List
Print This Post Print This Post

‘Walk the talk’ is being consistent: say something and then do what you said you would. ‘Talk the walk’ is when you act first and then follow it up with words consistent with your actions. The former is good management, but the latter is an extremely powerful disruptive idea.

The expression ‘walk the talk’ means you do what you ask other people to do or what you promised to do. There are a few variations on the theme, but they all come down to this: practice what you preach! Walking the talk is a key behaviour in the organisation (but not a disruptive behaviour). Walking the talk is absolutely necessary and people who do this are true value creators in three ways:

 They build trust. Trust professes the most ‘unfair’ un-linearity of all: small breaches of trust have the power of extrapolation, generalisation and of triggering total defence: “If you have failed me on this one, you’ll do it again.” People who walk the talk are reinforcing trust all the time because their primary driver is to behave in a way that shows consistency with what they say. Some of these people do this in a rather unconscious way.

They are powerful role models. The power of imitation and/or social copying is enormous. Although one could role model via language, expressions, declaration of values, etc., there is nothing more powerful than overt, observable behaviours. Most of these powerful behaviours are silent. By that I mean that they are not announced and heralded; they happen naturally, not through spin.

They practice behavioural translation. Our language is full of things that we call values, beliefs, mindsets, attitudes, etc. We can have good conversations within that vocabulary, but these may happen under the false assumption that we all agree on the specific meaning of these terms. Only behaviours are observable and unequivocal. There is no such thing as honesty, at least like there is grey hair or a deep voice. There are behaviours that when exhibited we agree to call honest. From there we then infer and create ‘honesty’ as a value-concept. The problem with mindsets, attitudes, values, etc. is that they are not operational. We can’t do much with them unless we translate those values and beliefs into observable behaviours.

All this is very well and desirable, almost a baseline. Hardly negative. You need all those behaviours and all those people big time. But the disruptive behaviour is actually the reverse of walk the talk. ‘Talk the walk’ goes beyond the simply needing to find that inherent disproportion between the relatively simple behaviour and the big impact in the organization:

  • In ‘walk the talk’ mode, you model the behaviour you told other people you want to see from them. In ‘talk the walk’, you do it first and then talk about it afterwards
  • The ‘walk the talk’ wisdom would say that you should do what you say you’re going to do. The ‘talk the walk’ disruptive behaviour tells you to do it and only then to talk about what you have done and what you would like people to do as well
  • In ‘walk the talk’ mode, you act following declarations. In ‘talk the walk’, you get involved personally in group activities that are strictly speaking only done by people reporting to you. You make yourself part of the team, even temporary. Walk with them and then talk about what’s happening, about how people are doing.

The ‘talk the walk ‘disruptive behaviour can also be described as: do more, talk less.

‘Talk the walk’ is highly viral because people will see you doing something and then they will hear about the philosophy or the rationale behind it. Seeing the behaviour is the first step to successful imitation. Start with the action, follow up with the words. It doesn’t get more disruptive than that!

Imagine a culture with good mutual levels of trust because people do what they say they will do. Imagine a ‘walk the talk’ management culture where there is a clear observation of consistency between what management (or others) say they will do and what they actually do. Imagine an organization working like that. Now imagine a culture where the action is more visible than the ‘talk’ and where people are going beyond the ‘walk the talk’ to talk about what has already been walked! Imagine the behaviours in the organization. What will you see and what will be the benefits? Imagine what this will do for your overall trust capital. Imagine where to start building it.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For more thoughts on company culture….

Watch our webinar on The Myths of Company Culture

 

Stuck in old concepts, we have made culture change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes or ‘culture training’ tell us a lot about the myths in this area. Learn how to successfully mobilize your people for a purpose and change culture. Culture is the key to the complex post Covid-19 future in front of us. Over the Covid-19 peak across the world we have seen the best and the worst of company cultures. Sometimes it felt like a pressure cooker. Culture is now ‘the strategy’, but we need to get rid of some assumptions and learn inconvenient truths.

 

What attendees said:

‘Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this fantastic webinar. Both the depth of the discussion between Leandro and Carlos and the very intensive exchange in the chat inspired me.’

 

‘It was a great pleasure to participate in today’s webinar…. If you would have been sitting next to me, you would have seen a lot of ‘head nodding’ and heard a couple of loud ‘yes’es’ from the bottom of my heart.’ 

 

WATCH NOW

 

 

 

Keep up with the Daily Thoughts

Twitter Email

Would you like to comment?

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]