Conversations With Leaders

Conversation techniques and tools that can help strong managers become great leaders Often the very same skills and traits that enable rising stars to achieve success "tenacity, aggressiveness, self-confidence" become liabilities when promoted into a leadership track. While managers' conversations are generally transactional and centered on the task at hand, leaders must focus on people, asking great questions and aligning them with the vision for the future. Leadership mindsets and skills can be developed, and Leadership Conversations provides practical guidance for connecting with others in ways that transform each interaction into an opportunity for organizational and personal growth. Identifies four types of conversation every leader must master: building relationships, making decisions, taking action, and developing others Provides an action plan for boosting your personal leadership potential, as well for developing leadership skills in others Draws on the authors' rich experience coaching and working with leaders at a wide range of organizations, including NASA, the U.S. Navy, intelligence agencies, Boeing, Gillette, Bausch & Lomb, and Georgetown University Leadership Conversations is required reading for both high-potential managers looking to make it to the next level and leaders looking to develop their people.

Find out what your customers and employees are really thinking with this indispensable resource Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People delivers invaluable strategies for how leaders can make their communications more inclusive and access the voices of those employees who rarely feel empowered to speak up. As constituent numbers scale, leaders have traditionally struggled to make communications a conversation with the entire organization, settling instead for small focus groups, talking at people in town halls, and delivering surveys after the fact. The result is exclusive, narrow decision-making that disengages and under-utilizes talent and human capital. And now, as the remote environment grows, the challenge and imperative for engaging conversations on a wider scale is even greater. Scaling Conversations provides the solution. Having led a remote team for over a decade and having worked with thousands of leaders across North America, Dave MacLeod teaches you how to: Scale your business by listening to the voices that really matter Access and maximize the human capital in your organization Make decisions that create unity and move the group forward Decrease employee turnover caused by poor communication Within these pages, you'll learn how to better facilitate conversations with a wider and more representative array of clients and employees, and not just the loudest ones in the town hall meeting or Slack channel. Perfect for any leader who's responsible for understanding what employees are really feeling and thinking, Scaling Conversations also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who wants to learn how to discover what the “silent majority,” who are often drowned out by the loudest people in the room, actually believes.

For every leader who has faced resistance to change, overspent on change initiatives, or wished there was a way to 'do change right the first time', the answer is here. In Talking Change: Must-Have Conversations for Successful Leaders, Campbell gets to the heart of gaining commitment and dealing with resistance -- through conversation. She demystifies the world of change management and outlines the pivotal conversations that create successful change. Based on her twenty years of leading change, from the boardroom to the plant floor, this practical and easy-to-use guide is a must-read for today's leaders. Part 1 outlines the foundations of change, definitions, a roadmap to lead people through change, and how to deal with resistance to change. Part 2 outlines why conversations are needed, what conversations to have, how to facilitate effective conversations, and with whom. Part 3 provides the details and questions for twenty pivotal change conversations, including self-reflection conversations to uncover your approach to leading change, planning and managing conversations to lead change effectively, and engagement conversations to bring people along to buy into and commit to the change. About Jennifer Campbell Jennifer Campbell is a certified coach, sought-after consultant, and seasoned facilitator with twenty years of experience leading complex change implementations. Clients seek her out because of her diverse management consulting and leadership coaching background and her ability to create beneficial and sustainable change in people and organizations. See her author page at amazon.com/author/jen-actionimpactmovement and visit her website at www.actionimpactmovement.com

You want people to stretch their limits, but your conversations meant to help them often fall flat or backfire, creating more resistance than growth. Top leadership coach Marcia Reynolds offers a model for using the Discomfort Zone—the moment when the mind is most open to learning—to prompt people to think through problems, see situations more strategically, and transcend their limitations. Drawing on recent discoveries in the neuroscience of learning, Reynolds shows how to ask the kinds of questions that short-circuit the brain’s defense mechanisms and habitual thought patterns. Then, instead of being told, people see for themselves the insightful and often profound solutions to what is stopping their progress. The exercises and case studies will help you use discomfort in your conversations to create lasting changes and an enlivened workforce.

Direct difficult discussions toward successful outcomes every time! For every headteacher who has ever wished for a quick reference guide to keeping challenging conversations on course, the ideal tool is here! Inside are all the skills you need for navigating high-stakes interactions with staff, parents, students, and district leaders and steering them toward win-win solutions. Case studies throughout the book identify the risk areas and provide the steps to mastering techniques for: - Active listening - Assertive communication - Providing effective feedback - Staying calm - Problem solving - Mediation. Also included are scripts, sample dialogues, style inventories, checklists, and resources for practicing skills learned from the case studies. Like having a communications coach in your back pocket, this guide gives tips for building a collaborative culture focused on what matters most--working together to achieve student success.

A veritable who's who in leadership, Conversations on Leadership features Warren Bennis, Jim Kouzes, John Kotter, Noel Tichy, Peter Senge, James March, Howard Gardner, Bill George, and others. Since each leader has a distinctive approach, this book provides the multi-faceted truths of leadership to broaden and deepen the understanding of the readers.

Interviews with 13 women, in areas ranging from philanthropy to politics and from business to academia, present a thought-provoking look at differences and commonalities in the lives and leadership approaches of women committed to social change. Beyond personal details and anecdotes, conversations capture a variety of experiences and insights reflecting what it's like to be a woman and a major leader in America at the close of the 20th century. Hartman is a professor and director for the Institute of Women's Leadership at Douglass College, Rutgers University. Lacks a subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Conversation-powered leadership How can leaders make their big or growing companies feel small again? How can they recapture the “magic”—the tight strategic alignment, the high level of employee engagement—that drove and animated their organization when it was a start-up? As more and more executives have discovered in recent years, the answer to this conundrum lies in the power of conversation. In Talk, Inc., Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind show how trusted and effective leaders are adapting the principles of face-to-face conversation in order to pursue a new form of organizational conversation. They explore the promise of conversation-powered leadership—from the time-tested practice of talking straight (and listening well) to the thoughtful adoption of social media technology. And they offer guidance on how to balance the benefits of open-ended talk with the realities of strategic execution. Drawing on the experience of leaders at diverse companies from around the world, Talk, Inc., offers provocative insights and user-friendly tips on how to make organizational culture more intimate, more interactive, more inclusive, and more intentional—in short, more conversational.