My thoughts on Crucial Conversations
Just read Crucial Conversations by K. Patterson, J. Granny, R. McMillan, and A. Switzler. Brilliant book! I recommend it!
A few thoughts from the book and from me:
Ask yourself what you want from the conversation. Know your aim. Stay with it throughout the conversation.
A few more great questions:
What do I want for myself?
What do I want for others?
What do I want for the relationship?
This will help both sides to achieve their aims, maintaining a good relationship.Treat everyone in the conversation with 100% honesty and 100% respect.
Would you collaborate with a person, who doesn’t respect you? Let others feel you respect them and their opinion.
Likewise, let others know you care about them and what they want.
Make sure that people feel safe. When people feel safe, they can talk about almost everything.
When people don’t feel safe, they don’t want to talk and/or they might interpret even the best-intended words as offensive.
If others don’t feel safe, encourage them to speak up. If that doesn’t help, try challenging your own ideas out loud. You can also try guessing what other people might think to encourage the discussion on a topic.
Silence is not always a confirmation. Maybe people don’t feel safe enough to share?
More heads can come up with better ideas than one. So put your ideas aside and listen to what other people have to say. Then share (don’t push, share) your ideas and let others listen as well. You’ll all end up with a common shared knowledge pool. It will be the cornerstone of both better decisions and better relationships.
It’s hard to change others, but easy to change your own behavior. So if there’s an issue, first think what you can do about it.
Stay in a dialogue, not in a monologue.
Sometimes we feel that some people's actions are driving us nuts. Wrong! It’s our interpretation of those actions which is driving us nuts. To solve this we can change the stories we tell ourselves (our interpretations). Of course, we can also share our concerns with those “annoying” people and ask for their own view of the situation.
Separate facts from interpretation. He was late to pick you up? That’s a fact. He did it because he’s a ****? That’s an interpretation.