The command-and-control approach to management has become less viable due to globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers. To replace this, leaders must manage communication within their organizations, focusing on conversational communication. A recent research project identified four elements of organizational conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality.

Smart leaders today engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary person-to-person conversation more than a series of commands from on high. They initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations. This approach allows a large or growing company to function like a small one, retaining or recapturing qualities such as operational flexibility, high levels of employee engagement, and tight strategic alignment.

Conversational intimacy distinguishes organizational conversation from long-standard forms of corporate communication. Leaders must minimize distances between themselves and their employees, cultivating the art of listening and speaking authentically. Conversational intimacy can be manifest in various ways, such as gaining trust, listening well, and getting personal.

However, trust is hard to achieve in organizations, and leaders must be authentic and straightforward. For example, Athenahealth, a medical-records technology provider, treated every last employee as an "insider" under the strict legal meaning of the term, allowing employees to become deeply involved in the business.

Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously can enhance conversational intimacy by attending to what people say. True attentiveness signals respect for people of all ranks and roles, a sense of curiosity, and even a degree of humility. James E. Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, instituted "listening sessions" to gather information from managers and raise concerns. He also took feedback on his own performance and found that "internal communication" was the area in which the highest number of participants believed he had room for improvement.

Exelon, an energy provider, experimented with a deeply personal form of organizational conversation by bringing the company's corporate values alive for its employees. They used short video clips of top leaders speaking unscripted, very personally about diversity, which made a strong impression on employees. Interactivity in organizational conversation promotes dialogue, making the conversation open and fluid rather than closed and directive. This pursuit reinforces and builds upon intimacy, as efforts to close gaps between employees and their leaders will fail if employees don't have the tools and institutional support to speak up and talk back.

A shift toward greater interactivity reflects a shift in the use of communication channels, with social technology giving leaders and employees the ability to invest an organizational setting with the style and spirit of personal conversation. However, interactivity is not just about finding and deploying the right technology; it also involves buttressing social media with social thinking.

Cisco Systems, a leading social technology company, uses TelePresence to enable high-quality back-and-forth communication. This technology simulates in-person meetings by beaming video feeds between locations, creating a wraparound effect and allowing users to feel as if they were seated at the same piece of furniture. The technology also masters the critical issue of visual scale, allowing participants to appear life-size and look one another in the eye.

Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, holds various forums to keep in touch with employees, such as birthday chats and video blogs. This allows him to speak directly, informally, and without a script, suggesting immediacy and building trust. Inclusion adds a critical dimension to intimacy and interactivity, focusing on the role that employees play in the process. It extends the practice of interactivity by enabling employees to provide their own ideas, often on official company channels, rather than simply parrying the ideas that others present.

In the standard corporate communication model, top executives and professional communicators monopolize the creation of content and keep a tight rein on what people write or say on official company channels. However, when a spirit of inclusion takes hold, engaged employees can adopt important new roles, creating content themselves and acting as brand ambassadors, thought leaders, and storytellers.

Brand ambassadors are employees who become living representatives of their company's products and services, while thought leaders are those who develop and test new products and services. Juniper Networks has sponsored initiatives to get potential thought leaders out of their labs and offices into public venues to communicate their perspective to relevant audiences.

Corporate communication professionals often tell stories about a company, but there's nothing like hearing a story directly from the front lines. Incorporating employees' experiences and ideas can help instill a sense of welcomeness and openness in the company. For example, EMC published The Working Mother Experience, a 250-page book written by and for EMCers on being both a successful employee and a parent. This peer-driven endeavor was championed by Frank Hauck, then the executive vice president of global marketing and customer quality.

Inclusion means that executives cede a fair amount of control over how the company is represented to the world. However, cultural and technological changes have eroded that control, making it easier for anyone to tarnish or polish a company's reputation. Inclusive leaders are making a virtue out of necessity, as the free flow of information creates a freer spirit.

Organizational conversation should reflect a shared agenda that aligns with the company's strategic objectives. Intentionality differs from the other three elements of organizational conversation in one key respect: it brings a measure of closure to that process: it enables leaders and employees to derive strategically relevant action from the push and pull of discussion and debate.

Leaders must convey strategic principles not just by asserting them but by explaining them, generating consent rather than commanding assent. In this new model, leaders speak extensively and explicitly with employees about the vision and logic that underlie executive decision making. Technology and social networks enable bottom-up participation across the company.

Conversation goes on in every company, whether recognized or not. Smart leaders find ways to use conversation to manage the flow of information in an honest, open fashion. One-way broadcast messaging is a relic, and slick marketing materials have as little effect on employees as they do on customers.

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