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Speaker 1: But if you think about a lot of these different things that my clients say they want from their leaders, they want emotional intelligence, they want conflict resolution, they want their leaders to be more collaborative, they want them to communicate better, they want them to influence, they want them to speak up, they want them to be high performing teams. By the way, do your leaders want any of these things? Do your companies want any of these things?
Speaker 2: Yes, of course.
Speaker 1: Okay. Quite popular, right? But the truth is, is that all of these seemingly disparate needs are symptomatic, I would argue at least, of the same gap. They’re all about the ability of people to have conversations. What is coaching, but a conversation? Feedback, a conversation. Influence, a conversation. Selling, a conversation. A high performing team, it’s a group of executives that can discuss the real issues with each other and generate meaningful progress on those issues around things that are really important.
So this is what I’ve seen, is the red thread across these seemingly disparate needs. And so if we’re going to close the gap between the leaders that we have and the leaders that we need, we can’t afford to treat symptoms. We have to treat the core problem. And at least one of the core problems or one of the core gaps is conversations. But it’s not only logic that leads me there.
We have studied at Holzman Leadership more than 30,000 documented cases of leadership failure, where leaders try to get a result and there was a gap between the result they and their companies wanted to achieve as a result of their leadership and what they actually achieved. And in every single instance, it was because the leader, this is regardless of level, was not having the right conversation in the right way with the right people at the right time.
