Crucial Conversations Seminars

"Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High"

Upcoming Mastery Workshops

Are you ready to change everything?

Learn how to use the skills of the Top 1% performers.
By implementing their best practices, you can
get unstuck and achieve synergy, alignment, and agreement.

What makes the best the best?
Come find out.

Every team and every organization has problems. The difference between the best and the merely good is not how many problems they have, but whether or not they candidly discuss and resolve them. The difference is in how they handle the crucial conversations that are the key to resolving their problems.

Kurt Southam photo Southam Consulting offers Crucial Conversations Seminars for individuals and organizations. We also provide Trainer Certification Seminars for organizational leaders interested in leading their own team through Crucial Conversations training. Upcoming dates & locations.

The Seminars are conducted by Kurt D Southam, a VitalSmarts Associate.

If you're looking for the tools to make your good organization the best of the best, this is it! Let us show you how to make your toughest conversations your most effective career and organizational success catalyst.

What Will You Learn?

Just about every day, you have a high-leverage interaction with someone that will have a long-term impact on your success. Whether you're working through a tough issue with a major customer or having a sensitive interaction with a team member, if you don't succeed in these crucial conversations, you won't get the results you need to become the "best of the best."

For example, when was the last time you were faced with a crucial conversation such as this?

A colleague has just missed a critical deadline. What do you say?
Your boss' leadership style is smothering you. You hesitate to speak up.
Your team has been getting bad results. No one wants to speak up and no one wants to find out why.
Important issues are not brought up in a timely manner to those who can do something about them. Only those near the water cooler hear the issues.
One of your best employees has accused another of racism. He continually labels others who are not "the same" as him.
You find yourself disagreeing with your boss and yet your head bobs up and down like you are a fully supportive puppet. The last person who disagreed was "shot on sight."
One of your employees loses her temper and yells at customers about twice a week. When you bring it up with her, she blames others.
Top performers are leaving, and poor performers are not challenged. Top performers are disgusted that others get away with as much as they do.

Dialogue is a tested cure for communication problems. How we speak up and listen during crucial conversations makes all the difference.

During the last 25 years, we have surveyed almost a half million people, interviewed over 5,000 individuals, and worked with hundreds of organizations to discover the best solution to communication problems.

Here's what we've found:

The biggest driver of productivity is how people talk with those who perform poorly.
The two indicators of team excellence are: 1) how people handle disagreements with the boss; 2) how teammates handle problems with each other.
The most influential people are those who skillfully bring up subjects that others run away from.
The biggest predictor of safety is whether people challenge those who violate safety rules.
The driver of diversity is how individuals deal with the offensive actions of others in ways that are candid and respectful.

By studying influential individuals, effective teams, and productive organizations, we've identified the principles and skills they use to master these kinds of crucial conversations. In skilled hands, these crucial conversations move to dialogue. If handled poorly, they degenerate into silence or violence.

A Southam Consulting Crucial Conversations Seminar

Crucial Conversations has produced dramatic results for thousands of individuals and organizations.

Here's what people are saying:

"When VitalSmarts began working with our executive team we were uncertain about how we would ever know whether our investment of time, money and effort produced any real business improvement. Now, four years later, those questions have been more than answered to our satisfaction. Not only have we been able to create measurable changes in behavior but we also know that these improvements in 'critical behaviors' are fundamental to our effectiveness as a business.

We now have hard evidence that these changed behaviors help drive our productivity, costs and quality. Also, we have confidence that they were essential to our winning the Joint Strike Fighter program and will be mandatory for now delivering upon our promise."

Dain Hancock
President, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company

"When I took over the business billing organization at AT&T, we had 18 months to make 30% improvements in quality, 50% reductions in cost and dramatically improve our ability to meet schedule with new software releases. Had we not made a serious leadership commitment to practicing the skills we learned from DialogueSmarts, these goals would not have been a stretch, they would have been impossible. The Crucial Conversations skill set was not only vital to our ability to deliver these results, it enabled us to achieve them in just under 12 months."

Michael Miller
AT&T

As a result of this training seminar, you will see lasting and meaningful positive change in your personal life, in your career, and in your organization.

Don't just take our word for it.

Call us at 740-453-4547 or REGISTER ONLINE to enroll in this seminar, and you'll be able to see for yourself the positive impact Crucial Conversations will have on you and your organization. And, don't hesitate to call with any questions, we'd love to give you more details.

Our promise is that by implementing the principles and tools from this training, you will significantly improve in areas such as:

Performance-giving feedback to poor performers
Productivity-confronting teams and individuals who consistently let you down
Teamwork-challenging a peer who disappoints you, or a boss whose leadership style is hurting the team
Change Management-talking to leaders who don't walk the talk around change; or admitting you don't have the skills needed to support changes
Quality-talking with those who fail to support quality processes
Significant Relationships-speaking with a loved one about differences in values or about habits that annoy you
Safety-approaching those who violate safety practices
Diversity-confronting those who behave disrespectfully
Meetings-speaking up when things get off track and suggesting how to improve them

And many more areas that will measurably improve your individual, team, and organizational results. And, we'll show you what it will take to transfer these powerful tools to your organization and take you from good to best. We have developed several very effective delivery methods that will help you implement these materials in your organization once you've experienced the introductory training. These methods range from our consultants training the materials on-site for you, to certifying your trainers, to our revolutionary leader-led training system.

Crucial Conversations WORKS . . . we guarantee it!

Facing a Crucial Conversation?

Contact Southam Consulting