Change the Conversation and You Change Behaviors and Outcomes

What do executive do, really?

What is the nature of executive work? When all is said and done what do executives get paid for? Well, as you know already there is a huge literature dedicated to answering that questions--yet for many, while the prevailing perspectives are interesting they don't alter actions or outcomes.

Just as there is a huge literature on personal fitness and weight loss while we are probably the least fit and most overweight in our history, so it is with perspectives about being an effective executive--lots of insights, and little correlation to altered behavior and outcomes.

I have a particular bias in thinking about this question given my own work for the last 25 years has been working with executives with two specific intentions in mind: the first, to help executives be clear about what they really, really, really want beyond predictions from the past; and second, to help them realize what they want so that they get results consistent with their intentions and not, what they so often have to contend with--resignation from thwarted ambitions.

I every case, going from what is predictable or able to be extrapolated from the past, and what executives really, really, really want calls for a transformation. A transformation in:

• Their operating context: about what is possible and impossible, reasonable and unreasonable, feasible and infeasible; about how strategy gets formulated and goals get established; about how agreements are made and disagreements are handled; how failures are dealt with and successes...
• Their ways of being: how values are established and lived; how trust is established and maintained; how moods and emotions are expressed; how competition and rivalries are handled; how disappointment, upsets and complaints are dealt with...
• Their operating practices: for dealing with accountabilities, roles, responsibilities and authorities; for dealing with the unexpected; for sustaining the engine of growth and profitability; for inventing and discovering new business models and opportunities...

What executives are doing as they are speaking and listening all day, whether in person, in emails, and the myriad other ways they communicate is, they are--generating and managing a network of conversations. Conversations that:

• Create new possibilities--possibilities that will, in all likelihood, threaten some as they excite others--especially if they are conversations that are designed to create a new future, not just extend and expand the ways of the past
• Conversations that cause action and desired outcomes--specific demands, requests and promises rather than equivocal conversations that include things like, try, do my best, with a bit of luck, if all goes well...
• Conversation that surface and deal with difficult issues--the elephant in the room, the sacred cows, the uncomfortable topics...
• Conversations that...

Executives who are really effective use language with the same precision that a surgeon uses when using his surgical instruments. They understand the design purpose of their conversations--and they observe the correlation between what they intended to produce and what actually got produced--and they know how to correct in the instances when they miss the mark.

A useful question to keep in mind is, what's the design purpose of the conversation I am generating or managing? And the follow on question, is that purpose being forwarded or not?