How do top CEOs foster deeper dialogues with their teams and build a culture underpinned by trust? In the ninth episode of the CEO Insights series, senior partner Dana Maor speaks with Laurel Moglen, McKinsey’s managing producer, to share how the best CEOs lead through active listening and engagement to establish authentic and lasting relationships with their teams.
CEO Insights, which features short, sharp perspectives on the evolving role of the CEO, is produced by The McKinsey Podcast in partnership with the CEO Special Initiative.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. To catch the full episode, click here.
Laurel Moglen: You and some of your colleagues wrote an article about five ways to get employees engaged. One practice is to speak the stakeholders’ language, but there are a lot of stakeholders, so what does that mean exactly?
Dana Maor: Leaders who are successful at engaging an organization typically can find one very clear message, sometimes with a very simple tagline that they communicate consistently and broadly with everyone. When we talk about speaking in the audience’s language, we mean taking that message and making it specific to the different stakeholders, customers, employees in different markets, and people in different functions, because we want to be sure that this is truly alive for them. So it’s about meeting the audience on their own terms, in their own reference space.
Laurel Moglen: Another practice encouraged in the article is for CEOs to communicate with their colleagues and not at their colleagues. Is there language you could give as an example that illustrates talking with someone as opposed to talking at someone?
Dana Maor: Asking questions is always a good way to do that, such as asking for examples of how that comes to life in their own context, celebrating examples of organizations following a specific direction that have evolved into a great success. All of these are ways to engage. It’s about asking what resonates, what may be difficult and why, and what we should be talking more about to make that a reality.
Laurel Moglen: And, I suppose, actively listening is important, too. If you’re asking the questions, you also need to listen.
Dana Maor: The worst thing is to ask a question and then not listen, because that would not be authentic at all and would absolutely be against what you’re trying to communicate and achieve as a leader.
Laurel Moglen: What is the best way to use generative AI, assuming that companies are at least dipping their toes in, if not fully embracing it, when it comes to keeping communications as human as possible, with all the various stakeholders?
Dana Maor: Use AI as your assistant, not as your boss. This is exactly what it’s about. There is no question that you can save hours of research and work by bringing all the information together in minutes, or in hours, instead of days. That is extremely efficient.
As you share that communication, it needs to be with empathy and the ability to read people and develop the conversation that we were talking about earlier. The secret is in how we actually use the power of gen AI and AI so that we’re focused on the human aspects of asking the right questions, synthesizing the right way, and sharing it with different people. And, as a result, making this an enabler, making this something that helps us but not something that controls us or replaces us.
Laurel Moglen: Could you speak a little bit more about being able to read people?
Dana Maor: There is a very good question about whether younger generations—who are now growing up with more and more technology and less and less human interactions—are still as skilled at doing that. There is something about reading the energy in the room, sensing where things are headed, looking at someone based on their facial expressions or their body language, even on Zoom, and sensing that something is off or maybe that they’re excited about something or they want to say something.
I am convinced that, like many other things, over time we will develop gen AI and other technologies that will also start making very smart assumptions about that as well. But at the moment, entering a room, inspiring, setting the stage, sensing the energy, navigating through that, think about facilitating a top-team session, for example—when you have an amazing, skilled facilitator, they sense what’s happening in the room and they change the agenda according to how things evolved in the session. Can gen AI do that? I don’t think that it can do that yet.
Laurel Moglen: Thank you for everything you shared today.
Dana Maor: Of course. And I think you said two important things. One is, “How do we have that conversation and engage others?” The other one is, “How do we very actively listen?” because that is the only way that you can truly sense what’s happening in the room, either visual or physical. I also take that away from our conversation.