In the past I’ve regularly taken a large team to the annual Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit, this year was a little different. Thankfully the Global Leadership Summit is available digitally even after the live event! We previewed the talks and selected the best two from this years event to share with our team.
The first talk was from Joseph Grenny, Co-Founder, Vital Smarts: Social Scientist for Business Performance and New York Times bestselling author.
Key Question: Are there some moments in our leadership that are disproportionate in influence, that matter more than any others?
Crucial Conversations: these 3 things cause these moments to become more crucial than others
- High Stakes
- Opposing Opinions
- Strong Emotions
Principle #1 Any time you find yourself stuck in a relationship or team: There are always crucial conversations that we are not holding or not holding well
- When it matters most you and I seem to do our worst
You have options when a crucial conversation comes
- Talk it out
- Act it out (if you don’t talk it out you will act it out…it will affect your behavior)
- We buy into a lie early on and that is “We have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.”
- You can measure the health in a relationship or team by measuring how many undiscussables there are in the relationship or organization.
- Progress in organizations begin when we as leaders discuss the undiscussables.
- Our job as leaders is to model, teach, and measure these crucial conversations.
- Crucial conversations are either a pit or a path – they can become an acceleration of intimacy – they become trust building accelerators
- The Bible is a history of crucial conversations
“The vital behavior that enables most any positive organizational outcome is candor at moments of acute emotional and political risk”
7 Skills to Successfully Navigating Crucial Conversations:
- Start with the Heart
- Learn to Look
- Make it Safe
- Master my Stories
- STATE MY Path
- Explore Others’ Path
- Move to Action
In the first 30 seconds of a crucial conversations there are 2 things that determine if you will be heard:
- Mutual Purpose: Help them know that you care about their interest, concerns and interests
- Mutual Respect: Help them know that you genuinely care about them.
Candor is never the problem: people never get defensive about what you’re saying. People become defensive because of why they think you’re saying it.
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