- Leadership and conversations. Leadership is about coordinating action. Coordinating action happens with other people through the conversational acts we engage in with them. Conversational acts include hallway conversations, face-to-face meetings, all-hands meetings, and interactions that take place over IM, text, and email. To be a successful leader, we need to be successful in conversation; to be successful in conversation, we need to know how to use conversation to drive clarity.
- Conversation types. There are three basic types of conversation that take place at work in the process of coordinating action to deliver a result: Conversations for Relationship, Conversations for Possibility, and Conversations for Action. Often, when progress stalls out or a contributor isn’t contributing, the cause may come down to a breakdown or pitfall that occurred along the way that left a gap in one of these conversations. By working to identify and address what might be missing, you can often bring your interactions to a more productive place.
- The building blocks for working with others. By understanding the building blocks for working with others and seeing that your conversations are the tools you use to address those building blocks, you have the opportunity to be more skillful and effective in your collaborative work with others. Use your Clarity Checklist and your understanding of conversation type to design for conversational success before and during your projects.
- Clarity by design starts with you. Clarity is a practice. The more you can bring clarity into how you lead, including at the level of how you design and go about your own workday and other “internal processes,” the more clarity and executive presence you will bring into your interactions with others.