An assignment that formed part of my engineering studies in the 1970s, included the requirement to reflect and comment upon the following proposition:
"Talk and paper are an engineer's most important tools."
The same statement could be applied to leaders - especially as regards the role of 'talk'.
In a recent series of interesting posts on the nature of leadership – and, indeed, on whether leadership exists at all – Stephen Billing referred to the work of two Swedish academics, Mats Alvesson and Stefan Sveningsson (see here, for example). This sparked my interest in their work and I came across a summary of some further research that they had carried out on the nature of leadership in organizations. The paper, entitled Managers Doing Leadership: The extra-ordinarization of the mundane, can be found here.
Their findings identify everyday conversation – that is, informal talking and listening – as a key leadership task. Indeed, they argue that,
“in many cases, the meaning and significance of leadership may be more related to the mundane than the carrying out of great acts or the colourful development and implementation of strategies and changes.”
In workshops, I have often asked managers to describe what they do as they go about the task of leading their organizations, departments or teams. Their responses usually include such things as providing vision, setting strategy, motivating performance, developing capability, solving problems and so on. However, when we 'boil this down' to what they are actually doing, we find something much more ordinary. They ‘talk’ – in the broadest sense of the word. That is, they carry out these 'headline' aspects of their leadership role by speaking with their staff - both collectively and individually. In other words, when managers are ‘wearing their leadership hats’, 'talk' is their primary action tool.
Too often, though, this communication is limited to one-way message passing, rather than the listening and informal chatting that Alvesson and Sveningsson identify as being important:
The latter is " ... not the kind of informal manager-talk, carrying the Big agenda of the manager, being implemented in [the] incremental but conscious and directive ways that Kotter (1990) talks of.”
From their research, Alvesson and Sveningsson maintain that:
· a lot of the behaviours that people describe as "leadership" differ little from those carried out by other people;
· everyday, conversational activities “appear as significant and remarkable when [these are] framed as leadership”; and, importantly,
· viewing these everyday activities in this way only happens if they are carried out by someone in a formal management position [my emphasis].
Interestingly, they suggest that the last point undermines the popular notion that leadership and management are separate and distinct. But more of this in a later post.
For now, it is sufficient to note the support that the research provides for the “reframing communication” element of the informal coalitions agenda. In particular, it echoes the need for managers to actively engage with the informal, unstructured conversations and interactions that characterise everyday organizational life. And, in turn, this means moving beyond a view of leadership communication based solely on "getting the message across", to one which emphasises joint sense making and relationship building.
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Related posts:
- Leadership communication in organizational change
- Beyond Buzz - Lessons for leadership communication in organizational change
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