Daniel Goleman - HBRs 10 Must Reads on Leadership, Vol. 2 (with bonus article The Focused Leader By Daniel Goleman)

One-way, top-down communication between leaders and their employees is no longer useful or even realistic.

Todays leaders achieve far more engagement and credibility when they take part in genuine conversation with the people who work for and with them. A conversation is a frank exchange of ideas and information with an implicit or explicit agenda.

Corporate conversation reflects a new reality: Thanks in part to digital and social technologies, employees have found a public voice. Theyll use it whether their bosses like it or not.

The good news for leaders is that people can talk up a company in a way thats more interesting and attractive than any obvious public relations campaign.

Smart leaders today, we have found, engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary person-to-person conversation more than it does a series of commands from on high. Furthermore, they initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations. Chief among the benefits of this approach is that it allows a large or growing company to function like a small one. By talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualitiesoperational flexibility, high levels of employee engagement, tight strategic alignmentthat enable start-ups to outperform better-established rivals.

In developing our model, we have identified four elements of organizational conversation that reflect the essential attributes of interpersonal conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. Leaders who power their organizations through conversation-based practices need not (so to speak) dot all four of these is. However, as weve discovered in our research, these elements tend to reinforce one another. In the end, they coalesce to form a single integrated process.

Personal conversation flourishes to the degree that the participants stay close to each other, figuratively as well as literally. Organizational conversation, similarly, requires leaders to minimize the distancesinstitutional, attitudinal, and sometimes spatialthat typically separate them from their employees. Where conversational intimacy prevails, those with decision-making authority seek and earn the trust (and hence the careful attention) of those who work under that authority. They do so by cultivating the art of listening to people at all levels of the organization and by learning to speak with employees directly and authentically. Physical proximity between leaders and employees isnt always feasible. Nor is it essential. What