Crucial Conversations Book Summary

Crucial Conversations Book Summary
Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

Original book by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler

Summarized by Dean Bokhari

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Crucial Conversations Book Summary
It happens far more often than you’d like: You start discussing something perfectly rational about a sensitive topic with a friend, a colleague or another acquaintance. And before you know it, the conversation turns from friendly to fierce… You’re angry. They’re angry. Everyone’s just way too fired up to communicate in a calm and collective manner.

The result: a failed conversation.

Why is it that two perfectly rational people become so angry amid a conversation where both simply want to communicate their ideas to one another?

Crucial Conversations deals with this subject. The book identifies the causes that lead to such frustrating conversations and offers highly effective solutions you can actually utilize both in your professional development as well as your personal development. It also provides valuable advice on how to immediately recognize—and mitigate—potential conversational train wrecks before they go off the rails and get out of hand.

Here’s what you’ll learn about in this Crucial Conversations book summary:

• How to have conversations about sensitive topics with tact and reach positive outcomes for everyone involved
• How to get your point across to kids and teenagers without coming across as annoying or frustrating.
• How to broach a sensitive topic with your partner without upsetting him or her.
• How to share valuable criticism with another person without offending them.

Crucial quotes

“The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process”.
_{— Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations}

”The mistake most of us make in our crucial conversations is we believe that we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.”
_{— Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations}

”Skilled people Start with Heart. That is, they begin high-risk discussions with the right motives, and they stay focused no matter what happens.”
_{— Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations}

Big Ideas
_{^{Crucial Conversations Book Summary}}

• 1. How Crucial Conversations turn into irrational and emotionally-charged debates
• 2. Open sharing of information leads to the best results in crucial conversations
• 3. Be calm and focus on your ultimate goal in a crucial conversation
• 4. When people don’t feel ‘safe’ in a conversation, the conversation fails
• 5. Make people feel like you respect them to create a safe conversation
• 6. Manage your emotions by examining and interpreting the facts
• 7. Create a safe atmosphere in a conversation and make others feel their opinions are valuable
• 8. Determine a suitable decision-making process with a well-organized plan of implementation
• Closing notes

1. How Crucial Conversations turn into irrational and emotionally-charged debates

Have you ever been in a conversation that began well enough, but ended up turning into a huge argument? You’ve likely had conversations that ended up this way more than a handful of times. I know I have. Sometimes it happens with a spouse or partner. Sometimes it happens with a colleague or co-worker. Heck, sometimes it happens with people you barely even know!

These are precisely the kinds of crucial conversations that take a wrong turn and become irrational and emotionally charged debates—causing a complete breakdown of communication between two people.

To understand how this happens, we need to observe what happens in the brain and body…

When you’re involved in an emotionally charged conversation, the body releases adrenaline. This makes your body think that you are in danger and the body goes into its fight-or-flight mode. Now, this mode is great for survival in actual danger but in an emotional conversation, it only makes matters worse. Once your body goes into this mode, it becomes incredibly hard to think clearly or rationally anymore.

To make things even worse, the most important conversations usually take place completely unexpectedly and without any warning…

Imagine having a perfectly normal day when your partner suddenly tells you that he or she wants to end the relationship.

Now, since you probably weren’t expecting this, it’s likely that your reaction will be completely spontaneous.

A wiser course would be to calmly and rationally think about it.

But as mentioned above, the adrenaline rush will make that nearly impossible and you will soon be in the middle of a heated conversation. And yet, these are the conversations that matter most… If only you could learn to tackle them better, you could have more impact across every dimension of your life.

When 20,000 people were surveyed in a study cited in the book, the results revealed that those who could master the art of crucial conversations usually dealt with their personal and professional challenges more effectively. These were the people who emerged as opinion leaders in their organizations. And in their personal lives, they had a higher likelihood of staying together with their partner. In fact, being good at crucial conversations reduced their likelihood of being involved in a breakup by up to 50%.

2. Open sharing of information leads to the best results in crucial conversations

”When it comes to risky, controversial, and emotional conversations, skilled people find a way to get all relevant information (from themselves and others) out into the open.” — Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations

A senior surgeon once amputated a man’s healthy foot when he was actually supposed to amputate the other foot! And although many surgeons were standing around the operating table, none of them said a thing because they were too intimidated by the surgeon’s seniority. The result: the patient lost a healthy foot. This could’ve been prevented if the other surgeons involved openly spoke up, but no one did.

Oftentimes, when we’re involved in a crucial conversation of some kind, we tend to hold back our opinions out of fear that they may hurt the other person or say something that’s out of line.

But as it turns out, this is part of the problem.

Any healthy and successful conversation involves the sharing of information and opinions between all the participants.

This ensures that all the necessary information is on the table before the participants in a conversation make any decisions. And obviously, smarter decisions are based on the maximum amount of such information.

In both professional and private life, people tend to fully commit themselves to a decision when it’s made after an open dialogue and an informed conversation. When we clearly see that a decision was reached after weighing all the available information, we feel more confident in that decision.

In fact, even if the decision isn’t exactly to our liking, we’re still more likely to accept it—if we at least contributed productively to the discussion that led to it.

On the flip side, if the decision was made without our input or consultation, we tend to resist it.

For example, imagine for a moment that you’re part of a football team. The captain of the team calls a huddle to discuss the plan for the match. All the players share their opinion and then the captain finally decides the final strategy. Even if you know this strategy isn’t the best, you—as a contributing member of the team—will give it your best. Why? Because you were a part of the decision-making process.

On the other hand, if the captain simply made a decision without consulting anyone, and then told all the players to follow it, the players would most likely not be very dedicated to it.

Bottom line: It’s critically important to facilitate an open dialogue and a free flow of information…

But how do you create an environment where this can take place?

That’s what we’ll be talking about in the next section.

3. Be calm and focus on your ultimate goal in a crucial conversation

Do you remember the last time your ideas came under bitter criticism? For most of us, it’s hard to stay calm and cool when this happens. The last time this happened to you, you may have even lost your temper or gotten offended and walked out, or at the very least felt a certain degree of negative emotion. Unfortunately, all of this accomplishes very little in terms of helping you have a successful dialogue, or getting your ideas to land with other people.

Here is how it could have been different…

Before you have a crucial conversation:

• Think about your actual goals by asking yourself the following two clarifying questions:

  • What do I want to achieve from this conversation?
  • What information do I want to share with the other participants in the conversation?
    ^{👆 Asking yourself these questions will highlight your ultimate goal in a conversation and help you stay focused on the topic at hand.}

• Also consider for a moment what you don’t want from a conversation.

  • In your professional life, for example, you don’t want a conversation to be vague if it’s about making an important decision.
  • In your personal life, you don’t want a conversation to cause bitterness between you and your partner, because a good decision must be agreed upon by both of you.

Once you know what you want out of a crucial conversation, be sure to stay focused on this goal during your actual conversation. If someone criticizes you, or if any objections annoy you, or if you’re offended about something, pause for a moment and remind yourself of your goal. And every time the conversation starts to steer away from this goal, gently nudge it back in the right direction.

This also lets you overcome your emotional outbursts. When you have a solid goal, you wouldn’t want your anger or your ego to meddle with that goal. And no matter how much you are ‘attacked’ in the conversation, you will weather it patiently simply because you don’t want the conversation to fail without achieving its goal.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to share some information with your partner that may upset him or her. Before beginning the conversation, pause and ask yourself this: What is my goal and what do I want to avoid? You probably want to convey the information without upsetting your partner, right? So, begin the conversation with this goal in mind and you’ll be more likely to have a rational and calm conversation, patiently weathering your partner’s reaction.

4. When people don’t feel ‘safe’ in a conversation, the conversation fails

”When under attack, our heart can take a similarly sudden and unconscious turn. When faced with pressure and strong opinions, we often stop worrying about the goal of adding to the pool of meaning and start looking for ways to win, punish, or keep the peace.” — Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations

Often times, a perfectly normal conversation can quickly turn into a shouting contest. And nothing you can say or do can restore peace. Why does that happen? Most of the time, it’s all about the atmosphere of the conversation. In any conversation, the participants either feel safe or they don’t…

• When the atmosphere is ‘safe’, the participants are more open to each other. In an environment like this, even criticism and disagreement is less likely to offend others. And you can easily discuss even highly controversial topics with less of a risk that you’ll be getting someone all fired up and offended.
• But when the atmosphere of a conversation is ‘unsafe’, the participants do not share their opinions openly and tempers begin to rise. As we mentioned earlier, if you don’t feel safe in a conversation, adrenaline kicks in and it becomes incredibly hard to think rationally.

And once the participants feel that a conversation’s atmosphere is in the ‘not safe’ zone, it’s very hard to restore their confidence and trust again (if it was ever there in the first place). At this point, perfectly benign remarks are misunderstood and a complete failure of mutual communication takes place.

Identifying an ‘unsafe’ conversation isn’t hard. You can do it by observing how each participant behaves. These behaviors are broadly categorized into silent and violent behaviors.

• A silent reaction is when people start hiding their opinions. They may use sarcasm and other indirect methods of communication to share their opinion.

  • For example, rather than telling you what they really think about those cool new pants you wore to the office today, a person might say something like, “That’s a nice-fitting pair of pants you’ve got on! No one will ever think they’re three sizes too small for you. Nope, not at all…”

• A violent behavior/reaction is when one or more people in a conversation try to force their opinions on others.

  • For example, they may speak loudly, let no one else speak, hinder others from sharing their opinions, and indulge in other similar activities.

Now that we have identified the telltale signs of when a conversation is unsafe, it’s time to see how you can prevent a conversation from taking any wrong turns in the first place. And our next Big Idea discusses some effective ways to do exactly that…

5. Make people feel like you respect them to create a safe conversation

If participants feel threatened during a conversation, they resort to silent or violent reactions, and the conversation fails.

So how do we ensure that the atmosphere of a conversation remains safe?

First things first: we start by laying the foundation of your conversation on two things:

1. a common purpose, and
2. mutual respect.

A common purpose is incredibly important. It’s what binds two or more people together in any given conversation. If the participants in a conversation genuinely feel that they have a common purpose, they will try to look above their differences and communicate with each other in order to achieve that purpose. Put simply, every participant needs to feel like they’re contributing to any decisions that get made as a result of the conversation; people need to feel like they’ve got some skin in the game.

Mutual respect is equally important. Respect is absolutely critical for any successful conversation. If your conversation partners feel like you don’t respect them, you will either get a silent reaction (no communication, sarcasm) or a violent reaction (angry words, shouting contest). So you must make an effort to avoid making anyone feel disrespected—period.

Even when you are about to criticize an employee, you can do so without disrespecting them.

A good way to do this is by using the technique of alternating between praise and criticism.

For example, let’s say you want Jimmy to be more punctual. Here’s how it might go:

• YOU: “I appreciate all your hard work on XYZ project, Jimmy.”
• JIMMY: “Thanks so much!”
• YOU: “You know, if there were just one area I’d like to see you improve upon, it would be your punctuality. Do you think you could work on ensuring you’re at our project meetings on time from now on? It would really help maintain the high-quality work you’re known for as you continue to take on new projects in the future.”
• JIMMY: “Absolutely, boss. I apologize for showing up late and will make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll be on time, every time.”
• YOU: “Thank you, Jimmy… And hey—keep up the quality work, it’s really showing.”

BOOM.

Start out positive. Place the area of improvement in the middle. Finish off strong with another positive statement.

Both personally and professionally, your conversations will be more positive, and you’ll increase your chances of achieving win-win solutions if you make an effort toward the common goals and interests of the people involved. Try to define a common solution and once this is clear, those who are a part of the conversation will strive towards that as well.

For example, let’s say you were just offered a once-in-a-lifetime promotion at work; the kind of opportunity that could really take your career to the next level. But the downside is that you and your family will have to move to another state. This puts you at odds with your partner.

Initially, you and your partner seemingly have completely different goals: you want the promotion while your partner doesn’t want to move. At this point, it’s important to work on finding a more general goal that is in both your interest as well as your partner’s. For instance, define the long-term needs of the family, and see if your promotion aligns with those needs. Talk it out. Work on coming up with something together.

This will immediately help you and your partner establish common ground. And no matter what the outcome of your discussion, you will both be more likely to sincerely consider the available options.

In the end, your partner may be persuaded to let you take the promotion and move; or you may decide that finding a better opportunity in the same area is a better option.

Either way, it will be a stronger decision because both you and your partner will fully back it.

6. Manage your emotions by examining and interpreting the facts

Many of us have experienced this scenario: right in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation, someone says one harsh or unpleasant word and we lose our temper and all our composure. This may happen even if the person who said it didn’t intend to make us angry.

Why does this happen?

Most of the time, it happens simply because you misinterpret the facts of a situation. You may interpret a word or a gesture in an incorrect way and that may offend you. This is an emotional response and you must learn to overcome it during crucial conversations.

An easy way to overcome this is to pause for a moment every time you start to get angry during a conversation…

Is it a word or some gesture that is making you angry?

If yes, examine the word or gesture in a calm, cool manner, asking yourself if you’re misinterpreting it.

For example, if someone keeps staring at you during a conversation, you may be inclined to conclude immediately that they are being rude. But look closely at the facts and there may be a different explanation. Perhaps the person is looking at something behind you, or someone sitting right next to you. Or perhaps that person is simply lost in thought and doesn’t realize that he or she is staring right at you.

If you only take a moment to examine the facts more accurately, you can avoid the emotional flare-up in such situations.

This is particularly important in professional settings.

Consider this example: you and your co-worker are discussing a project with your boss. During the break, you step out to relax a bit but your colleague stays back and continues the meeting. Your immediate reaction would be to get offended, thinking that your colleague is trying to take credit for the work.

But look more closely at the facts and there may be many other explanations. Perhaps your colleague and your boss want to finish discussing something totally unrelated before taking a break. Or perhaps they are very passionate about the topic at hand while you may not find it very interesting at all.

By reconsidering the facts and weighing different explanations, you have a better chance at finding the correct and rational explanation behind them. And once you interpret such situations properly, you have a better chance of finding the right solution. In the example we just mentioned, for instance, you can later arrange another meeting to discuss your own ideas or those aspects of the project about which you are passionate.

7. Create a safe atmosphere in a conversation and make others feel their opinions are valuable

Consider this scenario: You want to talk to your teenage daughter about a lazy, unambitious boy that she’s dating. You’re concerned about her, but every time you try to discuss it with her, your daughter gets angry. She thinks you’re trying to control her life.

How do you approach this crucial conversation successfully?

The first thing to do is this: Make her feel safe in the conversation. Help her understand that you value her opinion, no matter what it is. Once you’ve created the safe space, she’ll open up and you’ll be able to understand her better and likely reach a better solution.

This applies to any conversation.

Always keep in mind the importance of showing your conversation-partner that you care about their concerns and sincerely want to understand their motives and behaviors.

Getting back to the conversation with your teenage daughter, here’s how a crucial conversation done right might look like:

• YOU: “Hunny, can we talk about what seems to make you think I’m trying to control your life?”
• HER: “I don’t wanna talk. Besides, that’s how it is with all the parents.”
• YOU: “I can see this really matters to you. So I would really like to understand what makes you feel that way…”

This may persuade your daughter to open up. Once she does, encourage her and try to paraphrase her input. This will immediately evolve the conversation into a frank and friendly discussion that might go something like this:

• HER: “I’ve finally met someone who cares about me. And you want me to leave him.”
• YOU: “So you feel like no one else cares for you the way this boy does. He makes you feel special…”

As you paraphrase, the other person will feel that you really do understand their concerns. This doesn’t mean you agree. It just means you understand. And this persuades them to share more of their feelings with you.

Still, at some point in the conversation, you may disagree with what they’re saying. If you do, it’s important to stay focused on understanding them and not challenging their beliefs.

For instance, if your daughter says something like, “Nobody likes me. I’m the worst, most hated person in my school.” Do not immediately agree, but instead try to understand why she feels this way. You first want to understand her before finding the right words to connect with her.

In this way, you’ll be able to continue an open discussion without any flare-ups or abrupt endings. And you’ll be more likely to reach a better solution by the time the conversation comes to a close.

Now that you understand how you can create a safer atmosphere for a successful conversation, it’s time to learn how to correctly implement any decisions that may arise as a result of your conversations…

8. Determine a suitable decision-making process with a well-organized plan of implementation

”The key to real change lies not in implementing a new process, but in getting people to hold one another accountable to the process.” — Joseph Grenny, et al., Crucial Conversations

If you have followed the advice in the previous Big Ideas, you’re equipped with the knowledge to have conversations that are far more calm and rational. You also now know how to create a safe space to hold your conversations.

But you still need to conclude a crucial conversation with an effective and implementable solution. This is the final step of mastering the art of crucial conversations.

Before reaching an ultimate solution during a crucial conversation, consider these two highly important questions:

• 1. Who will be affected by the decision?
• 2. Who should have the decision-making powers?

The following examples will illustrate this more clearly.

Imagine you’re planning to move your family to a different city. This means your children will have to change their schools and your partner will likely need to find a different job. So the decision affects the whole family. The best way to go about a situation like this is to take everybody’s input and ensure that everyone agrees on the final decision. If there are multiple options, you can also vote on the options to find the most agreeable solution.

But what if you can’t implement a democratic decision-making process like the one above? In cases like that, you want to focus on building trust. For instance, if you have a solid and trustworthy relationship with your project team, they may have no problem at all with you making an important decision. In many cases, this will ensure that a key decision is made quickly and by someone who has formal or informal power to make that decision.

The second aspect of decision-making is to ensure that it’s implemented. For this, you need to clearly define what needs to be done and the roles of everyone doing it—with an emphasis on holding one another accountable. Define the tasks, define the roles, and set the deadlines if needed.

And finally, remember the following rule whenever you communicate instructions to anyone: Clarity is crucial.

When entrepreneur Howard Hughes tasked a group of engineers to build a steam-powered car, he did almost everything right: He defined the tasks, he defined the roles, and he set aggressive deadlines…

The result? The engineers worked really hard for several years and eventually cranked out a production-ready steam-powered car.

The problem? In the event of an accident, the car would boil the passengers alive.

Obviously, Hughes forgot our rule about clarity.

But you can avoid making the same mistake by always keeping in mind, that in every communication, clarity is crucial.

Communicate your ultimate goal in a simple, easy-to-understand manner, and hold each individual accountable for their actions.

Closing notes

Key takeaway:

• Crucial conversations are prone to turn into emotional and angry conversations. But if you master the different aspects of such conversations, you can make these conversations successful and positive. And doing so improves both your personal and professional lives.

Actionable insights:

• Focus on respecting everyone involved in a crucial conversation.
• Create a safe atmosphere during conversations by letting others know and feel that their opinions are valued.
• Share information and opinions as openly as possible. Ask people to share their thoughts whenever needed. It’s okay to ask to ensure there’s clarity about something rather than allowing room for misinterpretation.
• If you feel your emotions flaring up, reconsider the cause. If someone or something is making you angry, or if they’re offending you, clarify the cause and make sure your interpretation is actually what’s really going on before getting angry and saying (or doing) something you may regret.

About the original authors of Crucial Conversations: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron Mcmillan, and Al Switzler are the cofounders of VitalSmarts, a corporate training consultancy that teaches leadership and organizational effectiveness skills to millions of people around the world. Learn more + connect with them at: vitalsmarts.com