Crucial Conversations

Transcription

1 Crucial Conversations training Contents DAY 1 Lesson 1: Get Unstuck 1 Lesson 2: Start with Heart 13 Lesson 3: Master My Stories 23 Lesson 4: STATE My Path 35 DAY 2 Lesson 5: Learn to Look 48 Lesson 6: Make It Safe I 57 Lesson 7: Make It Safe II 67 Lesson 8: Explore Others Paths 73 Lesson 9: Move to Action 83 This is a direct transcript of a Crucial Conversations training presented by Steve Willis, Justin Hale, and Emily Hoffman. It is to be read in speaking form.

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3 DAY 1 Lesson 1: Get Unstuck Presented by Steve Willis, Master Trainer We re gonna start in this first section we call Get Unstuck: how to spot the conversations that are keeping you from what you really want. From the results, the outcomes that you re after. EXERCISE: How Did You Get Your Way as a Child? So we re gonna start off with a little quick start exercise. This is for you at your tables. What I d like you to do is turn to the folks at your table and consider this question: what are things you did or strategies you used to get your way when you were little? So think back to when you were a child, when you were young, things you did, strategies you used to get your way. Take a couple of minutes, try to share and compare some of those strategies. Go. All right, bing. Stop where you re at there. So you had a chance to talk about this at your tables. What are some of the things that you talked about, what are some of the strategies that you used? Yes. Comment: Crying. Crying, good. What else? Yes. Comment: Playing against the parent. Asking one and then saying, Oh but the other one said yes. Playing parents. Excellent, good. Any others? Yes. Comment: Not taking no for an answer. Not taking no, good. What else? Yes. Comment: Do exactly as you re told. Okay, exactly as you re told. Good. You starting to see your favorites up here? Comment: Controlling the information. Okay. Yeah. Comment: Wearing them out. Wearing them out. Yes. I suspect you may have been consulting with my kids. One of their favorite strategies. All right, starting to see a range of these. Now when I was a child, I had a favorite strategy. It s kind of a combination of some of the things that you put up here, with a little different twist. I would use pouting and guilt, kind of combine em together. I d say to my mom: Fine, I m gonna go outside and eat dirt and die, and you re gonna be sorry when I m not around. These are all things that we did when we were little. Now that you re older, what s changed? Comment: Nothing. Don t we see a lot of these same strategies today? Now what has changed? Comment: We ve mastered em. Comment: I think discipline in general, like how the kids you can t discipline as well as you used to because it s such a different generation now and it s like, you know, what do you do sometimes, cause you don t know, yes or no, do you discipline em or you don t, or they re gonna go to the police or something like that. So it makes it very difficult. And so they learn a whole of different types of strategies. And we have, now once we ve grown to adults, had time to perfect a lot of these, right, make them more sophisticated now, for the adult population that we interact with. But we see variations and versions of these today. In fact if we were to take a look at this in terms of a continuum of communication, we could plot these along that continuum. Take a look at a continuum where at one extreme we have the silent side of communication. At the opposite end, more the violent side of communication. And kind of in the middle there we d have more that healthy realm. We could take each of these and plot them somewhere along that continuum. For example, which of these might fit more on the silent side? Yeah? Comment: Controlling information might fall on that side. That s right, keeping it myself, right. Good. How about more on the violent side? Comment: Crying. Crying. All right, sometimes it s the tantrum that goes along with the crying. And there might be some that fit there in the middle, more of like the negotiation, to bargain, to be able to talk back and forth. But somewhere along this continuum. Comment: I m thinking that as a child, even today, I ask for forgiveness rather than for permission. Yeah, another good one. Comment: And not it s done, and hopefully I can go forward with what I ve decided to do, rather than forgiving. And we see a lot of that same kind of strategy today in Crucial Conversations Training 1

4 organizations: I m just gonna go ahead with it and hope that I can get away with it. Because it s easier to get forgiveness than permission sometimes, right? We see a lot of these strategies and variations of these. Now we want to talk about this continuum. Because this sets up the big premise for what we re going to be talking about in this first section. And it is this: the more time you spend moving towards the extremes of that continuum, towards either silence or violence in communication, the more problems you run into. Let that sit with you for just a moment. The more time we spend moving towards the extremes of that continuum, towards either silence or violence, the more problems we run into. What we re going to be able to examine today is exactly this. That we find that at one time or another we all become stuck at being able to achieve the results that we need or want. And stuck has a wide range of meanings. Sometimes it s that we haven t hit the targets that have been set for us. Other times it s that we have these strained relationships with the people we depend on to get work done. This range of feeling and becoming and sometimes remaining stuck. And underlying these feelings of being stuck are patterns of communication. What we want to be able to do is take a look at the connection between these patterns of communication and these feelings of becoming and sometimes remaining far too long stuck, and being able to achieve the results that we need or want. So the solution that we re gonna look at here is learn how to identify the crucial conversations that are key to organizational, team and interpersonal successes. A lot of folks at this point say, ooh, crucial conversations, nice name what does it really mean? Well let me give you a little example. A little while ago I was preparing to deliver this course in northern California. And as I was getting ready and making all the preparations, the first participant arrives. His name s Brian. Brian comes in, he puts down his materials, he looks straight at me and he says, Are you going to be able to help me? I said, I don t know, what are you dealing with? He said, I have an employee who s incompetent, both socially and technically. And he went on to describe in some detail some of the problems that he was having. He said, This guy is aggressive, he s stubborn, he s been here for a long time. He only works on projects that he likes working on. People on the team transfer off the first opportunity they can get. People on other teams that have to interact with our team, they ll call me directly instead of having to deal with this person. He says, And then there s the technical aspect of his work. He s getting kind of sloppy, lots of errors. We can t put him on any job that s gonna go to an end user because there s too many errors to catch. So Brian had been documenting his performance over the last little while. He went to his boss, the vice president in the organization, and laid out the case for letting this person go. The vice president carefully considered and then finally said, You know, we re moving over to a new performance appraisal system. I think we should give this person a clean slate, let him start over. All right, now put yourself in Brian s position. He knows that this is absolutely the wrong decision to make, that this person s creating all kinds of quality, morale, productivity, cost problems for him in his area. So he musters up all the courage he can, he looks his boss straight in the eyes and he says, Okay, that d be fine and he walks away. How does he feel? Disappointed, lousy, frustrated, angry, upset, thinking about how he s gonna have to deal with this person on an ongoing basis. Now if you ve ever been in this kind of situation, you ll appreciate the need for crucial conversation skills, for handling these types of conversations and doing so effectively. Again, we find that there are certain skills which if we can employ and employ more regularly will be more effective at working towards the results that we need or want. So we re going to be focusing on a model here to help us understand some of the best practices approaches to deal with this type, and similar types, of crucial conversations. So most people think about the crucial conversations as the during I m in it, I m holding this conversation, it s not going so well, there s high stakes, I don t think I m gonna get what I want. But we want to talk about some other aspects and elements that ll help you prepare to be most effective during that interaction, that exchange. So we ve broken the model as you can see here up into 3 parts: before, there is the during part, and also after. So this morning we re gonna start with the section we call Get Unstuck. That s one of the skills that ll be helpful for us before we get into the conversation, to recognize what kind of conversation we should be holding, how to get to the right one. We ll also be looking this morning at a section we call Start With Heart. How do we get our motives right before we open our mouth? We ll look this afternoon at a section we call Master My Stories. How do we help those emotions that tend to well up when we re talking, to be more productive rather than carry us to an unproductive result. And then this afternoon we ll end up with a section we call State My Path how do I express my perspective in a way that encourages others to respond, especially when it s risky or controversial? So we ll take breaks about every hour and a half, we ll have a couple 10 minute breaks this morning, a couple in the afternoon, and we have an hour for lunch, and lunch will be served here. So that ll be our agenda for today. Questions about the agenda, what we ll be 2

5 covering? Okay. Tomorrow when we get back together, we re gonna start over here on the other side of the model. It says Their Meaning still during the crucial conversation, with a speak we call Learn To Look. One of the things we find that people really need to master is that when they re in that conversation and things start deteriorating, it s not going so well, if they can notice the early warning signs that people aren t feeling safe, they do much better in the course of the conversation. Then we re gonna provide some skills to help you make it safe when it doesn t feel so safe. Then we want to also focus on how do we get other people to speak up when they re either clamming up or blowing up? We call that section Explore Others Paths. And then finally, tomorrow in the afternoon we ll wrap it all up with a section we call Move To Action. We ll move to that after bit, and say how do we decide who s gonna do what by when, and how to follow up to make sure that this conversation just isn t talking, but it s channeling to actions that ll produce results that we need or want. So this will be the model that we ll be building, and the agenda that we ll follow. Now there s a lot of different components to the model, we ll look at the different elements as we go in. Right now what I d like you to do is just focus here on that middle blue part. We call that the Pool of Shared Meaning. This represents our collective perspective, our kind of group IQ. Let me give you a little idea of why and how this is important. I was working just a little while ago with a CIO and her direct reports. And in anticipation of the session that we were going to conduct, I got to do some individual interviews with each of those direct reports. And I asked them, What s preventing you from being as effective as you could be? And almost without exception, they said, What s really killing us is skilled incompetence. And I had a look on my face like some of you have on yours: skilled incompetence, what s that? They said, Well we hire very bright people, very smart individuals. We bring them to our organization because they ve had experience in the industry, because they ve produced wonderful results. So individually we re very skilled, but then something interesting happens. We get together, we re considering options, opportunities, plans, and we start to see people agreeing to plans that they know are flawed, committing to decisions that they know they aren t going to live up to. So collectively they become incompetent. They hold information as we talked about, Jared I think you were the one that said hold information close, they don t share all of their concerns. And so that pool shrinks. We want to find a way, as it shows here, to allow that pool to expand. So, what we re talking about here is facts, experiences, perspectives, feelings, information, that we can collectively share, to draw from, to make better decisions from. We re gonna find ways to create a larger pool of meaning, find ways to allow that to expand. All right. So, you have in front of you some materials, materials we re gonna be using on this journey today. One of the things you have in front of you is the book Crucial Conversations. Do you see it? Hold it up, let me see. Oh, excellent. We won t be using this book during the class, now that you have it in your hands, but it is a wonderful reference tool. So I wanted you to get the feel for it, because there is a lot of value and wisdom here. After the class, if you want to read up on something, get farther into some of the material, great resource to have. Also in front of you at your tables you should have a picking that is cellophaned, or was cellophaned. If you haven t already done so, go ahead and break open that picking. You ll see two things. Can I borrow that for a minute? One of the things you ll see is the Audio Companion. This is not the book on tape, this is the authors giving examples, case studies, stories of how and where the skills have been used. So again, reference material for you. 6 CDs with lots of valuable information. A lot of people use it as they re driving in and out of work, have some time to catch up. And then you also have your toolkit. This will be the manual that we ll be using throughout today and tomorrow. So open it up. On the front inside cover you ll find there s a place for you to write your name. Since we will have chances to move around, we want to make sure that toolkits get back to their proper owners. So go ahead and mark those up. All right, one last tool that I want to point your attention to. It s in the very, very, very back of your toolkit. You ll see a red envelope. In that red envelope there s a number of different resources. Leland s pulling out of his a plastic case, a case of cards. These are cue cards. If you look at this case, it s kind of a conundrum how you open it, but if you remember CDs, some of you might, it opens like a CD case. It bends back on itself. There is a card for each of the sections that we have and will cover in the material. And the card provides an overview of the ideas, the principles and the skills that we ll be covering. So some people like to keep this out as a kind of a signpost, it folds back on itself. As they go through you can make notes there. We ll be using those throughout the two days. You also have an overview of the model itself with the principles and skills on the back. And then some information about the full offering of courses that VitalSmarts has developed. Anyone not have those materials? All right, group, one last resource that I want to make you aware of, Crucial Conversations Training 3

6 is that after the training we have some follow up resources for you as well I want to make you aware of, and we ll talk more about this later on. ChangeAnything.com/CrucialConversations. So this is an online resource to help you improve, to review skill areas, to make change plans around the ideas and the concepts that you ll learn over the couple days. And this will be made available to you as well. All right. So let s take a look at what we mean by crucial conversations. And we re gonna do so by looking at a specific example. We re on page 2 of your toolkit if you d like to turn there. And we re gonna watch this interaction between Michelle and Bruce. Bruce is Michelle s boss, and they re working on a big project. Bruce has asked Michelle to do a feasibility study, asked her to go away, talk about with her team what it s gonna take as far as timeline to pull the project together to be able to execute effectively. She s done that. She s now coming back to report those discussions with her boss Bruce. What I d like you to do is put yourself in Michelle s position. If you were Michelle, how would you feel about how this conversation goes, and what concerns might you have? VIDEO What s Wrong Here? Turn to your tablemates. If you were Michelle, how would you feel about how this conversation unfolded? What concerns might you have? Take a couple of minutes. Go. Okay, stop where you re at if you will. What did you find? If you were Michelle, how would you feel? Comment: Really upset. Really upset, blind sided? Yeah, why? What happened here? Comment: Lack of communication. Okay, lack of communication, how so, what do you mean by that? Comment: Well you know, there s some assumptions being made here. The boss is saying, I m assuming that you can do this, and why are you questioning me? And she s saying, Holy cow, I didn t realize you want me to do this at this time they come up with 6 months or whatever it was when I think it s gonna take 9 months. She s scrambling now in her mind: how am I gonna do this? And she s having a hard time under the circumstances. Cause she s under a lot of pressure. Yeah. Now, does this type of thing ever happen in real life? Comment: All the time. Yeah. What else concerns you about how this conversation went? Yeah. Comment: I feel like the boss made her feel guilty. He played a little bit of guilt trip and said, Well do you know what I did to get you in this position? So she will feel obligated to do it now. Yeah. It s that veiled threat that s not so veiled. Yeah, similar, different? Comment: Yeah, I m agreeing with her that there s not a lot of we in this conversation let s solve this together, I made a commitment, how are we gonna solve this? Instead of, hey you ve got to meet these deadlines. Yeah. Now we d consider this a crucial conversation. What makes it crucial and not just a regular, ordinary type of conversation that you might run into? Yeah. Comment: Well like you said, there s no we. And he s throwing it all on her, and she s feeling so bad, she s either gonna do it angrily and not have a happy job there, or just feel like quitting, you know. And we don t want employees to go home and feel like quitting every single day, that doesn t help. Excellent. Yeah. Comment: I think there s something at stake, there s something that would be lost. So that makes it crucial, because if the project doesn t happen, things are gonna go downhill and that could ultimately affect a lot of people, or at least those two and whoever else is involved. Okay. So there s a couple things at stake here. We find that crucial conversations are at the convergence of 3 elements. This is over on page 3 here. The first one that we ve talked about is high stakes. We said projects at stake, relationships at stake. Anything else at stake here? Comment: Her job. Comment: Reputation. Reputation. His reputation, his job. All riding on the outcome of how this conversation turns out. But it s not just the situation with high stakes, it happens to be one also where they don t see eye to eye. It s those opposing opinions you were talking about. They have different assumptions about what it s gonna take to get this done. And there s not a lot of we, it s your view and my view and they start to clash. And when these two conditions present themselves, you can almost feel this third one start to creep in. Those strong emotions start to take over. And when it matters most, we often do our worst. These crucial conversations are at the crossroads of results. Depending on how we handle them will determine in large effect the types of results we get or don t get. So let s take a look at some of the typical ways that people approach these crucial conversations. Turn over to page 4. We re gonna go back to this same situation we ve started with. We ve got Bruce and Michelle, continuation of the previous. As you watch this, how does 4

7 she do? Would this be an example of silence, violence, dialogue? And what would you guess would be the impact? VIDEO How Does She Do? How d she do? She caved. Right, she gave in, she rolled over. Why would she do this? Comment: Maybe because she has a lot of emotions bottled up and she doesn t want it to come out the wrong way, so she ll just keep it inside. Those emotions are tough things, right? Comment: She doesn t know how to express it in the way that it would come across to where he would understood it, so maybe she ll just keep quiet. Good. Yeah. Comment: She s being questioned as to whether she s a good team member and a good team player, and she s like, well if he s questioning that maybe I need to prove something, that I am, that I can do it. Interesting. Okay. Tyler. TYLER: I think when things get emotional like that it s tough to keep track of what the real issue is, and you can capitulate easily doing that. Interesting. We find this is the number 1 way that people respond to crucial conversations. They roll over, they cave, they go along to get along. What s the cost or impact of handling the conversation this way? Yeah. Comment: She won t have any power or control over the situation. And she probably if she s a sensitive person, he kind of knows what angle to hit her with, and so she s not able to kind of jump back to make it his problem too. Interesting. So it kinda has that feeling of helplessness. It s interesting that you made that comment. I had a very good colleague at one point that was in this same situation. He said he was so upset by how he was treated he quit right then and there. He just didn t let the organization know that he quit. When you re lucky, they leave, but more often they quit and retire in place. Other costs of this type of approach? Yeah, Jodi? JODI: I think it could ruin the morale of the people she s working with. It could bring everybody down if she s feeling so frustrated, understaffed in her organization of getting the project done. Yeah. That s an interesting one. It affects her team in a couple of ways. She goes back to her team after this conversation, how does she treat them? The same way she s just been treated right, and it kinda flows downhill. There s another little subtle impact here, is that she s lowering the bar. She s saying, please, treat me this way, it s okay. She can expect more of this type of treatment in the future. So this doesn t work all that well, the silent side. So we re gonna give her another shot at it. This time she s actually gonna step up and address the issue. How does she do? VIDEO How About This Time? All right, Michelle, right? She stood up to him. She looked him straight in the eyes and she told him off. At what consequence? So before you respond, wait for the mike to get there. So, what are the consequences of handling it this way? Comment: Now she s made him mad, and still she s in subjection of her job. So both ways didn t work as far as her keeping her job or staying in line with where she wants to be in her job. Interesting. Yeah, Jim? JIM: Yeah, but also I think he s got something to think about now. He has committed her to do the job, and she is stepping up and saying, hey this isn t how I work, he may want to think about taking a different approach with me. So she just left without any conversation, but now he s gotta think about what he s gonna say to her when she comes back. Yeah, and we re hoping that she hasn t given him too much to think about: whether she should come back, right? It kind of takes that original problem and wraps a whole new host of types of problems around it, without solving the original. Danielle? DANIELLE: I feel like it s missing some type of balance. I think if she came off yes she stated her ground and she stood her ground, but I feel like it could have been a balance as trying to understand where he s coming from, and still letting him know that she cannot do it. And the fact that she left is really aggressive, and it s still her boss. I think she almost took it out of her head like, that s not my boss, I m gonna say what I have to say and I m just gonna leave. Yeah. It s interesting you mentioned that idea of balance, because when we re approaching these crucial conversations, we often feel like we have to go to one of two extremes. This is on page 5 if you d like to take a look at this continuum we started to talk about. Yeah. Comment: The task at hand still hasn t been resolved. When he was asking her to do it, even when she said I ll do it, it wouldn t have got done. That s a problem. But by her standing up and leaving, it s still not going to be done. So nothing was solved. Yeah. And this is a lot of times why we feel stuck, right. Because Crucial Conversations Training 5

8 we re facing these crucial conversations, and we have these clips kind of playing out in the back of our head. And we say, whoo, you know what, I don t want to be Michelle in that last clip, way over the top, too forceful. So what s my choice? Michelle in the first clip. Because if you can t say something nice, don t say anything at all, so we go to silence. It s kind of this forced choice, what we call a fool s choice. We feel like we have to choose between the two alternatives. And it s interesting, because when we re removed from the situation we say, well of course they should get to dialogue. But when faced with these crucial conversations, it often drives us to these extremes. Why would this be? What s happening here? Why do we see an increase in silence and an increase in violence when we re dealing with crucial conversations? What s driving that? Well there s something interesting that s going on in the background. It says, faced with danger, when we re facing this crucial conversation and we re afraid that we might not get our way, we might lose our job, we re not sure of the results that are gonna happen, it might not go well for us, adrenalin starts to spill into our blood. Now what s the purpose of adrenalin? Fight or flight. So that we can stand up and fight if we need to, or take flight. This is really good if we re facing a physical danger. Not very good when we re facing a crucial conversation. The blood starts to get reallocated to the large muscle groups so that we can either stand and fight or take the flight. Now is your brain a large muscle group? It turns out no. So it starts to shut down some of the higher reasoning functions, to allocate the blood to the large muscle groups. So here s the sad truth. Most of the time we re reasonable, we re rational, we re decent, we re able to solve problems as they come up, handle multiple priorities. But if this is your brain normally, this is your brain on a crucial conversation. We revert to what we call the lizard brain. So if you ve ever walked away from a crucial conversation and said, oh gosh, I was such an idiot, truth was, clinically, you were. You were less able to deal with these high stakes conversations in an effective way. And no one is immune. That kind of gives us an idea of what s going on in the background, why we tend to revert back and forth. What we d like to do is spend a little time talking about what are some of the triggers, what are some of the conversations, the topics that you run into day in and day out, that tend to force that choice, that forced choice, fool s choice between silence and violence? EXERCISE: Common Examples So if you ll look over to page 7, we have a little table group activity for you. What are some common examples of conversations that you see in your organization that you run up to in your experience that people either shy away from or become very aggressive in trying to resolve? So what are the conversations that elicit these types of responses, that are the tougher ones to deal with, the ones that you see pretty regularly? I m gonna give you about 5 minutes here--i ll put a timer up so you can track your time, it ll go ding at the end to discuss what are some of the common conversations that you run into. Now you ll see there on page 7 that there are some starters. There s some in the professional area, some in the personal area. We ll spend most of our time in the professional area, but you may want to look at some of the personal ones. Which of these do you see most often? Are there other conversations you run into that aren t on the list but that should be, if you re thinking about your experience? If so feel free to write those in. So 5 minutes. The time is now yours. All right. So you ve had a chance here to talk about some of those common crucial conversations that you face. What were some examples? You don t have to get really specific. Some examples of some of the conversations that you face. How about if we start with the back table. What s an example of one of those? Comment: Strategy. So, there s a lot of differing focus in divisions or for entrepreneurs, partnerships. Everyone has different views as to the direction a company or a division should go. So, really crucial conversations, because the bottom line and the top line have everything to do with that selection. And some have different and opposing views, and they need to be heard. And it s sometimes difficult when you deal with very overbearing type of personalities that think that their way is the right way. Interesting. Good. How about some others, other conversations that you see fairly frequently that drive that response? Comment: Bill collecting. Bill collecting. You have that goal to get the money, they have a goal to keep the money, right? Opposing views. That can be tough. Jodi? JODI: I work as a nurse, and it s scheduling, getting the right shifts that I want that my supervisors also need to fill. Okay, good. Schedules. Especially when you feel like you re not getting a good schedule, right, or you re getting the bad schedule multiple times in a row. Comment: Maybe this one is not that common, but it was really strong. I was an organizational effectiveness advisor for 42 senators, including the president of the senate. So I was there advising on effectiveness, but sometimes effectiveness was not the goal. So they said it is effectiveness, but it is not. So how do you do that? How do 6

9 you talk to somebody who s got another perspective, agenda? Yeah, especially when it s more hidden. Comment: Hidden, powerful, really powerful reach. So how do you tell those people that? Yeah. Those are interesting situations, because we see the most common strategy is people just go quiet. So any other conversations you run into frequently, either on the list or off the list? Yeah. Comment: Mine s a little more common like for the home front. But when you whether it s your kids or your spouse coming up to you and asking for your opinion, but in their mind they ve already got an answer, and so after they re like, Well let s just go with my way, then you realize what happened. You go the silent route and let em do what they want, or do you hey, I don t want that. Yeah, when they ve already made up their mind. Yes. Comment: I want to go with that. Or they go the opposite, and: well if you knew already, why did you ask me? Well, you know, sometimes that helps. So but you feel bad when that s said to you and you re like, okay, well so yeah, I d love to go further with that. Yeah, how we make decisions. These become interesting. Because sometimes we re making them independently, and sometimes we need to make em collectively. So how much of your input do I have to take into consideration, how much say do you have. Those can be assumptions that really drive a lot of this negative behavior, unproductive patterns. So what we found as we started to look at these types of conversations, was something interesting. And we ll come back to these in just a little while, but it s encapsulated here in what we call the Law of Crucial Conversations: that any time you find yourself stuck, there s typically a conversation or two you re either not holding or not holding well. And a lot of the types of conversations that you ve just been talking about are those conversations that cause us to become and remain stuck. So for me, I m a little bit of a visual person, it s been helpful to take a look at this from a visual perspective. When I m stuck, when I m getting poor results, I don t have the outcomes that I want, it s an opportunity for me to look backwards, and say, is there a conversation I m either not holding or not holding well? If I can identify this conversation and work through it, I m more likely to get unstuck, to achieve the desired results. Now so often what happens is that we find that we re stuck, and we re facing one of these conversations, I m talking to someone who seems to have already made up their mind. I m talking about strategy and we don t see eye to eye. As we find ourselves stuck, we try to work around the crucial conversation. In the end, we kind of spiral off and eventually tie ourselves up into this knot of ineffectiveness. This is exactly the wrong approach. We want to work through conversations rather than around them. Does this ring true with your experience, different than your experience? How is this sitting with you? Yeah. Comment: I can think of conversations I ve put off for a long time just because I knew they were going to be difficult. Did they get less difficult when you put them off? Comment: Oh, not at all. I think they get more difficult the longer you wait. Yeah. I had this interesting situation. I arrived at a company, and they said, We have this person who we really need to talk to. He s aggressive, he only works on things that he wants to work on, we need to have a conversation with him. I said, So what have you decided to do? They said, We ve decided to wait them out. And I said, What? They said, Wait him out. You know, it s not too long til he retires; we re just gonna wait til he retires. I said, Well how long til he retires? They said, It should be in the next 7 years. In the meantime, they re incurring all of these costs, right. Jodi, did you have your hand up too? JODI: Oh, just agreeing with him. I think it s easier not to have a conversation. But I also wonder what good is the tincture of time in some things. You know, sometimes, little this lady Melissa, is that right could she have waited a moment and got her thoughts together? You know, because sometimes that s what I need, is just a little bit of perspective. Yeah. And we re gonna learn how time figures into this. Because gathering your thoughts, preparing yourself for a crucial conversation, wonderful strategy. But so many times we use that as an excuse to never come back. We want to avoid those extremes. So to help us to do this because a lot of people look at this and say, whoa, I mean this is the problem, you re talking about it. How do we get out of this trap? We re gonna talk about a couple of skills here that will help us to do this. Over on page 9, Joseph Grenny, one of the coauthors of Crucial Conversations, is going to frame those skills and talk about how we can step up to these tough conversations, and the impact that it can have on us individually, on our teams, and on our organizations. VIDEO Crucial Conversations So we re gonna learn some of the skills that are required to be able to work through these conversations and do so effectively. And we ll start with some skills from Get Unstuck. It s kind of the before area that we were talking about, it s skills to help us get to the right conversation. So many times these things are tough to deal with, so we want to look at some skills that will help us with that. Crucial Conversations Training 7

10 So over on page 9, two skills that we re going to focus on. Identify where you re stuck. And the second skill, unbundle with CPR. Before we move to these skills, any questions, comments, observations you have about what we ve covered so far? You ready to move into these? Okay, we ll look at the first one. Identify where you re stuck. So, when we use the word stuck and we ve been kind of throwing it out a lot this morning, what comes to mind? How are you thinking about this, what does it mean to you so far? When you think stuck, what do you think? Catherine? CATHERINE: Not moving forward. Okay, good, not moving forward. What else? Janet? JANET: Nothing ever changes. Okay, same problem over and over again. Good. Yeah. Comment: You feel like you re running out of options. Okay, out of options. All of these are feelings of being stuck. And it can range from these feelings, of just feeling like I m stuck, like Brian was talking about, I m out of options, to actually poor results, that I m missing my targets, I m not hitting my numbers, quality is slipping, costs are out of control. Leslie, did you have another one? LESLIE: It just shuts down creativity, and your willingness to contribute when you feel those blocks. Okay good. So it could be lack of ideas, lack of innovation, people just going through the motions, morale, absenteeism goes up. All of these could be aspects and elements of stuck. So it s a chronic inability to solve problems or achieve aspirations or goals, is what we re talking about here. Being stuck. Now during our training today we want to make sure that we re dealing with real situations, real conversations that you are running into, that you re facing. So I m gonna be asking you to do some work along those lines. And I m not gonna be asking you to share this broadly and widely throughout the group, but to be thinking about real life situations that you face. EXERCISE: Where Are You Stuck? So the first exercise here over on page 10 has us do just this. We ve been talking about stuck. Where are you stuck? So what I d like you to do is identify some areas where you currently feel stuck. And again, we re gonna break this into two areas. You can think about professional places where you might feel stuck, you re not getting the results that you need or want or you re experiencing those poor results, and you can also think about some in your personal life where you re feeling stuck. So I m gonna give you a little time here to be able to come up with some examples. And again, I m not gonna be asking you to share this broadly and widely, but I want you to think about these in different areas. And we re going to take about 5 mentions here for you to brainstorm some of the areas where you feel stuck. Questions about what I m asking for? Okay, about 5 minutes on page 10. Go. All right. Stop where you re at if you will. So you ve identified some places where you currently feel stuck, where you re not getting the results you want and you d like to get different kinds of results. This is skill number 1, identify where you re stuck. It can be helpful because we can use this as a cue to do something different. Typically we kind of rush right through this, and then we re already down in the workaround. So if we can recognize where we re stuck we can do something different. That s where skill 2 comes in. Something different is to pause for a moment, unbundle, and prioritize. So skill number 2 is unbundle with CPR. So this is where skill number 2 lives. CPR. So you can think about a problem, an issue, at a couple different levels. Content, pattern and relationship. This is probably a different description of what you re familiar with of CPR. Usually we think of it to bring someone back to life. But in the same sense you can be thinking about this in a way to say how do we bring the conversation back to a healthy, productive outcome? Content, pattern and relationship. So contents, the single instance of a problem, it s the presenting issue. It s the first time many times that you ll be experiencing the problem. Pattern. Pattern is a pattern of behavior over time. It s that recurring problem. And relationship, we find that these patterns left unchecked often affect our relationship, our sense of confidence in the other person s competence, or the trust that we have with them. So let me give you a little idea on how this works. I was working a little while ago with a group of home health care nurses. So Jodi, you re probably familiar with some of the work that they do. And on one of the breaks, one of the members of the team came up to me and said, This all sounds nice, but it would never work with my team. And I said, Really? And she goes, Oh yeah, I ve tried the conversation and nothing seems to change. Now she was responsible in her group for receiving all of the reports of the home visits that were made. So someone goes out and makes a home visit, they re required by law to document what happened, medications, condition of the patient. All of that goes into a report. 8

11 And she was consistently receiving those reports 2 to 3 days later than what was expected. So she went into the first team meeting when she saw that that was happening, and she had a discussion. She sat down with the group and said, These reports are really important, and I need em in this time frame. And everyone said yes, yes, yes, we ll do it. Next week rolls around, what happens? Reports are late. So she goes back into the meeting. She says, These reports are really, really, really important. You notice how her strategy s changed? It s the triple really. What impact does that have on their behavior? Guilt, right. But the problem keeps going on. So the reports are late again. And she s starting to get frustrated, and she makes subtle references to the importance of the report and brings it up whenever she can, inserts her agenda item into the meeting. Until after a period of time she can take it no longer, and she goes into the meeting and she says, These report are really important! How has her strategy changed now? Slower and louder, right? But she remains stuck. Why? Comment: She s using the same strategy. Okay, she s using the same strategy. Comment: She s not coming up with a solution, she s just stating the problem. And part of the difficulty that she s having is she s not getting to the right problem. Jim? JIM: Yeah, there s no communication. Why doesn t she say, What is the issues of you not bringing these on a timely basis to me? What challenges are you having that you cannot get these to me? And then you get the conversation back and forth. Right. Now she s dealing with this problem as if it s a content problem, right: reports are important. But there s a pattern of behavior here. She needs to switch this pattern of behavior. Until she does she remains stuck. And the pattern is: you said you ll turn em in on time, but you don t. That s a different conversation. So many times we get hung up on content, and we miss the underlying long-standing pattern of behavior. And again, these patterns of behavior over time often erode that relationship. So let me give you one more little example here. This one s more on the relationship level. I ve got 3 boys. And when my oldest son Tyler turned 10 he started to swear. It was a rough year in the Willis home. And it happened at certain times. We have certain rules in our house, one of which is: when you come home from school, before you get on the computer, before you go out and play, before you do anything else, you do your homework. So I come home one day, Tyler s on the computer when he hasn t finished his homework. At least that s how it seems. So I walk up to him and say, Tyler, it looks like you re on that computer when you haven t finished your homework, is that the case? And he swings around in his chair and he says, Sheesh! right, that s his swearword. And I think to myself, how would a reasonable, rational, decent father handle this moment? I can see that some of you may have children. So I looked at him and I said, Do your homework! And I walked away. Now this is an interesting situation. What s the problem that I addressed with my son Tyler? Homework. Where does that fit up here? Content, right. But what s really got me upset? Yeah, the way he s treating me. It s this pattern of behavior that s actually starting to erode our relationship, how we treat one another lack of respect. He s turned into Master Sassafras, and he s only 10, not even teenage yet. Until I get to that conversation, we remain stuck. Does that make sense? So here s the interesting question: why wouldn t I just hold that conversation with Tyler in the morning? Comment: He turned to lizard. He turned to lizard, right. It s tough. These are easier conversations, content. The harder ones are pattern and relationship. And so we tend to circle and hover and dwell on the content, and miss the underlying issue. Just because you re talking, just because your mouth is open, doesn t mean that you re holding the right conversation. So this gives us a way of thinking about the issues, is separating them out. Cause a lot of conversations have many intertwined issues. You want to be able to deal with them separately, rather than collectively. EXERCISE: Will the Real Problem Please Step Forward? Getting a sense of how that plays out? Let s try it out. I have a little table exercise here for you. So at your tables you re going to be looking at a case. The case is on page 12. I m gonna give you about 4 minutes at your table groups to be able to read through this, and use CPR to unbundle. What are all the issues that are presenting themselves in this little case? So read it silently, then turn to your table mates, and you ll see at the bottom of the page you ll have content and a little place to write pattern, a little place to write relationship. Identify all of the issues that you can see in this case, and organize them by appropriate category. All right? I ll put 4 minutes on the clock. Go. All right. Stop where you re at there if you will. Did you see some problems? What were some of the content problems that you saw? How about we take a couple from the back table over here. What did you have under content? Crucial Conversations Training 9

12 Comment: The reports being pulled. It s not really their job responsibility. Okay, good. Any others you had on content? How about an example of a pattern one? What did you have for pattern, up here at the front table? Comment: We said because she constantly is asking her, and it sounds like it s not her job. And so that s the pattern, is that it s happening over and over, when it shouldn t be, and that s what needs to be addressed also, and the competency of who can do it and who can t. Comment: And the fact that it s last minute, always. Last minute, another. A couple pattern issues. Did you identify any others that were different than that? How about this tougher one, relationship? Did you see any relationship issues there? What did you see? Comment: Yeah, not valuing the work flow that this person has. And I think that s a big deal. Okay, yeah, interesting. So you kind of identified some of these areas, right. The report s useless, it s not really her job to do the things she s been asked to do. And it s always last minute, the management consistently demands unrealistic timelines. Doesn t seem that your manager values your other work. You don t feel comfortable speaking up to the manager. That s an interesting one. So, one of the things that CPR helps us to do is unbundle. You take a situation like this and you can start to see the different issues. Now with it unbundled, we can start to look at it and say, which of these would we deal with first? So let me have you turn back to your table mates for just a minute more, and out of all of the issues that you ve unbundled, which do you think you should deal with first? Which would be the biggest conversation that you should *wrestle to the ground with your manager? So take just about a minute or so with the people at your tables: which one of these would you deal with first? All right, stop where you re at there. Easy, hard? Comment: Hard. Cause they re all intertwined. But we ve gotta start somewhere. So which one would you pick to start with first and why? Yeah. Comment: I would pick relationships, so that when you do have the discussion of content and pattern, it s more of a productive and successful conversation. Okay. And is there one of those relationship issues that you d pick over the other? Comment: It s so intertwined, I feel like even all 3 categories should be addressed all together, but yes, you ve gotta maybe start with feeling comfortable speaking up to the manager. All right, we could make a strong case for that. Because if we don t feel comfortable speaking up to the manager, it makes this conversation and this conversation tough if not impossible. Other people have a different perspective on this or saw it differently? Comment: I was saying they do the content first. But that was a good point if I don t have a relationship then I can t even deal the with the content. So I m just gonna go as far as like if I had the relationship, to find what exactly is this report for, so I can gain a better understanding instead of me just doing something that I don t understand, then I won t value it. Okay, this is a good point too. We don t want to be doing work that s unnecessary, useless. So it doesn t mean that if we start with for example speaking up that the others just go away. We kind of bookmark some of those others and say I m going to deal with that after. Now what s nice about CPR is if you decide for example to speak about the report is useless and you still feel stuck, it s an opportunity to go a level deeper and say is there a pattern conversation here I m not holding, or a relationship conversation that s getting in the way? This has been one of the most useful ideas in all of crucial conversations, at least for me personally. If you re stuck at one level, move a level deeper, and bookmark the ones that you re not gonna deal with right now. Cause the report is useless is an important conversation. It s not really your job, another important conversation. But where we start might be down here. Questions or observations about this as we re playing with it? Yeah. Comment: Part of what we talked about was that you kinda need to determine how much time you have to dedicate to that conversation that day, and maybe you just need a conversation to get through today, and have the big one later. Or maybe you need to have the big one now. It kinda depends on which issues you want to tackle right away. Yeah, that s a nice one too, right. Time we talked about this earlier. Sometimes I ve been dealing with a pattern or relationship problem for a while, and the content, I need to be able to do this right now to satisfy a client and so I deal with that issue, and then come back to em when I have time. But we re hoping that s not a silent strategy that says: and I hope I never have time. Yeah. Comment: The group and I were talking, and it just seems like there s not a clear objective. There s expectations set for the employee without giving a clear objective of what is needed. And so if the employee would fall short then they ll be punished with it, without even knowing exactly what was going on. Yeah. Does that even happen in real life? And that one also, you 10