If you’re looking to bring Conversational Leadership into your work more intentionally and practically, I offer a coaching service that may be of interest.
It may be particularly relevant for people working in Knowledge Management who recognize that KM is about more than capturing and distributing information. Much of what matters happens in conversation, where people make sense of situations together and decide what to do.
It’s Not Just About Better Conversations
This is not simply about improving communication, running more effective meetings, or having more productive conversations. Those are small pieces of a much larger picture. Conversational Leadership is about something deeper and more personal. It’s about how we choose to live, how we relate to others, and how we engage with complexity. It starts not with a technique or a toolkit, but with each of us—how we see the world, what we value, and how we decide to show up in our everyday interactions.
It’s About Personal Development, Not Corporate Programs
Here’s what many people miss: Conversational Leadership is not an HR programme or top-down organizational initiative. It’s a personal choice – a commitment you make to practice it. No one can assign it to you, mandate it in a workshop, or measure it on a quarterly review. It emerges from your own recognition that the world is complex, that you want to influence positive change, and that you understand you can’t do it alone.
Think of it like meditation, journaling, or any other personal development practice. Organizations might support these practices, but they fundamentally happen because individuals choose to engage with them. The same is true for Conversational Leadership—it’s yours to embrace or ignore, deepen or explore lightly, based on your own commitment to growth.
A Practice, Not a Position
You don’t “become” a Conversational Leader the way you become a manager or earn a certification. Conversational Leadership is a practice, not a title or position. It’s an ongoing way of engaging with the world that involves:
– Taking responsibility for the changes you want to see
– Recognizing that complex challenges require diverse perspectives
– Using dialogue as a tool for learning, thinking, and creating together
– Embracing your capacity to lead, with or without formal authority
This practice is available to everyone because anyone with influence is a leader. And we all have influence, to varying degrees. Whether you’re talking with a colleague about a project challenge, discussing community issues with neighbors, or navigating family dynamics, you have opportunities to practice Conversational Leadership.
Beyond Skills Training – It’s About How You See the World
While improving conversational skills is part of the journey, Conversational Leadership runs much deeper. It’s not only about becoming a better communicator. That’s part of it, but it also involves embracing more thoughtful ways of acting and thinking in an increasingly complex world.
This practice shapes how you approach:
– Sense-making: How do you understand what’s happening around you?
– Decision-making: How do you navigate uncertainty and competing priorities?
– Relationship-building: How do you create conditions for mutual respect and good faith engagement?
– Innovation: How do you create space for new possibilities to emerge?
It’s both an attitude and a set of behaviors—a way of seeing the world that recognizes complexity and responds with curiosity rather than control.
Your Learning Journey, Your Pace
Conversational Leadership is about learning, not training. It’s a journey, not a course, a certificate, or a credential to put after your name. This means there’s no curriculum to complete, no final exam to pass, and no graduation ceremony to attend.
Instead, it’s a personal, lifelong commitment to reflection and growth. You can engage with it as deeply or lightly as you choose. Everyone’s path is different. Some people dive deep into the theory and philosophy. Others focus on practical applications in their daily interactions. Some explore it through community engagement, others through workplace relationships, and many through all areas of life.
Permission Granted – By You
Perhaps most importantly: Anyone can practice Conversational Leadership. You don’t need permission. It’s an approach, a mindset, and a set of behaviours. You don’t need to wait for your organization to support it, your manager to encourage it, or your team to adopt it. You can begin wherever you are, with whatever influence you have.
This practice acknowledges that none of us can create the changes we want to see alone, but each of us can take responsibility for contributing to those changes through our engagement in dialogue, listening, questioning, and learning together with others.
When you choose to practice Conversational Leadership, you’re not just developing a professional skill – you’re committing to a way of being that can transform your relationships, your work, your community engagement, and ultimately, your contribution to creating a better world.
The question isn’t whether someone will train you in Conversational Leadership. The question is: Will you choose to practice it?
This coaching is for individuals who want to lead through conversation, rather than performance. Whether you are a team leader, facilitator, educator, or someone working across different roles or communities, this can help you bring greater clarity and depth to how you engage with others.
Many of the people who explore Conversational Leadership come from the Knowledge Management field.
For many years, Knowledge Management has often been framed in fairly mechanical terms: capturing knowledge, storing it, and getting the right information to the right people at the right time. These activities still matter. Documents, repositories, and digital systems all have their place.
But anyone who has worked seriously in KM knows that this is only part of the story.
Much of what matters in organizations does not sit neatly in documents. It lives in experience, judgement, interpretation, and in people’s ability to make sense of situations together. It shows up in how people ask questions, challenge assumptions, and work things out through conversation.
In the age of AI, this distinction is becoming even clearer.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of storing, retrieving, and recombining vast amounts of information. The technical side of knowledge management, the storage and distribution of information, is becoming easier and more automated.
What remains distinctly human is something else: how we interpret information, how we make sense of complex situations, how we question what we think we know, and how we decide what to do next. These are fundamentally conversational activities.
This is where Conversational Leadership becomes especially relevant.
Rather than treating knowledge as something to be captured and transferred, it focuses on creating the conditions in which people can think together, explore different perspectives, and develop shared understanding in complex situations.
In that sense, Conversational Leadership does not replace Knowledge Management. It complements and deepens it by focusing on the human practices that make knowledge meaningful and useful in action.
If you work in Knowledge Management and have felt that something important has been missing from traditional approaches, this coaching may provide a useful space to explore that more deeply.
What We Explore Together
Each coaching relationship is guided by a simple but powerful framework and shaped by your particular context. Depending on your interests and challenges, we may work on how to:
- Listen as a leadership act—not just hearing, but paying attention to what matters
- Create space for meaningful dialogue—even when time is short, or the topic is difficult
- Make your thinking visible—sharing your thought process without taking over
- Work with difference—welcoming a range of perspectives without needing to reach complete agreement
- Stay present with complexity—knowing when a situation requires conversation rather than quick fixes
What’s in it for your organization?
Although this coaching is personal, organizations also benefit directly from the changes it supports. When someone practices Conversational Leadership more deliberately, it tends to show up in how they work with others. Organizations typically see value in the following ways:
- Stronger leadership judgement in complex and ambiguous situations, where rules, policies, and precedents are not enough
- Better decision-making through shared sense-making, reducing over-reliance on escalation and individual authority
- More effective cross-functional conversations, improving alignment across roles, disciplines, and seniority levels
- Greater capacity to work productively with uncertainty and disagreement, without rushing to false consensus or control
- Leadership meetings that enable real thinking, rather than reporting, posturing, or defensive positioning
Over time, this tends to show up in how people convene others, how they handle complexity, and how they enable better work to happen around them.
How It Works
The coaching is conversational and reflective, aligned with the practice of Conversational Leadership itself. Sessions are normally guided by your own questions, challenges, and areas of focus. We work with what is live and relevant for you, using examples, reflections, and occasional frameworks where they are genuinely helpful.
There is no fixed curriculum. However, if you would prefer a little more structure, we can shape some or all of the sessions to be more intentional explorations of Conversational Leadership. This might include introducing the Core Practice Areas that underpin the discipline, along with the Change Insights that inform thinking about conversation, leadership, and working with complexity.
This structured approach is always adaptable. We do not need to cover everything, and we can adjust the emphasis as we go. It is also worth noting that almost all of the ideas, principles, and practices we draw on are supported by extensive material on my Conversational Leadership website, which you can explore at your own pace alongside the coaching.
The overall shape, rhythm, and duration of the coaching remain flexible and can be adjusted to fit your needs and schedule.
Who It’s For
A formal leadership role is not required. This coaching is for anyone who wants to:
- Improve the quality of conversations in their team, organization, or community
- Build trust and collaboration in uncertain or complex settings
- Develop a more human and participatory approach to leadership
What You Can Expect
- A quiet and steady space to reflect, think aloud, and test ideas
- Honest feedback and thoughtful questioning
- Practical approaches you can try straight away
- Support in building your own conversational practice over time
Structure and Fees
Coaching can be structured as a series of one-hour sessions, with the pace and duration shaped around your needs and context. You may prefer to meet regularly over a few months, or opt for more occasional sessions linked to specific challenges or phases of your work.
A common starting point is a block of six or ten sessions, arranged at a comfortable rhythm. These can be planned in advance or adapted as we go. Payment is usually agreed at the outset, although I’m open to alternative arrangements depending on your situation.
If you’re part of a small organisation, working independently, or in a community setting, reduced rates may be available.
If you would like to discuss whether this coaching is suitable for you or learn more, please get in touch.
In-person, 7–11 September 2026
Warbrook House, Hampshire, UK
We are living and working in conditions of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change. This week-long workshop with David Gurteen and John Hovell offers a space to practise Conversational Leadership as a shared, lived experience.