Chapter 1: What is a Crucial Conversation?
Crucial conversations are often emotionally charged. They relate to topics that are very important or impactful to you personally.
Humans have evolved to handle these kinds of situations poorly. We have a physiological response that makes us less able to navigate the situation in a calm and level-headed manner.
Crucial conversations are often spontaneous, and come out of nowhere. We are forced to navigate these challenging conversations in real time.
How we navigate these crucial conversations is often made up as we go along. We haven’t seen real life models of effective communication skills, so we just don’t know what it looks like.
Even if you plan for, or mentally rehearse a tough conversation, you may still fail. Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. If you have no good model for how a conversation should be conducted, how can you possibly know what to plan for or rehearse effectively.
People who routinely hold crucial conversations well are able to express controvertial and even risky opinions in a way that gets heard. Their bosses, coworkers and direct reports listen without becoming defensive or angry.
Chapter 2: Mastering Crucial Conversations
The Fool’s Choice
The fool’s choice is the believe that we must choose between two bad options e.g.:
- Option 1: Speak up and turn the most powerful person in the company into their sworn enemy.
- Option 2: Suffer in silence and make a bad decision that might ruin the company.
People who are skilled at navigating crucial conversations do not make The Fool’s Choice. The ask themselves the question, “How can I be 100 percent honest, and at the same time be 100 percent respectful?”.
Dialogue
When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open.
di·a·logue or di·a·log (dì´ ∂-lôg´´, -lòg) n
The free flow of meaning between two or more people.
Filling the Pool of Shared Meaning
Each of us enters conversations with our own opinions, feelings, theories, and experiences about the topic at hand. This unique combination of thoughts and feelings makes up our personal pool of meaning. This pool not only informs us, but also propels our every action.
When two or more of us enter crucial conversations, by definition we don’t share the same pool.
People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool—even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs.
When people aren’t involved, when they sit back quietly during touchy conversations, they’re rarely committed to the final decision.
“He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.” - Samuel Butler
Chapter 3: Start With Heart
The first principle of dialogue—Start with Heart. That is, your own heart. If you can’t get yourself right, you’ll have a hard time getting dialogue right.
And that’s the first problem we face in our crucial conversations. Our problem is not that our behavior degenerates. It’s that our motives do—a fact that we usually miss.
So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us.
Start With Heart
They maintain this focus in two ways.
- First, they’re steely eyed smart when it comes to knowing what they want. Despite constant invitations to slip away from their goals, they stick with them.
- Second, skilled people don’t make Fool’s Choices (either/or choices). Unlike others who justify their unhealthy behavior by explaining that they had no choice but to fight or take flight, the dialogue-smart believe that dialogue, no matter the circumstances, is always an option.
A Moment Of Truth
A real life example is given of a CEO in a meeting with other company leaders. The CEO has been pushing for reduced costs for months, but not much has been accomplished. There appears to be an openly hostile atmosphere, yet one of the managers is able to present a piece of information that turns the conversation into a difficult one. Does the CEO walk the talk of openness and honesty? Or are they a raging hypocrite.
Winning: First, we correct the facts. We quibble over details and point out flaws in the other person’s arguments. Of course, as others push back, trying to prove their points, it’s not long until we change our goal from correcting mistakes to winning.
Punishing: Sometimes, as our anger increases, we move from wanting to win the point to wanting to harm the other person. Eventually, as emotions reach their peak, our goal becomes completely perverted. We move so far away from adding meaning to the pool that now all we want is to see others suffer.
Keeping the peace: Of course, we don’t always fix mistakes, aggressively discredit others, or heartlessly try to make them suffer. Sometimes we choose personal safety over dialogue. Rather than add to the pool of meaning, and possibly make waves along the way, we go to silence. We’re so uncomfortable with the immediate conflict that we accept the certainty of bad results to avoid the possibility of uncomfortable conversation. We choose (at least in our minds) peace over conflict. But if we do this, the real issue is never understood by the people who have the power to remedy it.
First Focus On What You Really Want
In reality, the CEO didn’t give in to their raging desire to defend themself. They acknowledged the apparent hypocrisy in talking cost cutting while spending on a new office. The CEOs openness allowed for a candid exhange with various participants feeling safe to express their views. In the end they were able to come to an agreement that all were happy with.
Subsequent conversations with the CEO would reveal that they had a realisation, “what do I really want here?“. They realised the original goal was to encourage the other managers to decrease spending, and that the biggest blocker to achieving this was the widespread belief that they were a hypocrite.
When you feel yourself starting to change your goal to save face, avoid embarrassment, win, be right, or punish others, you must take a step back from the interaction. Ask yourself: “What am I doing, and if I had to guess, what does it tell me about my underlying motive?”
You can ask these questions either when you find yourself slipping out of dialogue or as reminders when you prepare to step up to a crucial conversation. Questions like:
- What do I really want for myself?
- What do I really want for others?
- What do I really want for the relationship?
Once you’ve asked yourself what you want, add one more equally telling question:
- How would I behave if I really wanted these results?
These questions help centre ourselves, and rediscover our original purpose. They also affect our physiology.
As we introduce complex and abstract questions to our mind, the problem-solving part of our brain recognizes that we are now dealing with intricate social issues and not physical threats. When we present our brain with a demanding question, our body sends precious blood to the parts of our brain that help us think and away from the parts of our body that help us take flight or begin a fight.