If people don’t feel safe to engage in dialogue, they won’t. And when conversations turn crucial, a sense of safety is the first thing to go. When stakes are high, emotions run strong, and opinions vary, we often feel threatened. This is why we often resort to silence or verbal violence when faced with a …
I have an employee who makes negative comments and tries to undermine leadership. She is a great teacher, but she creates a toxic environment with our staff, and she has a strong influence on them. How can I handle this behavior?
To ‘Master My Stories’ means to take control of our stories so they don’t take control of us. It is the key to preventing strong emotions from taking control of a Crucial Conversation.
My supervisor has been micromanaging employees, disclosing project information that shouldn’t be, and generally just overstepping communication boundaries. I have stopped sharing information with them for fear that they will share it too soon or in the wrong way. My question is this: How do I have a Crucial Conversation with my supervisor about this?
I have a close friend who recently they told me their views on vaccines, mandates, and masks, and now I see them differently. They were vocal and opinionated. I would be lying if I said it hasn’t affected our interactions. I really like my friend, but I feel they aren’t being reasonable or rational. Every time I think about talking with them, I get annoyed and irritated. What can I do?
People often ask what it was like to write Crucial Conversations with four authors. Sometimes it’s asked with a voyeuristic fascination, as though the unstated question is, “Were there some knock-down, drag-out fights along the way?” The truth is it took a lot of Crucial Conversations to write Crucial Conversations.
I find that I am asked to do more in a day than I can actually accomplish. Each day, I might get ten things done but twenty new tasks get added to my list, so the list just grows and never shrinks.
My 27-year-old son moved in with me and my husband before the pandemic and planned to buy a house last spring. He has since enrolled in grad school and it’s now a seller’s market, so he is still here. The problem is that we have a four-bedroom house, and we want it all to ourselves.
We overhauled our two most popular courses—Crucial Conversations and Crucial Accountability—with one objective: to demonstrate how timeless skills can be applied to today’s challenges. We refreshed everything from the videos to the practice scenarios to the slides and images. We are so excited for you to see and experience our new courses—Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue and Crucial Conversations for Accountability.
I have a direct report. He is very volatile, not at all a team player. Everyone gets along great in the department except him. He always tries to point out everyone’s faults but not his own. He is very difficult to talk to. How can I overcome this?
