What Is the Work of Leadership? Patricia Shaw, November 2010

You will find the transcript of Patricia  Shaw‘s talk below. Although she never uses the term, Patricia describes some of the key elements of Conversational Leadership. The highlighting is mine and draws attention to what I feel are the main points.

Transcript

I thought last night about how I am beginning myself to think about leadership or at least an aspect of it and if I take it away from leaders, I would say “what is the work of leadership?”, “what is a way of thinking about it?” and I have several formulations that I wrote down last night.

For a long time, I’ve been saying I think one of the ways of thinking about leadership is thinking about convening conversations that might not happen otherwise.

You could also say the work of leadership is about opening spaces for reflective inquiry in the midst of our institutional life. Having the courage to do that.

I might also think of leadership as taking action visibly.

I think one of the things that’s most demanding about leadership is that it is about taking up a voice, speaking out, saying and doing things when the consequences of that will always ripple out in ways beyond what you can ever know when you do it but nevertheless you have to take the risk, make the judgment, try it.

Within this notion that one of the ways of thinking about leadership is the way that it engages, opens up and shifts the conversational life of an organization.

I think there are lots of small practices worth paying attention to, and again last night I gave myself that the task of trying to list some of the ones that I
am most aware of at the moment.

So one of them I think is having the courage and the skill to invite and sustain fairly open-ended and free-flowing conversation that isn’t always managed by a highly structured agenda.

I think this is a leadership ability.

Secondly, I would say being able to invent, improvise, on the spur of the moment, shifts in the configuration of speaking with each other, that help to keep a conversation alive, moving between people speaking altogether, to moving into speaking in smaller groups, in pairs, in listening carefully, in reflecting in groups, that part of being a good leader is being able to work with conversation as an art.

I would say as we talked about here, increasingly I’m beginning to recognize the difficulty of working, often with senior people who have become so used to giving very confident and very comprehensive abstract accounts of policy, strategy, and direction but fail completely when you ask them, can you link this to something that happened last week, they go blank. I think this is a big problem.

So one of the issues I think that is necessary for leaders is that they learn to link the large scale to the immediate reality of everyday life and the inability to do that is really problematic.

Linked to that I would say as I’m increasingly noticing the ability to think intelligently about when you use written material and when you use the important value of oral communication.

I think we have forgotten how so much complex communication can be carried through oral exchange which our written documentation nearly always reduces and narrows. We need that documentation but only to the extent we use it to unravel yet again the complex communication by which we manage to sustain knowledge between us of a complex world and that move between the oral and the written again is an art that I think we need to have leaders consciously develop.

Another thing I would say is that I feel that all the leaders that I deal with, a lot at the time what they good at is explanation and very poor at description. They fail to be able to give detailed telling, resonating, descriptive accounts of what happens and how it happens, they’re too quick to move to wanting to find cause and effect and too simplistic linear connections between events. They lack a kind of descriptive, reflective capacity to inquire into the way circumstances happen and change.

Another thing that I think makes a big difference is being able to catch, I think, particularly in terms of changing cultures, Edgar Schein writes about it as critical instant incidents but it’s the ability as a leader to evoke and notice what I call vivid moments of experience that actually occur in organizational life which acts as moments of common reference that you can point to, explore together come to an understanding and sense-making together which really has meaning for people in their everyday activity.

Finally, another thing that I mentioned here was the ability to pay a little less attention to generating yet another and yet another action plan and paying more attention to what are the ways forward that are opening up in
front of us that we might exploratively take as next steps before we go too far to producing big action plans about what they’re meant to produce.

So these are what I call some of the micro-practices of working with conversational life.

•  What Is Conversational Leadership? By David Gurteen