Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick’s new book is a welcome breath of fresh air when it comes to leadership and business advice. Aptly titled Agile Conversations: Transform Your Conversations, Transform Your Culture – Squirrel and Fredrick provide an extensive how-to guide with respect to navigating postmodernist leadership terrain in an increasingly amorphous, digitized corporate landscape. The key they say is a precept as old as time itself.
RELATED URL: https://agileconversations.com/agile-conversation-book/
Simply put, maintaining good communication means maintaining good business. Ironically with all the isolating factors remote workplace standards bring, the one thing such measures do encourage is the ability to communicate effectively. In-person, there’s room for potential hiccups and growing pains in dialogue, conversation, and expectation. Online and indirectly, being able to express one’s self succinctly is paramount to workplace performance, expectation, and employer-employee relations in a workplace model that’s increasingly utilitarian.
“As a leader at your company, you’ve given the transformation your full support, and the organization has bought in. You’ve had the consultants in, they’ve trained the teams, and the process is in place. All that’s missing are the promised results. Why aren’t things better?” Squirrel and Fredrick write. “…After years of study and many missteps, we have come to understand that the key to success is not only adopting practices but having the difficult conversations that foster the right environment for those practices to work. You, your managers, and your teams are missing the right relationships, built only by having the right conversations. The good news is that you can begin a conversational transformation that builds the foundation for any other improvements you want to make, changing your conversations, improving your relationships, and finally getting results. We’ve seen it happen. Between us, we’ve consulted with over one hundred organizations across a range of subjects and at all levels.”
All of this calls to mind the concept of the Lean system, and Toyota’s statement regarding their implementation of said system into their workplace organizational models. The world is changing, and with that change comes a full top to bottom alteration of what is considered good practice, and in effect simply put good business. The workplace leader’s personal and professional conduct, along with everyone else in the corporate hive is blurred – sharing a somewhat symbiotic relationship. Paraphrasing Biden’s quote of all politics being personal, and all politics being local, all business relationships are now personalized, and with that all business relationships are communal.
AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Conversations-Transform-Your-Culture/dp/1942788975
The idea of everyone in every echelon being united in the company’s sole goal(s) is immensely empowering. The unprecedented nature of Covid and the restrictions it’s brought upon the workplace model has allowed for, ironically, new and cutting-edge breakthroughs on a series of social, technological, organizational, and even personal set of levels. The idea of what it is to go to work, to lead at work, to manage, and to even yes – inspire – has shifted to a more altruistic, and ideologically sound place. I’m immensely grateful for meaningful and inspired articulations for how to solidify this phenomenon, Agile Conversations ranking as something at the top of the list for required reading in this vein.
Garth Thomas