 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | The authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations show you how to achieve personal, team, and organizational success by healing broken promises, resolving violated expectations, and influencing bad behavior Discover skills to resolve touchy, controversial, and complex issues at work and at home--now available in this follow-up to the internationally popular Crucial Conversations. Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you'll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly--and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren't just irritating, they're costly--sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces. Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like: *An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that steps crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?
*Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can't meet--and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn't want to hear complaints about it.
*Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.
*An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?
*Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.
*A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers "how things work around here" and decides not to say anything. Everyone knows how to run for cover, or if adequately provoked, step up to these confrontations in a way that causes a real ruckus. That we have down pat. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn't harm the relationship--and in fact, even strengthens it. Crucial Confrontations borrows from twenty years of research involving two groups. More than 25,000 people helped the authors identify those who were most influential during crucial confrontations. They spent 10,000 hours watching these people, documented what they saw, and then trained and tested with more than 300,000 people. Second, they measured the impact of crucial confrontations improvements on organizational and team performance--the results were immediate and sustainable: twenty to fifty percent improvements in measurable performance. |
Average Customer Rating:   LIFE CHANGINGING BOOK THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE ( WORK,RELATIONSHIPS AT HOME,FRIENDS),IF YOU UNDERSTAND AND PRACTICE THE SKILLS DESCRIBED IN THE BOOK.IT CHANGED MY LIFE.MANY THANKS TO THE AUTHORS. Crucial Confrontations - time well spent This is a very helpful book.
The writing is a bit rough, but the message is essential.
If you are ready to put in some real work to relationshops and improve them, this book gives you some useful tools.
Highly recomend it.
An excellent approach to interacting management I had a wonderful time reading the book (and taking notes). It reminded me of the multiple occasions in which I have failed for lack of skills, but also showed me that there is a methodology to follow next time I have to confront a violated expectation (probably within the next five minutes) An important tool for any leader: Crucial Confrontations As the title indicates this book is about crucial confrontations. It starts off by defining what a crucial confrontation is and why we should care to have it. Then discusses how to know what crucial confrontation to hold and if one should hold it. After that comes what to do during a crucial confrontation and last but not least what to do after it. I believe that Crucial Confrontations are a crucial tool/mechanism that any successful leader should have in his arsenal. If used effectively, it helps promote a culture of accountability which usually entails high performance and high engagement. This book explains in depth the process from start to finish both within a personal and work setting. The reason I gave this book a lower rating despite the very valuable content, is that I felt that the material could have been more condensed and presented in a shorter more story-like format. I would recommend skimming through this book but definitely focus on the summaries of each of the chapters/stages of a confrontation. successful confrontations for nice people Nice: Adj. A pleasant, nonconfrontational attitude that eventually kills you. Are you too "nice" to confront failure? The authors promise to equip you "never to walk away from another conflict again". Their message is good news for both the work place and our personal relationships. They note successful leaders rarely if ever use their power to motivate people. Having just listened to a sermon on I Peter with its themes of treating people with gentleness and respect, I thought how biblical this was. We're encouraged always to think the best of others and to refrain from telling "ugly stories" about their motivations, aka "The Fundamental Attribution Error." When we let others down, of course we make concessions for our behavior. Generally speaking, we fail to take similar situational factors into account when others let us down.
How do you know when it's necessary to confront someone? We have to determine whether their failure (the authors refer to it as "the gap") was one of ability or of motivation. And just because you determine ability was the problem, don't assume motivation wasn't involved as well.
AMPP: Ask--to get the ball rolling (What's going on here?); Mirror--to let the other party know you're not seeing what they're saying (I'm not upset!!!!); Paraphrase--for understanding; and Prime--to make it safe. Do this by guessing their story.
Typically, people misbehave in confrontations when they don't feel safe. Safety is ensured when respect and mutual purpose come together. Many times, message content gets through, but intent is received as either disrespectful or as failing to address what's important to the other party. When people don't feel safe, they may react with silence or violence. Either reaction dooms the confrontation.
When a confrontation becomes disrespectful, you have a new, more pressing problem. And a wise person will step out of the original problem and shift focus to the newer problem. Contrasting is known as the "Killer of the fundamental attribution error." If you're trying to establish mutual respect, and you suspect the other party may feel defensive, imagine what they might conclude. You must immediately say what you DON'T mean, and then follow up with what you do mean. If you believe they don't trust your purpose, start out with what's important to both of you.
If you have to confront someone in authority over you, or if the content is volatile, ask for permission first. The authors remind us what a powerful form of respect this is. Finally, create a safety valve. A strategic delay is not a retreat. Determine follow-up: is it to be a "check back" or a "check up"?
The authors do a terrific job of summing this all up in the final two chapters and include 4 appendices to make this book appropriate for a study. What's to lose? We can either toggle between silence and violence, or we can master our stories, master our emotions, and thereby become masters of our behavior.
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