Toward a New Repertoire of Communication Skills for Leaders and Managers

"[M]any of us have a feeling that there is a mismatch between the requirements of flatter, more interdependent organizations in a rapidly changing globalized world and the repertoire of skills featured in many professional trainings and manuals."

This article describes aspects of the new body of theory on organisational communication skills for more interdependent organisations in a rapidly globalising world. It contrasts the older concept of leaders sending one-way messages to staff with the still-emerging concept of communication for managers and leaders that invites collaboration while setting an agenda.

The emerging view sees communication as performative: creating or forming the social world in which the communication occurs. This view considers forms of communication (debate, deliberation, etc.) as construction zones and considers them independent of the topics of these communication forms. Thus, 2-sided communication is a process of coordinating actions and of making/managing meanings.

The older "transmission model" suggests that the leader's role sets the topic of discussion, formulated to champion their goals. "In contrast, the emerging view leads to a perspective of organisations as comprised of patterns of conversations and the leader’s role as promoting certain forms of communication and inhibiting others." A leader is then a custodian of communication skills/processes. Some of these included:

• "Coordinated enactment of desired speech acts" - Speech acts include the family of requests, compliments, promises, threats, insults, answers, questions, etc. The leader performs the "second speech act" after being addressed in one of these forms. Their job is to act in this second speech to receive the desired response in a third speech act from the original speaker. Through the power of a "softer communication in the form of speaking invitationally", the leader/manager aims to create a collaboration and cooperation through the dialogue.
• "Ability to discern and act wisely into bifurcation points" - Through awareness of pivotal moments in conversation the leader/manager can see a bifurcation (point of two possible futures) and take into account the complexity of the situation and also judge how specific actions will fit into the organisation and what responses they might elicit.
• "Ability to do episode-work" - This is the ability to grasp a sequence of speech acts that have a beginning and end, such as a board meeting,  and "initiate, define, redefine, sustain, and on occasion, transform episodes." Being "mindful of episodes" means making intentional choices about how to structure their sequence - for example, managing the design of a meeting. Punctuating the beginning and ending of episodes is another management opportunity. A third opportunity is sequencing stories, a frequently used form of communication, to form coherent speech acts. Sanctioned stories can give a pattern to communication, while unsanctioned ones, such as rumour, result in uncontrolled patterns.

This new repertoire of skills can be approached in a number of ways, including the theory of "coordinated management of meaning (CMM) [See related summary below.] "The skills briefly introduced in this essay are grounded in an emerging concept of communication as the process by which we make, not just talk about, the events and objects in our social worlds. The acquisition of these skills requires more than simply adopting new techniques; they are sustained by a certain level of sophistication in the leader him or herself."