This essay builds on the ideas introduced in The Leadership Team’s Most Important Asset.

Leadership teams create enormous value through conversation because conversation is the primary way they develop, maintain, and continually strengthen a shared understanding of the organization they are responsible for leading.

Leadership conversations take place in meetings, at offsites, through online exchanges, over the phone, on Zoom, or in the hallway. Some unfold in a single interaction. Others develop over days or weeks through an ongoing conversation. In every case, great leaders create the conditions that enable people to prepare, contribute, learn together.

The form and duration of a leadership conversation vary. The discipline does not. Every important leadership conversation benefits from thoughtful preparation, genuine inquiry, and disciplined follow-through.

Great leadership conversations start before they begin. An executive review begins very differently when everyone has already studied the same information, reflected on its implications, and arrived prepared to explain what they see.

Every important leadership conversation begins when someone accepts responsibility for creating the conditions for its success. The conversation leader clarifies the purpose of the conversation, the outcomes it should produce, how the work will unfold, who should participate, what preparation is required, and how the team’s understanding should advance. Background information is assembled. Advance materials are shared with time for thoughtful participant preparation.

When the conversation calls for preparation, participants review the advance material, reflect on its implications, develop a point of view worth contributing, and are invited to begin sharing questions and observations before the conversation formally begins. This way, everyone arrives prepared to make their thinking visible and equally committed to understanding how others see things.

Facilitators guide the conversation and the way people engage with one another. Recorders work closely with the conversation leader to ensure the team’s evolving shared understanding is accurately articulated, thoughtfully refined, and memorialized. Every role prepares differently because every role contributes differently to the team’s shared understanding.

Great leadership conversations continue long after people stop talking. Leaders reflect on what they have learned, fulfill the commitments they have made, test their assumptions against reality, and carry that learning into the conversations, decisions, and actions that follow.

From Individual Thinking to Shared Understanding 

Preparation, facilitation, and follow-through matter because they create the conditions in which individual thinking can be shared, examined, and refined until shared understanding emerges. Leadership conversations create value to the extent that they surface and improve the thinking people bring to them.

Much of what guides a leader’s decisions remains invisible.

• Assumptions.
• Observations.
• Experience.
• Questions.
• Concerns.
• Possibilities.

Each influences judgment, yet much of it remains unspoken.

Leadership teams often leave meetings knowing what they decided without fully understanding why they reached that conclusion. Over time, different interpretations emerge because the thinking behind the decision was never fully shared. One leader believes “grow” means entering a new market. Another believes it means increasing share in the current one. The decision appears shared until execution begins.

Making thinking visible changes the nature of the conversation.

Leaders explain their conclusions as well as the observations, assumptions, and reasoning that produced them. Others respond. Similarities become clearer. Differences become easier to explore. The team gradually develops an understanding that is richer than any individual perspective. Shared understanding begins to emerge.

Leadership Is a Learning Process

Organizations are often described as learning organizations. Organizations do not learn; people learn, and leadership teams learn together. The distinction matters because leadership is the continual process of improving a team’s individual and collective understanding until its members can make independent decisions and take actions that reinforce one another.

Most organizations already possess far more knowledge, experience, and insight than they effectively put to work. It resides in the observations, expertise, judgment, and experience of individual leaders. Leadership’s challenge is to surface that thinking, examine it together, refine it, and integrate it into a shared understanding that is richer than any individual could have developed alone.

In most situations, sufficient understanding can be developed by leadership teams that learn from one another while listening carefully to customers, employees, partners, and outside experts. Leadership’s responsibility is to uncover the best collective understanding that can be developed and help the organization act from it.

Leadership Culture Matures

When leaders routinely make their thinking visible, questions improve because assumptions become easier to examine. Disagreement becomes more valuable because people are refining ideas rather than defending positions. Decisions become stronger because they are built from a broader understanding of reality. Trust grows because people come to understand one another’s reasoning, not merely one another’s conclusions.

These behaviors change the nature of leadership conversations. Leaders learn to say what needs to be said, work the point rather than the person, and remain committed to improving the team’s collective understanding rather than winning an argument or looking like the smartest person in the room.

Over time, these behaviors become the way the organization’s leaders think and work together. They become its leadership culture. Leaders develop the instinct and the desire to prepare thoughtfully, reveal their thinking, seek out the thinking of others, and continually deepen the team’s common picture of reality.

The Next Conversation

Leadership conversations shape the understanding from which the organization will act next. Because people think differently, every conversation is an opportunity to make those differences visible, learn from them, and build an understanding that enables the organization to move forward together. Every conversation leaves the organization with a stronger, weaker, or unchanged shared understanding. Great leadership teams ensure it is stronger because tomorrow’s decisions will be made from it.

Manage to Lead Essays
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Next: Making Thinking Visible
How leadership teams learn together by revealing the thinking behind their conclusions.