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The command-and-control arroyo to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-downwardly model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the reply lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the catamenia of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give manner to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Nearly important, that procedure must be conversational.

We arrived at that conclusion while conducting a recent research project that focused on the country of organizational communication in the 21st century. Over more than than two years we interviewed professional communicators every bit well equally top leaders at a variety of organizations—large and small, blue chip and starting time-upwardly, for-profit and nonprofit, U.S. and international. To date we have spoken with nigh 150 people at more than 100 companies. Both implicitly and explicitly, participants in our research mentioned their efforts to "accept a conversation" with their people or their ambition to "advance the conversation" within their companies. Building upon the insights and examples gleaned from this research, we have developed a model of leadership that we call "organizational chat."

Smart leaders today, we take constitute, 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 amidst the benefits of this arroyo is that it allows a big or growing visitor to office like a small one. By talking with employees, rather than just issuing orders, leaders can retain or recapture some of the qualities—operational flexibility, high levels of employee engagement, tight strategic alignment—that enable start-ups to outperform ameliorate-established rivals.

Physical proximity between leaders and employees isn't always feasible. But mental or emotional proximity is essential.

In developing our model, we accept 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 chat-based practices demand not (so to speak) dot all four of these i's. However, as nosotros've discovered in our research, these elements tend to reinforce ane some other. In the end, they coagulate to form a single integrated process.

Intimacy: Getting Shut

Personal chat flourishes to the caste that the participants stay close to each other, figuratively also as literally. Organizational conversation, similarly, requires leaders to minimize the distances—institutional, attitudinal, and sometimes spatial—that typically split up them from their employees. Where conversational intimacy prevails, those with controlling authorisation seek and earn the trust (and hence the careful attention) of those who work nether that dominance. They practise so past cultivating the art of listening to people at all levels of the organization and by learning to speak with employees direct and authentically. Physical proximity between leaders and employees isn't ever feasible. Nor is it essential. What isessential is mental or emotional proximity. Conversationally skilful leaders step downward from their corporate perches and then step up to the challenge of communicating personally and transparently with their people.

This intimacy distinguishes organizational conversation from long-standard forms of corporate advice. Information technology shifts the focus from a top-downwardly distribution of information to a lesser-up commutation of ideas. It'southward less corporate in tone and more casual. And it's less almost issuing and taking orders than virtually asking and answering questions.

Conversational intimacy can get manifest in diverse ways—among them gaining trust, listening well, and getting personal.

Gaining trust.

Where there is no trust, there tin can be no intimacy. For all applied purposes, the reverse is true as well. No i volition swoop into a heartfelt exchange of views with someone who seems to have a hidden agenda or a hostile fashion, and whatever word that does unfold betwixt two people will be rewarding and substantive only to the extent that each person can accept the other at face up value.

Merely trust is hard to achieve. In organizations it has go peculiarly difficult for employees to put trust in their leaders, who will earn information technology but if they are authentic and straightforward. That may mean addressing topics that experience off-limits, such every bit sensitive financial data.

Athenahealth, a medical-records applied science provider, has gone equally far equally to care for every terminal 1 of its employees as an "insider" nether the strict legal meaning of the term. Insiders are defined as employees entrusted with strategic and financial information that could materially affect the company's business prospects and hence its stock price—a status typically accorded only to peak-tier officers. Opening the books to such a degree was a risky move, discouraged by the company's underwriters and frowned upon by the SEC. Just Athenahealth's leaders wanted employees to go insiders in more just the regulatory sense; they wanted them to exist thoroughly involved in the business.

Listening well.

Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously know when to terminate talking and start listening. Few behaviors enhance conversational intimacy as much every bit attending to what people say. True considerateness signals respect for people of all ranks and roles, a sense of curiosity, and even a degree of humility.

Knuckles Energy's president and CEO, James E. Rogers, instituted a serial of what he chosen "listening sessions" when he was the CEO and chairman of Cinergy (which later merged with Duke). Meeting with groups of 90 to 100 managers in iii-hr sessions, he invited participants to raise any pressing bug. Through these discussions he gleaned information that might otherwise accept escaped his attending. At ane session, for example, he heard from a grouping of supervisors about a problem related to uneven compensation. "Yous know how long it would accept taken for that to bubble upwardly in the organization?" he asks. Having heard directly from those afflicted by the problem, he could instruct his Hr department to observe a solution right away.

Getting personal.

Rogers non only invited people to raise concerns about the company merely also solicited feedback on his own functioning. He asked employees at one session to class him on a scale of A to F. The results, recorded anonymously, immediately appeared on a screen for all to see. The grades were generally expert, but less than half of employees were willing to give him an A. He took the feedback seriously and began to deport the practice regularly. He also began asking open-concluded questions about his performance. Somewhat ironically, he plant that "internal communication" was the expanse in which the highest number of participants believed he had room for improvement. Even as Rogers sought to get close to employees by way of organizational conversation, a fifth of his people were urging him to get closer nonetheless. True listening involves taking the bad with the adept, absorbing criticism even when information technology is direct and personal—and even when those delivering information technology piece of work for yous.

At Exelon, an free energy provider headquartered in Chicago, a securely personal class of organizational conversation emerged from a project aimed at bringing the company's corporate values alive for its employees. Values statements typically exercise piddling to instill intimacy; they're generally dismissed as just talk. So Exelon experimented in its communication about variety, a core value: It used a serial of short video clips—no fuss, no pretense, no high production values—of peak leaders speaking unscripted, very personally, near what multifariousness meant to them. They talked near race, sexual orientation, and other bug that rarely go along the tabular array in a corporation. Ian McLean, then an Exelon finance executive, spoke of growing up in Manchester, England, the son of a working-form family, and feeling the sting of class prejudice. Responding to a question almost a time when he felt "different," he described going to work in a depository financial institution where virtually of his colleagues had upper-class backgrounds: "My accent was different….I wasn't included, I wasn't invited, and I was made to think I wasn't quite as smart as they were….I never want anyone else to feel that [manner] around me." Such unadorned stories make a strong impression on employees.

V long-term business trends are forcing the shift from corporate communication to organizational conversation.

Economic Change

As service industries have become more economically pregnant than manufacturing industries, and as noesis work has supplanted other kinds of labor, the need for sophisticated means to procedure and share information has grown more than acute.

Organizational Alter

As companies have get flatter and less hierarchical, and frontline employees more pivotally involved in value-creating work, lateral and bottom-up communication has achieved the importance of meridian-downward advice.

Global Change

As workforces have go more than diverse and more widely dispersed, navigating across cultural and geographic lines has required interactions that are fluid and complex.

Generational Change

As millennials and other younger workers have gained a foothold in organizations, they have expected peers and authority figures alike to communicate with them in a dynamic, 2-way fashion.

Technological Change

As digital networks accept fabricated instant connectivity a norm of business organization life, and as social media platforms have grown more than powerful and more ubiquitous, a reliance on older, less conversational channels of communication has ceased to be tenable.

Interactivity: Promoting Dialogue

A personal conversation, by definition, involves an exchange of comments and questions between two or more people. The sound of one person talking is non, patently, a conversation. The same applies to organizational conversation, in which leaders talk withemployees and not just tothem. This interactivity makes the conversation open and fluid rather than airtight and directive. It entails shunning the simplicity of monologue and embracing the unpredictable vitality of dialogue. The pursuit of interactivity reinforces, and builds upon, intimacy: Efforts to close gaps between employees and their leaders volition founder if employees don't accept both the tools and the institutional back up they need to speak upwardly and (where advisable) talk back.

In office, a shift toward greater interactivity reflects a shift in the utilise of communication channels. For decades, applied science made information technology difficult or impossible to support interaction within organizations of any observable size. The media that companies used to achieve calibration and efficiency in their communications—print and broadcast, in item—operated in ane direction but. But new channels have disrupted that ane-way construction. Social technology gives leaders and their employees the ability to invest an organizational setting with the style and spirit of personal conversation.

Yet interactivity isn't just a matter of finding and deploying the right engineering science. As if not more than important is the demand to buttress social media with social thinking. Too often, an system'south prevailing culture works against any attempt to transform corporate communication into a two-way affair. For many executives and managers, the temptation to treat every medium at their disposal as if it were a megaphone has proved difficult to resist. In some companies, however, leaders have fostered a genuinely interactive civilization—values, norms, and behaviors that create a welcoming infinite for dialogue.

To run into how interactivity works, consider Cisco Systems. As it happens, Cisco makes and sells various products that fall under the social engineering umbrella. In using them internally, its people accept explored the benefits of enabling high-quality dorsum-and-forth communication. I such production, TelePresence, simulates an in-person meeting past beaming video feeds between locations. Multiple large screens create a wraparound effect, and specially designed meeting tables (in an ideal configuration) mirror 1 another so that users feel as if they were seated at the aforementioned article of furniture. In ane sense this is a more than robust version of a web-based video conversation, with none of the delays or hiccups that typically mar online video. More important, it masters the critical event of visual scale. When Cisco engineers studied remote interactions, they establish that if the on-screen image of a person is less than 80% of his or her true size, those who see the prototype are less engaged in talking with that person. TelePresence participants appear life-size and can await 1 some other in the eye.

TelePresence is a sophisticated technology tool, but what it enables is the recovery of immediate, spontaneous give-and-take. Randy Pond, Cisco's executive vice president of operations, processes, and systems, thinks this type of interaction offers the benefit of the "whole" chat—a concept he illustrated for u.s. with an anecdote. Sitting at his desk-bound for a video conference i day, he could see video feeds of several colleagues on his reckoner screen when he fabricated a comment to the group and a participant "just put his head in his hands"—presumably in dismay, and presumably not considering that Pond could see him. "I said, 'I can encounter you lot,'" Pond told usa. "'If you disagree, tell me.'" Pond was then able to engage with his skeptical colleague to get the "whole story." A less interactive form of advice might accept produced such information eventually—but far less efficiently.

At the crux of Cisco's advice culture is its CEO, John Chambers, who holds various forums to keep in bear on with employees. About every other month, for instance, he leads a "birthday chat," open to any Cisco employee whose birthday falls in the relevant 2-month period. Senior managers aren't invited, lest their presence keep attendees from speaking openly. Chambers also records a video blog most in one case a month—a brief, improvisational message delivered by e-mail to all employees. The use of video allows him to speak to his people directly, informally, and without a script; it suggests immediacy and builds trust. And despite the inherently 1-manner nature of a video blog, Chambers and his team have fabricated it interactive past inviting video letters as well equally text comments from employees.

Inclusion: Expanding Employees' Roles

At its all-time, personal conversation is an equal-opportunity endeavor. Information technology enables participants to share ownership of the substance of their word. Equally a event, they can put their ain ideas—and, indeed, their hearts and souls—into the conversational arena. Organizational conversation, by the same token, calls on employees to participate in generating the content that makes up a company's story. Inclusive leaders, past counting employees amidst a company'south official or quasi-official communicators, turn those employees into full-fledged chat partners. In the procedure, such leaders raise the level of emotional appointment that employees bring to company life in full general.

Inclusion adds a critical dimension to the elements of intimacy and interactivity. Whereas intimacy involves the efforts of leaders to get closer to employees, inclusion focuses on the part that employees play in that process. It also extends the practice of interactivity by enabling employees to provide their own ideas—often on official company channels—rather than simply parrying the ideas that others present. It enables them to serve as frontline content providers.

In the standard corporate advice model, top executives and professional communicators monopolize the creation of content and keep a tight rein on what people write or say on official company channels. Only when a spirit of inclusion takes concord, engaged employees can adopt of import new roles, creating content themselves and acting as brand ambassadors, thought leaders, and storytellers.

Brand ambassadors.

When employees feel passionate about their company's products and services, they become living representatives of the make. This can and does happen organically—lots of people dearest what they do for a living and will talk it upward on their ain time. Only some companies actively promote that kind of behavior. Coca-Cola, for example, has created a formal ambassadorship program, aimed at encouraging employees to promote the Coke image and product line in speech and in practice. The Coke intranet provides resources such as a tool that connects employees to visitor-sponsored volunteer activities. The centerpiece of the programme is a list of nine ambassadorial behaviors, which include helping the company "win at the point of sale" (by taking it on themselves to tidy store displays in retail outlets, for example), relaying sales leads, and reporting instances in which a retailer has run out of a Coke product.

Thought leaders.

To achieve market leadership in a noesis-based field, companies may rely on consultants or in-house professionals to draft speeches, articles, white papers, and the like. But often the well-nigh innovative thinking occurs deep within an organization, where people develop and test new products and services. Empowering those people to create and promote thought-leadership fabric tin can be a smart, quick way to bolster a visitor'southward reputation among key industry players. In recent years Juniper Networks has sponsored initiatives to get potential idea leaders out of their labs and offices and into public venues where industry experts and customers can sentinel them strut their intellectual stuff. The company's engineers are working on the next wave of systems silicon and hardware and can offer keen insights into trends. To communicate their perspective to relevant audiences, Juniper dispatches them to national and international engineering science conferences and arranges for them to run into with customers at company-run briefing centers.

For many executives and managers, the temptation to treat every medium at their disposal equally if it were a megaphone has proved difficult to resist.

Storytellers.

People are accepted to hearing corporate advice professionals tell stories most a company, but in that location's nothing like hearing a story direct from the front lines. When employees speak from their own experience, unedited, the message comes to life. The computer storage behemothic EMC actively elicits stories from its people. Leaders expect to them for ideas on how to improve business performance and for thoughts about the company itself. The point is to instill the notion that ideas are welcome from all corners. Every bit just i example, in 2009 the company published The Working Mother Experience—a 250-folio java-table book written by and for EMCers on the topic of being both a successful EMC employee and a parent. The projection, initiated at the front lines, was championed by Frank Hauck, then the executive vice president of global marketing and customer quality. It's not unusual for a big company like EMC to produce such a volume equally a vanity projection, but this was no corporate communication endeavor; it was a peer-driven endeavor, led by employees. Several dozen EMCers as well write blogs, many on public sites, expressing their unfiltered thoughts about life at the company and sharing their ideas about engineering.

Of class, inclusion ways that executives cede a off-white amount of control over how the company is represented to the globe. But the fact is that cultural and technological changes have eroded that control anyway. Whether you like it or not, anybody can tarnish (or polish) your company's reputation right from her cube, merely by e-mailing an internal document to a reporter, a blogger, or even a group of friends—or past posting her thoughts in an online forum. Thus inclusive leaders are making a virtue out of necessity. Scott Huennekens, the CEO of Volcano Corporation, suggests that a looser approach to advice has fabricated organizational life less stifling and more productive than it used to exist. The gratis flow of data creates a freer spirit. Some companies do attempt to set some bones expectations. Infosys, for instance, acknowledging its lack of control over employees' participation in social networks, tells employees that they may disagree but asks them not to be disagreeable.

And quite often, leaders have discovered, a system of self-regulation by employees fills the void left by top-downwards control. Somebody comes out with an outrageous statement, the community responds, and the overall sentiment swings dorsum to the eye.

Intentionality: Pursuing an Agenda

A personal conversation, if information technology's truly rich and rewarding, will be open but not bumming; the participants volition take some sense of what they hope to achieve. They might seek to entertain each other, or to persuade each other, or to learn from each other. In the absence of such intent, a chat volition either meander or run into a bullheaded alley. Intent confers order and significant on even the loosest and virtually digressive forms of churr. That principle applies to organizational conversation, too. Over time, the many voices that contribute to the process of communication within a company must converge on a single vision of what that advice is for. To put it another way: The conversation that unfolds inside a company should reflect a shared agenda that aligns with the company's strategic objectives.

Intentionality differs from the other 3 elements of organizational conversation in one key respect. While intimacy, interactivity, and inclusion all serve to open up up the flow of information and ideas inside a company, intentionality brings a measure of closure to that process: It enables leaders and employees to derive strategically relevant action from the push and pull of discussion and debate.

Conversational intentionality requires leaders to convey strategic principles not but by asserting them but by explaining them—by generating consent rather than commanding assent. In this new model, leaders speak extensively and explicitly with employees almost the vision and the logic that underlie executive decision making. As a upshot, people at every level gain a large-picture view of where their visitor stands within its competitive surround. In brusque, they go conversantin matters of organizational strategy.

I fashion to assistance employees empathise the company'due south governing strategy is to let them have a part in creating it. The leadership squad at Infosys has taken to including a broad range of employees in the visitor's annual strategy-development procedure. In late 2009, every bit Infosys leaders began to build an organizational strategy for the 2011 financial year, they invited people from every rank and division of the company to bring together in. In particular, explains Kris Gopalakrishnan, a cofounder and executive cochairman, they asked employees to submit ideas on "the significant transformational trends that we run across affecting our customers." Using those ideas, strategic planners at Infosys came upwardly with a list of 17 trends, ranging from the growth of emerging markets to the increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability. They and then created a series of online forums in which employees could suggest how to friction match each tendency with various customer solutions that the visitor might offer. Technology and social networks enabled bottom-up participation across the company.

In 2008 Kingfisher plc, the earth's third-largest home improvement retailer, began pursuing a new strategy to transform a group of historically discrete business units into "one squad," in part through intentional organizational conversation. To launch the effort, company leaders held a three-24-hour interval result in Barcelona for retail executives. On the second 24-hour interval anybody participated in a xc-minute session called Share at the Marketplace, which was intended to emulate a archetype Mediterranean or Middle Eastern bazaar. One group of participants, called "suppliers," donned aprons, and each person stood at one of 22 stalls, ready to give a spiel near a business practice developed by people in his or her part of the Kingfisher arrangement. Essentially they were purveyors of ideas.

Another group—executive committee members—served as facilitators, ambling through the aisles and providing words of encouragement. The tertiary and largest group acted as buyers, moving from one stall to the next, examining the "merchandise," and occasionally "purchasing" one of the ideas. Using special checkbooks issued for this purpose, buyers could draft up to five checks each to pay for suppliers' wares. Such transactions had no strength beyond the confines of the session, but they conveyed a potent message to the suppliers: What y'all're telling me is impressive. The essence of the market place was the peer-to-peer sharing of all-time practices in an informal, messy, and noisy environs. But the idea was too to care for conversation as a means to an end—to use information technology to attain strategic alignment across a various group of participants. Conversation goes on in every company, whether you recognize information technology or not. That has always been the case, merely today the conversation has the potential to spread well across your walls, and information technology's largely out of your command. Smart leaders detect ways to use conversation—to manage the flow of information in an honest, open fashion. Ane-way broadcast messaging is a relic, and slick marketing materials accept as little effect on employees every bit they practice on customers. Simply people volition listen to communication that is intimate, interactive, inclusive, and intentional.

A version of this commodity appeared in the June 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review.