Your Words are the Technology of Leadership

The Things We Don’t Know We Know

When we drive, there are hundreds of things that we do every minute that we don’t consciously think about.  Over time, we get so good at making these constant adjustments to speed and direction, gas and brakes, that we forget just how hard it is to actually drive a car.  If we’re not careful, our concentration will slip and that can lead to trouble.

The things that we don’t know we know are like that – they allow us to do incredibly complex tasks without thinking about them, but the unconscious nature of the action can also get us in trouble.

Leading and managing is a lot like driving.  When you’ve done it long enough, parts of it become automatic.  I don’t get to manage much in my current position, so when I get a chance to exercise my management muscles and I can see all these actions coming back, I’m much more aware of them than I was when I was a full-time manager.

Management is all about influencing from a distance.  The whole job is nudges and levers, questions and suggestions.  Little adjustments to keep on course, or speed up, or slow down.  That’s the art of managing.

The academic term for the things we “know” but can’t articulate is tacit knowledge.  It includes mostly things that we learn from doing.  Think about riding a bicycle – can you explain step-by-step how to balance while you’re moving forward?  It’s actually pretty close to impossible – that’s why we need training wheels.

We actually need training wheels as managers too.  Here is how Henry Mintzberg puts it in his superb book Managing:

Little of management practice has been reliably codified, let alone certified as to its effectiveness. That is why Hill found that people “had to act as managers before they understood what the role was”

It should be emphasized that, unlike other workers, the manager does not leave the telephone, the meeting, or the e-mail to get back to work. These contacts are the work. The ordinary work of the unit or organization—producing a product, selling it, even conducting a study or writing a report—is not usually undertaken by its manager. The manager’s productive output has to be gauged largely in terms of the information he or she transmits orally or by e-mail. As Jeanne Liedtka of the Darden School has put it (in a talk I attended): “Talk is the technology of leadership.”

Talk is the Technology of Leadership

I love that quote from Jeanne Liedtka – talk is the technology of leadership.  When was the last time you thought about how you use words?  That’s something we learned to do ages ago.  So long ago that we don’t even know what we know about speaking, or listening.

And yet, these are the core technologies of leading.  Speaking, and listening.

If you’re leading, or managing, it pays to think about these technologies a little more deeply.

Tom Peters addresses listening in a great document that he recently posted  called Presentation Excellence.  The main document is about presentation skills, and it’s useful.  For me though, the goldmine is the appendix on listening.

He starts this by saying “Interviewing/asking questions is a critical—and under-studied and under-practiced—skill. Few have treated it as a skill to be mastered akin to learning to play the piano.”  He then goes on to give 59 thoughts on becoming a better listener.  This is an invaluable resource – check it out.

In terms of speaking, I’ve also run across an excellent resource recently.  It’s a book called The Power of Framing: Creating the Language of Leadership by Gail Fairhurst.  Like the piece by Peters, this book contains a wealth of practical examples and tips for using language more effectively.

It’s time for us to consciously think about the things we do automatically.  If talk is the technology of leadership, than it makes sense to build our skills in this area.  As we do this, we should pay attention to one last quote from Mintzberg’s book:

It’s not [the manager’s] job to supervise or to motivate, but to liberate and enable (Max DePree of Herman Miller, 1990).

 Read more from Tim here.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Kastelle

Tim Kastelle

Tim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

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comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you Ed for sharing your insights into the Church Growth Movement. I have my reservations with Church Growth models because it has done more damage than good in the Body of Christ. Over the years, western churches are more focused on results, formulas and processes with little or no emphasis on membership and church discipline. Pastors and vocational leaders are burnt out because they're overworked. I do believe that the Church Growth model is a catalyst to two destructive groups: The New Apostolic Reformation and the Emerging Church. Both groups overlap and have a very loose definition. They're both focus on contemporary worship, expansion of church brand (franchising), and mobilizing volunteering members as 'leaders' to grow their ministry. Little focus on biblical study, apologetics and genuine missional work with no agenda besides preaching of the gospel.
 
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comment_post_ID); ?> Thank you for sharing such a good article. It is a great lesson I learned from this article. I am one of the leaders in Emmanuel united church of Ethiopia (A denomination with more-than 780 local churches through out the country). I am preparing a presentation on succession planning for local church leaders. It will help me for preparation If you send me more resources and recommend me books to read on the topic. I hope we may collaborate in advancing leadership capacity of our church. God Bless You and Your Ministry.
 
— Argaw Alemu
 
comment_post_ID); ?> Amen!!
 
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