Crucial conversations are characterized by high stakes, strong emotions, and varied opinions.
Why are they important?
Because there’s a direct correlation between crucial conversations, dialogue, and success.
When people are in the throes of a high-risk conversation, much hangs in the balance. Fortunately, when people are able to honestly and accurately discuss all the relevant issues – including facts, opinions, theories, and feelings – they make better choices. They identify problems early. They make better decisions. They take better action. They strengthen relationships.
In short, they get better results.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High is based on research repeated in two dozen industries involving more than 20,000 employees. This research has correlated crucial conversations practices with:
- Increased productivity
- Improved quality
- Reduced defects
- Increased leadership effectiveness
- Greater inter-and intra-team cooperation
- Accelerated change implementation
- Enhanced individual influence
- Improved diversity practices
- Reduced safety incidents
- Etc., etc.
In a nutshell, here’s what the researchers found:
- All relationships, families, teams, and organizations have problems.
- The difference between good organizations and the best is not how many problems they have – it’s how respectfully and rapidly problems get solved.
- People’s ability to confront emotionally and politically risky topics (crucial conversations) with each other is the #1 predictor of rapid problem-solving.
- If you want to become unstuck and improve your results and relationships, you need to improve your ability to deal with crucial conversations.
- When faced with crucial conversations, you have only three options – avoid them, deal with them badly, or deal with them well.
Crucial Conversations teaches the skills for dealing with them well.
"Why Crucial Conversations?" © VitalSmarts, a Southam Consulting, LLC strategic partner.