Conversational leadership is gaining ground, and for good reason: conversations are the fuel of leadership, as organizations discover the hard way when leaders underperform at motivating, guiding and supporting their people. People do not leave bad companies; they leave bad bosses. And a society that changes this fast makes old patterns obsolete faster than ever, which calls for a new generation of leaders at every level.
Yet most of the literature on critical conversations is cognitive: best-practice tips for the toughest situations, with no program to develop the underlying skills over time. Conversations are made of behaviors, and behaviors depend on habits. Knowing what to do, even how to do it, does not change a habit. If your goal is a robust structure for conversational leadership, you cannot solve it with a few days of class and leave people unsupported when they need to turn knowledge into new behaviors.
You need two ingredients. The first is a practice-based method, and nothing integrates formal education better than digital role play. The second is a curriculum: one strategic plan, built on a consistent vision, covering the real pillars of sustainable skill development rather than the shortcuts. These are its seven building blocks.
1. Areas of leadership empowerment
The first question is which areas of leadership influence are exercised through conversations. Too often the subject is treated tactically, by listing difficult conversations as they come to mind. The list of conversations should be the last step. Start from the areas, which are cross-cultural and apply to any organization:
- Lead: where conversations drive action and solve problems.
- Inspire: the prelude to any engagement; people want to be part of something.
- Support: once people are in the field, they expect their leader to help, when they ask and when the leader sees it is time.
- Discover: reciprocal discovery removes blind spots and keeps leaders aligned with reality.
2. Leadership values
Before any technique, make sure every recommendation is aligned with the organization's values. If you value honesty, you cannot endorse a technique that hides unpleasant truths; if you value humility, you cannot build on arrogant directives. Whatever the conversation, the topic or the counterpart, stay true to your core values.
3. Types of conversations
There are too many types of conversation to train on all of them. Plan smart: apply the 80/20 principle and select three or four types per area of empowerment. Avoid "one approach solves all": some general techniques apply everywhere, but practicing a type of conversation means gaining experience with that type, which is different from every other. A useful grouping: conversations that happen often and push things forward; less frequent ones that lay the ground for performance; and the ones that make the difference when things get really tough.
4. Topics
Topics are not types. "Giving feedback" is a type; performance, attitude or a recent incident are topics within it. Topics matter because they turn a type of conversation, a concept, into a situation, something practical that can be trained. Organize them on a matrix: on one axis the scope, review something that happened or plan something ahead; on the other the domain, performance and results, objective, or relationship and approach, subjective. A conversation in the Support area, of the type "ease the change", on a topic of inclusion, with the scope of planning a new approach in the relationship domain: that is a situation you can practice.
5. Types of people
The other factor that turns a type into a situation is the person on the other side. You cannot practice with every human being on earth, so select a limited range of characters by two criteria: how common that type is, and how difficult it is to handle once the conversation starts. Define them along how they think, behave and communicate, and use more than one psychometric model to get a rounded view.
6. Leadership styles
No single style fits every situation. Each situation, as defined by the blocks above, calls for a style, and the curriculum should connect them explicitly. I often hear "we have our own leadership style, coherent with our culture." The better statement is "we have our own competency model, and we adapt the style to the conversation." If I had to recommend one framework, it would be the six styles of emotional leadership: a comprehensive canvas of approaches.
7. Skills
Conversational leadership is behavior development, and behaviors are the building blocks of skills. Use a well-structured skill set both to design the program and to select each scenario, and map it onto the organization's competency model so that what is practiced is what is measured.
Why the intersection matters
The intersection of these blocks defines the situations worth practicing, the scope of the program, and the elements that need measuring to follow improvement and judge the program as a whole. Delivering smart general knowledge about critical conversations is one thing. Covering all the blocks, setting up a measurement system and deploying a consistent practice schedule is another.
Where to go from here
If you are planning a leadership program, three things to take away. Conversational leadership is now part of the picture and brings new design challenges. A structured curriculum is what makes a program consistent and measurable. And since conversational leadership is acquired mostly through practice, and practice is best delivered through digital role play, a solid curriculum is the best way to approach the design or selection of one.
Today, the curriculum does not have to be built from scratch, nor does it have to copy your scripts to be effective. The same blocks can be derived from your own materials, your experts' approach and your competency model, and turned into a circuit of scenarios that practice your situations, with your characters, in your words.