Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Second Edition. McGraw-Hill, 2011.
Companion volume: Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior
Referenced in: Church Conflict – Criticism, Difficult People, Difficult Conversations
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
These are New York Times best-selling resources that resulted from interviews with over 25,000 people to discover those who were most effective in difficult conversations, over 10,000 hours in observing these people and documenting what they saw, and then testing their insights by training over 300,000 people. It is one of the best set of resources for equipping people to engage difficult conversations productively. The authors also manage a web community, Vital Smarts. Those who join their site can get book excerpts and other tools.
Not all churches will be open to the level of candor encouraged by these resources, but leaders who are serious about missional effectiveness will recognize the need for a climate of truthful communication about what really matters.
The authors provide tools for use in work, home, and family which translate well into church leadership. Although many of the illustrations are not frequently experienced in the church (e.g. your spouse thinks you were flirting with another woman at a neighborhood block party), most of the skills and principles translate quite well.
In the first volume, Crucial Conversations (2002, revised 2011), the authors define a crucial conversation as a discussion between two or more people where (1) stakes are high, (2) opinions vary, and (3) emotions run strong. Conversations like are not only challenging, but have a huge impact on the quality of one’s personal or congregational life. Most do not handle these situations well, for a variety of reasons. These resources, however, operate on the belief that good dialogue skills are learnable. They try to help readers achieve this in the following sequence. First, they present the tools necessary to create the conditions in oneself and others that make dialogue the path of least resistance. Second, they examine the key skills of talking, listening, and acting together. Third, they tie all of the theories and skills together by providing a model and an extended example. Finally, they provide seventeen common situations to practice the skills.
The second volume, Crucial Confrontations (2004), takes it to the next level. Not only does it represent further research and experience with the concepts, it also discusses the higher level of skills required for the most difficult situations — broken promises, missed deadlines, failing to live up to commitments, violate reasonable expectations, bad behavior (immoral, unethical, illegal), etc. Most of these situations are never confronted or if they are, are handled poorly. Crucial Confrontations teaches how to engage these occurrences in a way that solves the problem and enhances the relationships.
About the Authors
Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler are the leaders of VitalSmarts, an innovator in best practices training products and services that has taught over two million people and worked with more than 300 of the Fortune 500 companies.
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