Crucial Conversations
Tools for Talking when Stakes are High
Crucial Conversations Drive the Results that Matter Most
Crucial conversations (conversations where stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong) happen every day and impact all of our results, yet few people invest in the skills for holding them well. Studies show that the inability to discuss a problem can be more destructive than the problem itself. Issues like poor productivity, declining quality, lack of teamwork, or strained relationships are often the effects of crucial conversations that aren’t being held or aren’t being held well. Learn to step up to high stakes conversations skillfully and respectfully and begin to resolve the problems by:
- Surfacing the best ideas
- Making important decisions
- Act on decisions with unity and commitment
Based on the New York Times bestselling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High, with over one million copies sold, this presentation reflects over thirty years of research in the trenches of real organizations. Let Crucial Conversations skills help you achieve greater alignment, agreement, and productivity.
Crucial Confrontations Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior
Results Depend on Accountability: Be Prepared
A crucial confrontation is a face-to-face interaction in which we hold another person accountable for a broken promise, a violated expectation, or bad behavior. Accountability issues such as lagging performance, quality, and low morale can keep you from getting the results you need. Crucial Confrontations presents a straightforward step-by-step process for identifying and resolving performance gaps, strengthening accountability, eliminating inconsistency, and reducing resentment.
Based on the New York Times bestselling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High, this presentation reflects over thirty years of research in real organizations. Use these skills to turn every disappointment or broken promise into an opportunity for enhancing accountability, improving performance, and ensuring execution.
Influencer
The Power to Change Anything
Learn to Create Change Strategies that Work
Creating sustainable change is a constant struggle for organizations and individuals. We often lack the skills to influence the behaviors behind issues like:
- Failed initiatives
- Short-lived change efforts
- Unproductive corporate cultures
- Entrenched bad habits
Influencer draws on the best practices of many of the world’s leading change agents and on five decades of social-science research to create a powerful model for changing behavior.
You’ll follow the experiences of influence masters who have succeeded in solving some of the world’s most profound problems. Examples ranging from major healthcare reform to reversals of destructive social behaviors to unprecedented corporate turnarounds will illustrate how a proven set of skills makes change not only achievable but sustainable.
In this fast-paced presentation based on the New York Times bestseller, and 2008 Business Book of the Year, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, you will learn to create rapid and sustainable change.
Change Anything
The New Science of Personal Success
The fastest and surest way to dramatically improve results is to change human behavior.
That’s because no problem is purely a personal problem. Research shows most people have a personal challenge that drags down their work performance by as much as 50 percent.
To help individuals overcome years of failed change efforts, the authors and researchers of the New York Times bestseller, Influencer, have embarked on their largest study of personal influence to date.
They studied the struggles, strategies, trials and triumphs of 5,000 people looking to make big changes. Whether hoping to get a promotion, lose weight, increase sales, or get off drugs, the select few who achieved their goals used the same basic influence strategies—strategies from which the authors distilled a new science of personal change.
In this engaging presentation, participants will learn to make long-anticipated improvements in their lives, careers and relationships by applying three breakthrough principles to any challenge.
- Escape the willpower trap. Those who fail falsely believe they lack willpower. More often, the problem is that they are blind and outnumbered to the many sources of influence shaping their behavior.
- Be the scientist and the subject. Those who succeed develop and refine a completely unique theory of change tailored to their individual needs.
- Turn bad days into good data. The successful few care less about dramatic success than they do about incremental learning.
The science delivered in this hands-on presentation will empower those who believe and understand that changing their own behavior is the most reliable path to achieving their personal and professional goals.
10x Your Influence
Create Sustainable Change with Six Sources of Influence
Change efforts fail when leaders narrowly look for a single cause behind their persistent problems and then try to implement quick-fix solutions.
On the other hand, influencers succeed because they understand that most problems are fed not by a single cause, but by a conspiracy of causes. They merge multiple sources of influence into a strategy that can overpower even the most persistent and resistant problems.
In a recent study published in MIT Sloan Management Review, VitalSmarts researchers found that those who combine four to six sources of influence are ten times more likely to succeed at producing substantial and sustainable change. These results held true across areas of:
- C-Level concerns—bureaucratic infighting, silo thinking, and lack of accountability
- Corporate change initiatives—internal restructurings, quality and productivity improvements, new product launches
- Personal challenges—overeating, smoking, overspending, binge drinking
Learn a step-by-step strategy for exponentially increasing your power to change your greatest and most persistent challenges.
The Four Crucial Conversations for Financial Agility
Respond Smarter, Faster, Stronger to Economic Downturns
Financially agile companies adapt to changing economic circumstances far more rapidly and effectively than the rest of the pack. A study of 1,400 executives and managers attributed thier financial agility to the capacity to handle four crucial conversations around fiscal challenges. Firms that handled the following conversations well adapted over ten times faster and weathered downturns far more intelligently than their peers:
- Debate, Dithering, and Denial—managers drag their feet rather than respond assertively to financial challenges.
- Undiscussables—enormous efficiencies and reductions are possible but seem politically risky to discuss.
- Silent Collusion—when leaders fail to follow through on committed reductions, others fail to hold them accountable.
- Irrational Slashing—executives impose across-the-board reductions or other policies that middle managers realize will create serious downsides the executives may be unaware of.
This fast-paced, hands-on session demonstrates how these four crucial conversations profoundly affect the resilience and responsiveness of teams and organizations. Participants will learn how to step up to these conversations to improve their organization’s financial agility.
Silence Fails
The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution
Hold These Conversations to Ensure Your Project’s Success
An organization’s success is determined by how well people execute on its high-stakes projects and initiatives. However, current execution trends are anything but promising. According to recent research:
- Fewer than one in three critical initiatives will achieve intended goals, and almost half are deemed outright failures.
- 83 percent of employees say they are working on projects, programs, and initiatives they believe will fail.
- Companies’ collective inability to execute on major projects costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
The good news is that these failures are predictable—and therefore, preventable. In the groundbreaking study, Silence Fails: The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution, VitalSmarts and The Concours Group found that project failures are almost always preceded by conversation failures. Learn to step up to these five crucial conversations and improve results through better decision making, higher quality project execution, and more engaged leadership.
In this interactive presentation, you will learn skills for engaging more effectively in these emotionally and politically risky conversations.
Silence Kills
The Seven Crucial Conversations for Healthcare
Speak up to Prevent Medical Mistakes and Save Lives
Every year, 195,000 people die in U.S. hospitals because of medical mistakes. Often, well-intentioned professionals in healthcare organizations choose not to speak up when they’re concerned with the behavior, decisions, or actions of a colleague.
The study, Silence Kills: The Seven Crucial Conversations for Healthcare, conducted by VitalSmarts in conjunction with the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, links people’s ability to discuss emotionally and politically risky topics in a healthcare setting with key results such as:
- Patient safety
- Quality of care
- Nursing turnover
The study suggests that creating a culture where healthcare workers speak up before problems occur is a vital part of saving lives. Learn to step up to these seven crucial conversations and drastically transform your healthcare organization.
In this engaging presentation, you’ll learn to speak up skillfully and respectfully when it matters most, and in so doing will decrease medical errors, improve patient satisfaction, and save lives.
Crucial Conversations for Workplace Safety
Prevent “Accidents Waiting to Happen”
A recent study conducted by VitalSmarts examined workplace safety failures. Interviews around specific failures turned up the same quote time and time again: “It was an accident waiting to happen.” Unsafe conditions had been recognized well in advance, but not resolved—and individuals and organizations suffered.
In 2006 alone, over 4 million people were injured in workplace accidents and another 5,703 died. The dollar cost of these injuries totaled $48.6 billion. The human costs are incalculable.
Our study reveals key moments where existing safety policies that can save time, money, and even lives, break down due to communication failures. Good safety practices require accountability across an organization to keep safety policies intact and working.
Learn to recognize the most common barriers to upholding policies, as well as how to address these barriers and improve safety practices for good.
In this interactive presentation, you will learn skills for engaging more effectively in these crucial conversations.
Crucial Conversations for Conflict Resolution
Cost of Conflict: Why Silence Is Killing Your Bottom Line
New research reveals employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid. These costs skyrocket when multiplied by the prevalence of conflict avoidance.
According to the study conducted by the authors of the New York Times bestselling book Crucial Conversations, 95 percent of a company’s workforce struggles to speak up to their colleagues about their concerns. As a result, they engage in resourcesapping avoidance tactics including ruminating excessively about crucial issues, complaining, getting angry, doing unnecessary work and avoiding the other person altogether.
In extreme cases of avoidance, the organization’s bottom line is hit especially hard.
The study of more than 600 people found that a shocking 8 percent of employees estimate their avoidance costs their organization more than $10,000. And one in 20 estimates that over the course of a drawn-out silent conflict, they waste time ruminating about the problem for more than 6 months.
In this interactive presentation, you will learn how to speak up quickly and effectively to curb the cost of conflict avoidance in your own organization.
