Critical Conversations For Dummies
Overview
The easy way to communicate best when it matters most
Most people are aware of the importance of handling critical conversations well. However, when it comes down to actually being in a difficult situation that calls for key communication skills, many do not know how to practically apply their own thoughts.
Critical Conversations For Dummies is a step-by-step reference for the variety of crucial conversations life presents in the workforce. It's packed with strategies for preparing for high-stakes situations; being persuasive (not abrasive); knowing the value of assertive communication; resolving failed promises and missed deadlines; maintaining morale when firing staff; getting new employees
off on the right foot; managing staff relations and strengthening team relationships; understanding audience needs and motivations to get positive results; altering confrontational language to cooperative language during difficult conversations; and building relationships in the face of conflict.
- Improve communication skills in crucial conversations
- Avoid common pitfalls and emotional tendencies
- Discover the benefits of success in crucial conversations
This book is especially relevant to the hundreds of thousands of leaders who are tasked with multiple duties, whether addressing complex problems from stakeholders or achieving exceptional results from staff.
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About The Author
Christina Tangora Schlachter, PhD, is a Certified Professional Coach. She has created and taught courses on communication skills, crucial conversations for new managers, communication for professionals, and dealing with difficult conversations. She is the coauthor of Leading Business Change For Dummies and is the Chief Leader of She Leads.
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critical conversations for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Are you looking to change behaviors in employees and create productive and dynamic team players? Critical conversations are a way to do just that! Staying ahead of possible conflicts and intervening when issues do arise are what critical conversations are all about. They are the best way to keep employees motivated and ensure productive teamwork.
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Business Communication
You can use a critical conversation to stop difficult behaviors. Critical conversation skills can turn difficult behaviors from negatively impacting productivity, and help the people involved start to find better ways to work. The goals of a critical conversation, whether the discussion is delivering bad news or working through difficult behaviors, remain the same: use honesty and empathy to create a positive solution for everyone involved.
Business Communication
What an employee has a concern, it’s time to sharpen your critical conversation skills. Many issues can be potentially resolved with a critical conversation. Critical conversations teach you that as you are digging into what is really happening, the best thing to do is to listen before you act.
Make sure you focus on finding out all the facts and maintaining a positive environment.
Business Communication
The critical conversation skills and its EDGE model can be applied to the hiring process, in order to build effective teams. With critical conversation skills, HR can identify the best people to complete a team and help it achieve its goals.
Think of the outcome if the hiring process operated a bit differently.
Business Communication
Not only can the hiring process benefit from critical conversation skills, the interview questions can too! Applying critical conversation skills when interviewing a potential new employee candidate will help you zero in on the perfect team player for your organization.
Some hiring interviews seem to reuse the same questions again and again and again.
Business Communication
The success of a critical conversation is based on the amount of planning that goes into it. Four major pitfalls contribute to critical conversation catastrophes. The good news is that you can avoid these pitfalls with the right planning.
Pitfall #1: Unmanaged expectations of the conversation. A critical conversation isn’t just water cooler talk; you have reasons and expectations for the discussion.
Business Communication
As you prepare for a critical conversation, building rapport and trust to set the tone can get the conversation on the right track from the start. Rapport and building trust give the recipient of the critical conversation's message confidence that the conversation will be successful.
During the preparation work, your agenda helps you open the critical conversation with the right words, but the recipient is paying just as much attention to your tone and observing the environment.
Business Communication
Body language often alerts you that someone’s not invested in a critical conversation. When that happens, how can you check someone’s body language and focus them back on the conversation?
Body language says a lot. Of course, you may not always have the luxury of seeing how someone is reacting if you can’t have the conversation face to face, but even if you’re 1,000 miles away, body language can make a critical conversation quickly go south.
Business Communication
Discussing an employee's poor performance can be an emotional experience, but with good critical conversation skills, the conversation doesn't have to end poorly. To conduct a meaningful performance conversation, be prepared to explain why the conversation is happening in a clear way.
State the purpose of the discussion to set the tone and focus, and briefly define why the conversation is important to the employee and the organization.
Business Communication
Thanks to your prep work, you aced the critical conversation. Now it's time to create an action plan based on the critical conversation's discussion, so that all the agreements, ideas, and feedback presented aren’t lost in a post-conversation black hole. Action plans provide goals and time lines that help all parties to be productive immediately and set a positive foundation for future feedback and conversations.
Business Communication
Are you looking to change behaviors in employees and create productive and dynamic team players? Critical conversations are a way to do just that! Staying ahead of possible conflicts and intervening when issues do arise are what critical conversations are all about. They are the best way to keep employees motivated and ensure productive teamwork.
Business Communication
Modern technology devastates the art of conversation. People who continue to text, type, or check their messages won’t focus on critical conversations or hear the message you’re trying to convey.
The ease with which people can stay connected through cell phones, pagers, and computers can be devastating to anyone trying to carry on a critical conversation.
Business Communication
No matter what communication style you have, using assertiveness and getting your employees to use assertiveness is the key to successful communication during critical conversations. During a critical conversation, assertive communication styles deliver the message in a firm yet professional manner.
Assertiveness during a critical conversation is about making sure everyone’s needs are met rather than getting just one person’s point across.
Business Communication
Effectively delivering a message during a critical conversation comes down to communication style. Your communication style may be direct, or something else. Your communication style is the way you deliver the message, not necessarily which words you choose. Most individuals have to adapt their personal style during critical conversations, or at least be aware of their own communication style.
Business Communication
During critical conversations, the way in which people deliver their message comes down to style. You might have a passive communication style, or something else. Individual communication styles and behaviors can greatly impact the message, so most people realize that they may have to adapt their personal style during critical conversations.
Business Communication
Obnoxious co-workers exist in every workplace, but critical conversation skills can help you deal with them effectively. Through critical conversation, you can address behaviors that are bothering you or interfering with your productivity, and work together to find an agreeable solution.
An obnoxious co-worker might blast her iPod, slam drawers or doors, never replace supplies in the common area, talk loudly on the phone, “forget” to give credit to team members that do the work, or simply ignore what other team members say.
Business Communication
If your critical conversation encounters resistance, focus your skills and turn the situation around. Critical conversation skills can defeat resistance in a discussion by teaching you to stay flexible, and to know when to push (and when to stop).
Prevent resistance by staying flexible during critical conversations
Balancing focus and flexibility when you’re faced with resistance during a critical conversation is the name of the game.
Business Communication
Even past issues can be addressed in a critical conversation. Having a critical conversation isn’t as easy as scheduling a meeting, however. Critical conversations take work, time, and follow-up, but having a critical conversation ultimately gives you back both time and energy, after you solve the problem.
When you address people problems with respect and honesty (as you do in a critical conversation), you will gain energy, time, and most likely get people working rather than arguing, which leads to more profit, productivity, and a better work environment.
Business Communication
Critical conversations lead to better relationships and productivity. The EDGE model for critical conversations calls for you to decide on options for moving forward, after examining data and acknowledging perspectives. So, after identifying during a critical conversation what's wrong, you're ready to talk about the desired actions or change, so all parties can work on finding possible solutions and alternatives.
Business Communication
Screaming matches in the office increase tensions while reducing productivity. With the right critical conversation skills, you can address screaming, yelling, and arguing behavior and focus on solving the problem.
Some screamers really scream; others choose to use technology to scream for them. You can address the problem behavior in the same way — just don’t do it over e-mail.
Business Communication
When a co-worker makes offensive comments, it can make the workplace uncomfortable. Critical conversation skills can help eliminate offensive comments from the workplace. Critical conversations allow you and your co-worker to find a solution that you can both live with.
Even in the most professional workplaces, employees can tell jokes or make rude comments that cross the line from bad taste and poor judgment to offensive behavior that could be seen as harassment.
Business Communication
Dismissing an employee is difficult, but critical conversation skills can make even that difficult process manageable. Through a critical conversation, you can find ways to fire an employee with compassion.
Critical conversations, even when followed up with action plans and evaluations, can't always turn the worst performers on a team into at least good employees.
Business Communication
Critical conversation skills can help you address a myriad of problems, including conflict. Like any good critical conversation, a conversation designed to help resolve conflict should follow a common process: examine the issue, options, and ideas; decide on solutions; and then get moving and evaluate the results of the conversation.
Business Communication
To make critical conversations go more perfectly, you can draw on five key phases to get the critical conversation going in the right direction and to redirect the discussion if it gets off track.
Using these five key phrases when they’re appropriate lets the other parties know you want to help make the situation better.
Business Communication
Building and maintaining rapport with the person you are having a critical conversation with makes any discussion more likely to have a positive result. Building rapport means creating a relationship based on trust and affinity. You will be much more likely to have a positive conversation with mutual respect if you keep the following tips in mind when building rapport:
Be sincere.
Business Communication
Critical conversation skills can help you handle a lot of situations, including emotional employees. A critical conversation can help keep an employee's emotions in check while you uncover the real problem and search for a solution.
When an individual gets a bad review, is under stress, or is dealing with personal issues, one reaction may be crying in the workplace.
Business Communication
Active listening happens when you actively pay attention to a speaker’s words and nonverbal cues. Applying active listening to critical conversations allows you to more fully participate. When people say they have trouble communicating, they often mean that they’re having trouble understanding the other person’s perspective or opinion.
Business Communication
Combining coaching with critical conversation skills can employees achieve and sustain top performance in support of organizational goals. Using coaching along with critical conversation methods can turn any positive dialogue into a five-star discussion.
Coaches provide feedback and encourage discussion that can influence changes in behavior, performance, or even beliefs.
Business Communication
At the end of critical conversations, an action plan should be created that reflects the agreements reached. But if action plans or agreements are ignored, what should you do? If action plans or agreements regarding changes in behavior aren’t happening immediately, be more assertive before the situation gets out of control.
Business Communication
Public relations with customers and critical conversations have much in common. Just like a critical conversation, public relations delivers bad news to customers through an open and honest environment, and then presents what’s happening next. The following critical conversation skills are great tools to add to any public relations strategy.
Business Communication
An employee complaint can be resolved with a critical conversation. However, workplace complaints that can be resolved by a critical conversation tend to have even higher emotions. Therefore it is a good idea to spend a decent amount of time repeating the steps of examining what is happening and acknowledging emotions before decisions on next steps are made.
Business Communication
Critical conversation skills can help you deal with a hostile customer,. Hostile customers often disrupt the workplace, but critical conversation skills, carefully applied, can help keep aggressive customers from infecting employees and other customers with their attitude.
Yelling customers making threats face customer service agents in almost every company on any given day.
Business Communication
An important element of critical conversations is how to facilitate team discussions. The goal of facilitating group conversations (critical conversations) is to help groups become teams that work together to solve problems. That isn’t an easy task, but by using these techniques, you get one step closer to creating a capable and effective team.
Business Communication
When critical conversation techniques are used during the decision-making process, there is often better follow-through on the decisions made during the critical conversation because more than one person is involved in making decisions. Following is a list of four common approaches to decision-making:
Decide and announce: One person decides and announces the decision.
Business Communication
Critical conversations are often emotional, which may lead to confrontation. You can turn confrontation in a critical conversation into accommodation by using one of three proven methods. Whether you’re kicking off the critical conversation or on the receiving end of a potentially confrontational situation, moving from argument to collaboration will create more positive results.
Business Communication
When confrontational language is used during a critical conversation, the conversation spirals out of control. Confrontational language in a critical conversation blocks each party from listening to the other’s interests and needs. The focus becomes protecting or standing your ground rather than finding a common and agreeable ground.
Business Communication
Agreements reached during a critical conversation may unravel, causing the conversation to run off-course. How can you keep agreements you've already reached from affecting a critical conversation. When agreements begin to come apart during a critical conversation, you may feel like all the work that went into reaching an agreement in the first place has gone to waste.
Business Communication
If you have a laundry list of issues that need to change, prioritizing them before having a critical conversation is key. Decide which issues you need to discuss in a critical conversation, and which ones can wait or even never be discussed if the other areas change. Here are a few things to keep in mind when prioritizing what to focus on during the critical conversation:
Consider the biggest consequence: To prioritize all the issues, start with the facts and the impact the facts have on the organization or team.
Business Communication
During critical conversations, a person may become offensive, dominating the conversation. Even when discussing a problem one-on-one, a person who takes the offensive during a critical conversation is not open to the idea of solving the problem together. In both situations, offensive people can get in the way of making progress during critical conversations.
Business Communication
Critical conversations filled with pronouns like me, I, or you may quickly turn divisive and non-inclusive. Me-versus-you language turns ordinary conversations into battles by focusing on the “us versus them” mentality.
Although you may come to a critical conversation with a genuine desire to make things better, not everyone is going to be in the same camp, at least not at the beginning.
Business Communication
Office gossips are insecure, attention seekers who can submarine your efforts. Deter office gossip by skillfully applying your critical conversation skills and stop the rumor mongering in its tracks.
Just like in high school, an office gossiper may feel that her opinions aren’t being listened to, she may be insecure about her abilities, or she may just be looking for attention.
Business Communication
Even if you use a positive facilitation approach during a critical conversation, the discussion can still go off-track. Critical conversations can go off track for many reasons. When one does, refocus the conversation.
Refocusing a critical conversation can be done in three simple steps: clarify the focus, check for agreement, and continue.
Business Communication
Critical conversations are not just about what you should do during the discussion. Unfortunately, poor attitudes and stressed relationships show up again and again during conversations. Even the best critical conversation can include its share of problems. This table shows a few solutions to some of the more common pitfalls.
Business Communication
In meetings with an angry hostile people, it's difficult to get anything done. Angry people stall progress, but by applying critical conversation skills, you can change the course of the critical conversation and achieve a good result.
Some angry hostile types start off as people with bad attitudes — they complain about everything, blame others, and never take responsibility for anything, ever.
Critical conversations take practice, perspective, and preparation. Unfortunately, sometimes there is never enough time to get ready because the conversation needs to happen now. For these situations, 10 minutes of preparation before a critical conversation will get you on the path to a successful discussion:
Minute 1: Make sure you have sufficient time to see the conversation through to the end.
Business Communication
Mastering the art of critical conversations provides many benefits, such as learning how to deal with conflict. By mastering critical conversations, you may discover some other personal and professional benefits as well.
Critical conversations increase your leadership potential
Senior executives often judge leadership confidence by looking at these three traits:
Asking for exactly what you want without being pushy, aggressive, or annoying
Handling difficult personality types and situations at work with poise and ease
Maintaining all these skills during change, crisis, and chaos
By using critical conversation methods, you can handle difficult personalities and situations and ask for what you want and need without being overly aggressive.
Business Communication
Critical conversations can help make decisions stick, work relationships grow, and teams operate better. Here are ten tips for handling your emotions during critical conversations, especially when someone is pushing your buttons.
Take a break from the critical conversation
Taking a break gives you time to collect your thoughts and physically slow down the conversation until you feel confident that your responses will be professional and productive.
Business Communication
Everyone plays a role in critical conversations, even the guy who keeps time. The timekeeper tracks time’s passing, and how long a critical conversation is taking. The watch-checker is the evil and a bit outdated twin of the phone-checking guy or texting gal. The timekeeper is the individual who not only checks his watch but also lets you know exactly what the watch says.
Business Communication
Dealing with silent team members during a critical conversation is often best done by creating opportunities for participation. Dealing with talkers who suddenly go silent during a critical conversation requires a different tactic if you want to rescue the situation.
Try asking silent members for their opinions during critical conversations in order to encourage their participation.
Business Communication
People naturally defend themselves and their opinion when they receive feedback during a critical conversation. But when someone’s on the defensive, how can you steer a critical conversation back on track?
When someone goes on the defensive, don’t back down — doing so undercuts the conversation. Instead, recognize the individual’s opinion and ask him to focus on the purpose of the meeting before defending his position.
Business Communication
People who play the blame game during critical conversations love to avoid responsibility by throwing the blame around. If you want a critical conversation to be successful, you must learn to corral people who blame others and avoid taking any responsibility or ownership for anything.
Someone who blames others is often doing one of two things (sometimes both): hiding his own insecurities or just trying to get away with doing nothing.
Business Communication
Emotions can take over a critical conversation, causing it to quickly lose its focus. How can you refocus a critical conversation that’s being overshadowed by strong emotions? When the other party or parties in the conversation are so upset or emotional that they can’t focus on tasks, the conversation may come to a screeching halt, or worse, turn into a complete wreck.
Business Communication
When a customer threatens to call the boss, you can ignore it, or use critical conversation skills to diffuse the situation. Critical conversation skills can help you and the customer not only find a solution, but also create a foundation for a customer-company relationship that continues in the future.
Learn how with the right critical conversation skills, a few simple sentences can take a customer interaction from simply finding a solution to creating a better relationship in the future.
Business Communication
Deciding to bring a mediator into a critical conversation is often a judgment call. A mediator can make your job in a critical conversation easier, and prevent workplace concerns from turning into crises.
The choice to involve mediation in a critical conversation is often based on the history of resolving issues between the parties and the state of the relationship before the issue happened.
Business Communication
Workplace dynamics can make a good team perform at an extraordinary level or fall to pieces. Many workplace dynamic critical conversations come about because of subjective issues such as personality differences. So before you have a critical conversation with individuals or a group, diagnose what is causing the problem by looking at the group dynamics.
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