Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On

9Conversational Capacity and the Challenge of Team Leadership

An organization is a community of discourse.Leadership is about shaping the natureof the discourse.

ROBERT KEGAN

This book is about building teams that perform when the pressure is on, and the vital role conversational capacity plays in building such teams. In an exploration of this subject we can’t ignore the issue of team leadership, a function that is often defined in simple terms—as a role performed by a person in charge. But in this chapter we’ll consider a double-loop way of framing what constitutes real team leadership—as an activity far more complex and challenging than just being assigned a slot in the hierarchy. Specifically, we’ll explore four key distinctions. Effective ...