Being able to lead great conversations is the most important leadership skill.

What is the most important quality in a leader? Is it her determination? Her creativity? Or maybe it’s her ability to rally her people together behind a common cause.

Actually, it’s none of the above. A good leader is defined by her ability to design strategic conversations; that is, helping others channel their creativity and finding great solutions to her company’s obstacles.

Among her most useful skills are the ability to plan a meeting and steer conversations.

Have you ever sat in a meeting or a two-day conference that promised to improve your skills, only to find yourself brought down by tedium and boredom?

While those meetings may have been meticulously planned, they missed one crucial thing: they didn’t pay attention to their audiences and didn’t help them work effectively.

As a leader, you want to organize and lead strategic conversations that make everyone’s work as satisfying as possible. It will allow you to guide your employees towards enlightening moments, great problem-solving strategies and newfound creativity.

Unfortunately, many leaders – even well established ones – never learned to properly lead a strategic conversation. Despite its usefulness, you won’t find courses that teach strategic conversations in most universities or other educational institutions.

For example, the authors recall a time when they received a desperate phone call from a senior executive who was planning a two-day conference. He had noticed about eight days before the actual event that, while he had planned the location and the topic, he had no idea how to successfully steer those meetings to generate potent discussions and the effective solutions.

Despite his top-notch education, he felt totally lost, and ended up having the authors fly out to help him prepare. After reading these blinks, you’ll have all the tools you need to design effective strategic conversations – and you won’t have to pay for anyone’s plane tickets.