Okay. We've talked about different communication models and the four dimensions of communication. We've seen the role that communication plays for problem solving and for decision making, and the role it plays for establishing relationships and establishing a social identity for yourself. We've got some great ideas of how to improve your communication skills and what best practices to focus on when you do so. What I want to do is to round off our discussion by focusing on the practical realities of communication. And what I've done is I talked to Bocconi Alumni, and I wanted to learn from them, I wanted to hear what they consider most important about leadership communication. Myself I would describe as a couple of things. First, extremely informal. And I therefore avoid any form of excess formality, because when I get to excess formality I lose my effectiveness. I really encourage every form of communication no matter if it is with the guy that just entered the company a week before, I try to create an environment which is extremely friendliest and informal in which we can talk very openly. And the other one is what I call the extreme passion for seriality. I don't want people to tell me the coded, embellished version of things. I always start meetings by saying, "Listen, whatever went wrong is my fault, by definition, even if I didn't know I could have asked. Now that we know who's guilty, can you please help me understand what is really going on here. What is the problem? What are we missing?" And when people disagree, I usually stand up, shake hands and say "Well done. Let's talk it now. But the fact that you stood up and told me that I was right, this is great. Because this is the kind of environment that I want to see on the business." So that facilitates a communication that after a while becomes very direct and very much linked to reality. I fundamentally believe that once you know what the problem is, and you are able to define it correctly, 90% of time you're going to resolve it. Most of the time it takes too long to know what is the real problem or the problem is not described in a correct way. We talk about the symptoms but we don't talk about the root causes of the problem. And communication is a way in which I get to know what the problem is in fastest possible way and in the most direct way. And this is the way I am, which probably also is visible through this interview, is informal, and tries to go as fast as possible through all this, the topic that we want to discuss. The best analogy for communication in my experience is the game of chess. Which is, at the beginning of learning to play chess, you are all focused on your first move. And you almost don't think about what will be the reaction to your move. You are trying to figure out what is the best first move. And then over time you learn to make a first move and try to anticipate the move of your counterpart and think through the second move and the third move. I find the communication is the same. Initially, when I was less experienced, all my focus was in making sure I was expressing as clearly as possible what was in my mind. I was all occupied on, "Okay, what is that I want to achieve and how do I say it very clearly?" Over time, I learned that what really matters is something completely different, which is, which kind of reaction I get. And as you focus less on what you are saying and more on which reaction you want to get, your communication changes. Because in the end, it doesn't matter if I download all my frustration or all my hopes or all my decision and I don't get the reaction because what really matters is the kind of reaction I get. Am I getting the reaction that I want? And when you start worrying about the reaction, the communication becomes much more interesting but also much more difficult because as I speak, I need to look at you and try to see if I'm getting the reaction that I want to get. If I'm not getting the reaction I want to get, I need to start changing my communication almost in a chess game in real time to try to get to what I believe is the right endpoint for all of us. Though, at the beginning is a very mechanical exercise because I talk and I talk slowly and I try to understand if the audience is reacting in the way I'm expecting, and if I don't see the right reaction, which is usually to a dialogue, I talk a bit and then you talk and I realize that actually you are reacting in a completely different way than what I wanted to say. And that I need to start talking again and try to change the way I talk so that I generate the right reaction. Over time, you get a bit faster at that exercise and now it comes natural. As I am in big meetings or in front of a large audience and I talk, that creates a bit of empathy, requires a bit of emotional intelligence. But the ah-ha discovery for me is being when I stopped being over focused on what I wanted to say and become much more focused on the reaction I was getting. You learn to ask questions. This is another very important skill of leaders. In the early phase, you tend to listen 10% and talk 90% because you believe the more you talk the more you can make a difference and more you can give direction to people. And then over time you learn that maybe 50/50 is much better. But the way you ask questions is different with different people and different parts of the world. When I am in certain countries, I need to be more direct if I want to know what is exactly the problem. If I am in other places, I need to be a bit more subtle and allow a bit more time for people to open up and describe what the opportunity is. Asking questions is critical for leaders and is a way that helps you to go beyond the surface of things and to really penetrate situations and challenges. There are different ways in which people interact and get motivated. Sometimes people like clarity of the endpoint. The clarity of the vision. What is that we want to achieve? What do we want to be in five years from now or in 10 years from now? And they get really excited and really energized by the beauty of that endpoint and the clarity of that endpoint. The more challenging that endpoint is the better, because that drives more energy and drives more--, easy as I would say a typical attitude that you find more commonly for example in the Anglo-Saxon cultures. There are other cultures where people like to understand where you want to go in 10 years from now but they get worried if there is no clarity on the building blocks to get to that endpoint. And therefore, as you spend a bit time to say, "Guys, in 10 years we want the business to be like that, we want to change the market in this direction." Then you need to spend much more time discussing, "I think to get there we need to do one, two, three and four." And then people get comfort and get confidence through the fact that there is a path towards the endpoint. The endpoint per se people do react to, but if the path is convincing then you can get more energy out of the people. There are some cultures but also some teams where all starts from the analysis of today. People almost don't want to engage on where we are going to go next, if we don't know exactly where we are today. And so it requires a bit of agility and a bit of flexibility. You need to try to understand which is the prevalent need in a team or in a country or in a business and try to adjust your style to the one that is most helpful to the teams. And, of course, you can take these three styles and start putting a few flags of different countries or different--, but these are a bit stereotypes to a degree but there is a bit truth I can say. Provide with... overgeneralizing. I'm sure that in our alumni's recommendations and their experiences, you heard echoes of themes that we've talked about earlier. As he reflected on their experiences, the importance of thinking about communication as a dialogue that asking powerful questions, active listening are as important as speaking. And I really like this metaphor that Giovanni was suggesting about communication as playing chess. As you're trying to anticipate each other's moves, so you think strategically about communication. And we also heard him emphasize that it's really important to be attuned to your audience's needs and their communication styles. To show a certain level of respect to cultural conventions of communication in the context that you're working in. We also heard that it's very useful in a diverse multicultural setting to be heedful of communication barriers. That you have to try a little hard to make sure that you are effectively communicating to reduce misunderstanding and misinterpretations, to make sure that what you and what others are trying to accomplish communicatively is actually getting through. And maybe most importantly, we heard that as a leader you really need to find a way, a style of communicating that is uniquely you. That suits you. That allows you to optimally leverage your strength as a leader, that differentiates you and that your followers can come to rely on. And by view of communication, by its very nature, it's something that you'll work on together with others and therefore it can't be perfect. In fact, if you try to make it perfect, from your perspective, you'll probably end up excluding others from the work. There's this great quote from Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe that comes from [foreign language]. It goes [foreign language]. And I think that really hits it on the head. Communication, by its nature, is wrought with some errors, with some inefficiencies. You just have to work with others, and therefore, in my view perfectionism really is not the right goal for developing your communication skills. What I would propagate as suitable goals is to try to have more or better generativity, more participation and engagement in communication. In fact, if you develop your communication skills along those lines, you're well-prepared to motivate others, to build relationships. You have an easier time actually tackling conflict. In fact, your understanding of communication, the intricacies of communication, are going to be a great foundation for some of the other topics that we're going to talk about in this course.
