We face crucial conversations in our day to day life. According to Perry and other authors of this book, crucial conversations are conversations you need to handle with care. Some of the examples are calling a client who hasn't paid an invoice or confronting a teammate who hasn't done their part of the job. Crucial conversations are sensitive. Kind of like navigating a bomb. To know how to approach these types of conversations can help us not only go through conflicts peacefully but even prevent them or benefit from them. And that is why I chose to read this book.
What we want is to prevent the conversation from going silent or verbally violent. How? We keep the dialogue going. Thanks to a productive dialogue we can go through the conversations peacefully without any emotional explosions. How do we do that?
Our made up story
When we approach people regarding crucial matters, we have a story in our head, for example one that says how our teammate doesn't care about the project. Where we make the mistake and one that I have been guilty of as well, is that we think we know the whole story. We make up our mind and approach the conversation based on our story. That way, there is no space for dialogue.
When, I, invite
A simple framework that authors of the book offer is to describe WHEN something happens I feel a certain way. INVITE stands for inviting them to share their part of the story. With this approach, you are being assertive and honestly sharing the facts without jumping to some judgements that can come off as aggressive and turn on a defensive or aggressive response in who we are speaking to as well. And that way we do not get where we need to go.
Emphasis on common goals
Even if we approach the situation using the approach explained above, the conversation can get into an argument. That happens when the other person sees us as an opponent. What we have to do is to convince them we are not rivals, we are in fact on the same side. We do it by showing them we share the same goal and values or purpose. When we do that we often find out that us and our conversation partner just have different strategies for achieving the same goal.
Priming
When we need to get conversation going we can do what authors call a priming. That basically means taking a good faith guess on what our conversation partner is thinking about. To make this guess, we need to acquire two beliefs. First is that the person we are talking to is a reasonable, rational and decent person. Second, I am largely responsible for why this conversation doesn't go well.
I think this is an amazing and easy to implement approach for crucial conversations that I have been looking for. I will definitely implement it the first time I am going for a crucial conversation whether in my professional or personal life. :)
