Find out what your customers and employees are really thinking with this indispensable resource
Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People delivers invaluable strategies for how leaders can make their communications more inclusive and access the voices of those employees who rarely feel empowered to speak up. As constituent numbers scale, leaders have traditionally struggled to make communications a conversation with the entire organization, settling instead for small focus groups, talking at people in town halls, and delivering surveys after the fact. The result is exclusive, narrow decision-making that disengages and under-utilizes talent and human capital. And now, as the remote environment grows, the challenge and imperative for engaging conversations on a wider scale is even greater.
Scaling Conversations provides the solution. Having led a remote team for over a decade and having worked with thousands of leaders across North America, Dave MacLeod teaches you how to:
- Scale your business by listening to the voices that really matter
- Access and maximize the human capital in your organization
- Make decisions that create unity and move the group forward
- Decrease employee turnover caused by poor communication
Within these pages, you'll learn how to better facilitate conversations with a wider and more representative array of clients and employees, and not just the loudest ones in the town hall meeting or Slack channel. Perfect for any leader who's responsible for understanding what employees are really feeling and thinking, Scaling Conversations also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who wants to learn how to discover what the “silent majority,” who are often drowned out by the loudest people in the room, actually believes.
Table of Contents
The Limit of Our Competitive Advantage ix
Part I What’s in a Conversation?
Chapter 1 What’s a Conversation? 3
Chapter 2 Why Do We Need to Scale Conversations? 9
Chapter 3 Components of a Conversation 21
Chapter 4 Why Are Conversations Hard to Scale in Person? 33
Chapter 5 Why Are Conversations So Hard to Scale Online? 41
Chapter 6 Typical Mistakes Leaders Make at Scale 47
Part II How to Scale Conversations Effectively
Chapter 7 Components of a Successful Scaled Conversation 65
Chapter 8 The Hierarchy of Questions 79
Chapter 9 Components of Good Questions for Scaled Conversations 107
Chapter 10 Synthesizing Scaled Conversations 119
Chapter 11 Scaling Conversations in Action: Diversity, Inclusion, Mental Health, Equity 139
Acknowledgments 163
About the Author 167
Index 169
