Five Ways Leaders Can Facilitate Better Conversations
Stop running meetings. Start facilitating conversations.
My new book, Forward Talk, launches soon, and I can’t wait for you to read it. This article isn’t an excerpt. It’s a taste of the topic the book is built around.
If you want to change your culture, you have to change your conversations, as I wrote in a previous post. But most leaders don’t know how. They were never taught to facilitate conversations. They were taught to dominate them.
Business schools reward decisiveness. Organizations promote executives who sound confident and move fast. Great conversations ask for the opposite: slow down. Leaders must facilitate rather than be the protagonist. They need to pay attention to the dynamics, especially what isn’t being said.
When teams avoid issues or end meetings with false agreement, conversational debt builds. Over time, it slows everything down, and nobody can explain why.
Better conversations aren’t only a leader’s job. Every team member owns part of it, and I go deep on that in Forward Talk. Sti…
