As a leader of your team, organization, or business, can you regularly have a hard conversation with people and walk away understanding that it likely meant progress?
“No difficult conversation is not worth having at the expense of your organization’s ability to execute.” This quote by strategy expert and author Miles Kierson informs us that if we can't discuss what’s most critical for our business, everything we do can potentially fail.
Our inability to get along with others or have substantive conversations keeps us from achieving what we know we can accomplish.
The issue here is that people generally struggle with having hard conversations. We call them “conversations of consequence” because they’re the discussions that have an impact:
1) when they happen, we experience better execution, key initiatives get completed, and our business moves forward.
2) When they don’t happen, problems persist, people disengage, we act on assumptions, which causes more issues, and the business stalls.
We can’t get the results we need unless we can openly and confidently address the issues creating barriers to our ability to execute. Organizationally, we’ll likely never achieve our strategic objectives if we can't have these difficult conversations.
We must stop “stepping around and over” the hard conversations simply because we fear having them. We need to be able to share and discuss what's most important.
Conversations of consequence are rooted in our ability to execute. The best way to make them happen is to create an environment that allows them to happen naturally. We know they happen for the results when we make them cultural and part of our everyday operations.
This requires building trust and respect between every manager and direct report on our team. Our willingness to do this will place the organization in a position to create a collaborative communications framework that will get the people on the team to understand what we want to accomplish and get them working together to achieve it.
People execute, not organizations. You have to focus there.
As Miles Kierson shared, "no difficult conversation" is not worth having at the expense of our organization's success. If we want transparency and honesty, the truth, the right solution, or a better way to do something. We must be able to talk directly and candidly with each other.
Without that, we're nothing more than a group of individual contributors assigning work to each other, hoping that things will eventually come together and help us achieve our desired results.
That, by itself, is enough reason to have a hard conversation.
#ceos
#leadership
#difficultconversations
#execution
