Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

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:

Recommended for Everyone

Customer Rating:

After a very mild, but poorly handled (by me) confrontation at work, my boss recommended that I read this book. He felt it would help me learn tools to deal with the little squabbles that happen everyday in a hospital environment. It did- and also helped almost immediately with a personal problem as well. I had an altercation with a landlord soon after completing this book. He kept trying to make the conversation unsafe- escalating and blaming me for things that he had not completed properly. I found myself using a few of the techniques from the book! It worked! Every time he escalated I identified it from the book and brought the conversation back to a "safe" area focused on the most important issue. By the end of the conversation, we were both calm and had at least identified the problem (step one of solving it!) I immediately bought a copy for my younger brother- who had just been promoted to management in a sales job. He's reading it now on his commute in the form of a book on CD. I'm reading Crucial Conversations right now by the same author. This book is immediately applicable and does indeed deliver the promised techniques, with very excellent and very readable examples, for many of the squabbles we run into during the course of living.

Still using these teachings

Customer Rating:

I forgot I read this book until I saw it on my list. The teachings are memorable and I am still using them on a daily basis. I am also still giving people advice from this book. Excellent for managers and supervisors. I was making many common mistakes and this book helped put me in the right direction. It is rare for me to remember the in-depth content of books, but this one is well written and has helped me greatly.

The first half is a must-read.

Customer Rating:

The first half of this book was excellent. Part I was titled "Work on me first". Under it was Chapter 2 "Master my stories: How to get your head right before opening your mouth". It talks about the stories we tell ourselves to explain what is happening around us. These stories can have a profound influence on your life. Negative stories tend to become self fulfilling prophesies. I'd heard about these stories in a talk. The speaker asked us not to share what we had learned. So I was pleased to see it in another source. The second half of the book I suspect was written by another author. Perhaps if I'd been practicing their suggestions it wouldn't have felt like formula writing. That said, I would still recommend this book to anyone who feels uncomfortable confronting people around them even when it is necessary.

Crucial Confrontation	Customer Rating:
The book provides an excellent methodology for addressing issues in both my business and private life. I thought it very helpful with completing my performance reviews for both high and low performers.

Great job	Customer Rating:
I appreciate the books a great deal. They are wonderful tools for improving communication, which is something we all need, and especially when the stakes are high. Great book.