HBR's 10 Must Reads for CEOs (with bonus article "Your Strategy Needs a Strategy" by Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns)

Leadership Is a Conversation

by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

THE COMMAND-AND-CONTROL APPROACH to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.

We arrived at that conclusion ...