#Conversations September 17

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Last week during my morning leadership reading I came across a couple of nuggets of wisdom related to CONVERSATIONS. As a leader a CONVERSATION is a critical part of making sure a team achieves results.

The first gem I read about was to remember a simple formula when engaged in a CONVERSATION with someone on your team. Let’s call it the 70-20-10 rule: 70 percent listening, 20 percent enquiring with just the right amount of advocacy, and 10 percent tracking.

The second suggestions was to be a leader who is not afraid to talk about the tough stuff. Be a leader that find ways to have the difficult CONVERSATIONS. When you avoid talking about problems that doesn’t make them go away. In fact if you as the leader, don’t talk about things, no-one will and, pretty soon, a culture will develop on your team in which too many things are left unsaid.

I want to add that having a leadership CONVERSATION means that you often have to prepare and commit to listen more and not skim over the real issues.

When teams have meaningful CONVERSATIONS the magic of results often follows.