Why Strategic Conversation Matters in Your Organization
Strategic conversation is a powerful way to move your organization closer to its goals, but a lot of organizations don’t use it, or only think they use it. In an earlier post, we talked about how to have strategic conversations. Now, here are some reasons why doing so is so important to your organization.
Strategic conversation clarifies the organization’s mission and vision in everyone’s mind. For an organization to reach optimal performance, everyone in it must understand why it exists and what it was created to do. Those things, in turn, must become the fulcrum upon which the organization makes all its decisions. Strategic conversation at all levels of the organization can fix those purposes in the mind of every member, thus helping achieve unity of purpose and enabling strategic cooperations across lines of rank and function.
Strategic conversation ensures unity on goals at the top of the organization. To maximize success, an organization’s leadership must share, and must be seen to share, common goals that they, in turn, can communicate to their subordinates. If they can’t or won’t do that, their subordinates won’t be able to, either. Strategic conversation offers the leadership its most reliable way of reaching agreement on, and communicating, shared organizational goals.
Strategic conversation is a great way to highlight shared wins. A strategic conversation need not be only about problems. It also lets leaders and teams focus on strengths, wins, and opportunities. Neuroscience tells us that that kind of conversation is important to have, even in organizations facing major problems. The human brain responds well to positive feedback: The hearer not only feels better about themselves, but they also become more creative and better able to work well with others. And no organization can achieve its goals without creativity and teamwork.
Strategic conversation contributes to a spirit of inquiry. Asking – and seeking the answers to – such open-ended questions as “What works?,” “What doesn’t?,” “Why, or why not?,” and, “What can we learn from that?” builds curiosity in individuals and in the organizational culture. That curiosity is a prerequisite for superior service, more efficient problem-solving, and more effective connection of what’s important on any particular day to the organization’s purpose and reason for existing.
Strategic conversation helps you focus on the future. It helps your people better grapple with what’s coming up next month, next year, in the next five to 10 years. As noted in Point 3, you and your teammates have good reason to celebrate where you are and how you got there. But for the celebrations to continue, you will all need to look not only down the road but also around corners. Strategic conversation helps you do that.
Strategic conversation helps you focus on the external. Organizations that survive and thrive do so by changing. And they change not only their internal processes but also how they respond to external factors, such as the needs or actions of customers, consumers, and regulators, or the impact of social change (think ESG) or technological change (think AI). Healthy strategic conversation can help the team, unit, or organization identify these factors and devise responses to them more quickly and effectively.
Strategic conversation helps you and your organization be more resilient. Change is inevitable, and not all change is either controllable or comfortable. For that reason and others, organizational leaders sometimes are not as open with their subordinates as they could be because they fear that the subordinates might lose motivation or even push back. But organizations that talk more openly about impending change, even involving employees who have little or no control over the process, tend to have better outcomes than organizations that do not when they connect the change directly to the organization’s mission and vision and accept – and listen to – input from all the organization’s members.
Strategic conversation helps organizations be clear on desired outcomes and responsibilities. It helps everyone in a team, unit, or the organization identify work outcomes that move the organization in the right direction, consistent with its mission and vision, and outcomes that do not. It helps teams to make their goals and to deliver them on time. Also, because management involves less telling people what to do and more working with them to keep them involved and focused in an age of uncertainty, strategic conversation is the best way for managers to help their direct reports – and their direct reports – achieving their goals consistent with the organization’s mission and vision.
Strategic conversation engenders more discovery, creativity, and emergent thinking. It allows and encourages people to act and move in ways that feel comfortable for them and are consistent with the team, unit, and organization’s mission and vision. It engenders the opposite of micromanaging.
Strategic conversation engenders the building of relationships. The human brain is wired for that, but we too often fail to take advantage of that fact in our interactions. Change and uncertainty may make people feel threatened; when that happens, our instinct is to seek the safety of groups. Strategic conversation can help people in these groups respond positively to change and uncertainty, whether that response is adaptation or creative resistance.
Your organization is more likely to survive amid constant change and uncertainty if you empower employees to work together creatively toward a shared goal. The best way to do that is with strategic conversation. To learn more, read about our framework for strategic conversations or get in touch!
