Conflict Resolution
Lesson 2: Crucial Conversations
Introduction
In lesson one you learned different conflict management styles and when you should choose each style. Some of the styles require greater dialogue skills than others. In this lesson, you will learn skills to bring to crucial conversations often needed in the collaborating conflict management style.
The teachings in this lesson come from the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. Each of you will be getting the full book from your iRep. This lesson is an overview of the book
Lesson Objectives:
- Understand the elements of a crucial conversation
- Practice skills in having a crucial conversation
What is a crucial Conversation?
A confrontation that you need to handle with care. These conversations happen every day and can happen in big meetings or in simple daily exchanges. They are crucial because they impact your life and always have three ingredients:
- Opinions Vary
- Stakes are high
- Strong emotions
Examples:
- Ending a relationship
- Talking to a coworker who behaves offensively
- Asking a friend to repay a loan
- Giving your boss feedback about their behavior
- Critiquing a coworker’s work
- Approaching someone who is breaking policy
- Telling a volunteer they cannot lead anymore.
- Talking to a team member who isn't keeping commitments
- Giving a poor performance review
- What would you add to this list?
A crucial conversation can happen in the middle of a meeting when a meeting becomes tense and there are differing opinions or it can be one that you plan to have. The crucial conversation is the dialogue. If a conversation is successful, all parties will feel safe to engage in dialogue and create a pool of shared meaning!
What do we usually do when we have a crucial conversation?
- Avoid the conversation
- Face them and handle them poorly
- Face them and handle them well
Why does it matter to be good at having crucial conversations?
- Improve your work and collaboration skills as an individual and a team.
- Improve your organization - save time, money, and resources
- Be united with your team!
Pause and Reflect on your Own:
Now that you know what a crucial conversation is, think about how a recent crucial conversation went.
- Who did it involve?
- What were the differing opinions?
- What were your strong emotions - just yours?
- What were the high stakes?
- How did you prepare for the conversation?
- How did the conversation go?
- What was the result of the conversation?
As we continue through this lesson, keep this conversation in mind as well as the one you want to work on from the Action Steps in Lesson 1.
Pause and Reflect: Culture Matters! (20 min)
How we grow up - our families, country of origin, generation, religion, schooling, our culture - all impact how we handle crucial conversations. While the skills we learn about in these sessions can be applied to all parts of our lives, we are focusing our time on our Young Life roles. As you read through the lesson consider how culture impacts crucial conversations.
Steps of a Crucial Conversation
The below image, will guide you through the steps of a crucial conversation. It is broken down into before, during and after.
BEFORE the conversation - majority of the work we need to do is here!
Conflict Resolution Starts with Me!
What is the conversation that you really want to have?
- What do I really want for myself?
- What do I really want for others?
- What do I really want for the relationship?
- How would I behave if this is what I really want?
Start with heart (Heart = motive, intent) These questions help you focus on long-term, healthy outcomes, rather than short-term, self-serving outcomes.
- Get clear on what your motives are. Does my behavior match my motive?
- Improve your motive if necessary.
- Avoid the Fool’s Choice - that there is only one solution to a challenge. Be prepared to collaborate with others rather than compete, accommodate or compromise.
Master my Stories
A “story” is our rationale for what’s going on and our own interpretation of facts. To Master My Stories means to take control of our stories so they don’t take control of us. It is the key to preventing strong emotions from taking control of a crucial conversation.
The Path of Action:
If we have time to prepare for a conversation, taking time to realize the story we are telling ourselves prepares us for the conversation. Even if the story we tell ourselves is true, to control our emotions in a conversation, we want to let facts rule the conversation.
Common Stories we tell ourselves:
- Victim Story: It's not my fault
- Villain Story: It's your fault
- Hopeless story: There is nothing I can do
We tell ourselves stories so fast that we barely realize it is happening. If we feel our emotions taking over we can retrace our steps to help us get back to facts and stay on track with the conversation we really want to have!
To untangle the stories and understand our actions we have to work backward:
- Act: Examine your behavior. Ask: How am I acting — with silence or violence?
- Feel: Identify your feelings. Ask: What emotions are driving me to act this way?
- Tell a story: Question your stories. What story is creating these emotions?
- See/hear: Examine the facts. What observable evidence (which can be seen/heard) do I have to support this story?
Pause and Reflect:
Consider the conversation you want to have when you get home:
- What is the conversation you really want to have?
- What is your motive for the conversation? Is it the right, long-term motive? If not, what is the correct motive?
- What stories might you be telling yourself about the situation? What are the facts?
Consider these same questions as you prepare for any crucial conversation:
- What is the conversation you really want to have?
- What is your motive for the conversation? Is it the right, long-term motive?
- What stories might you be telling yourself about the situation? What are the facts?
Let’s hear from Rosa how she prepares for hard conversations:
DialoGue
Now that your heart and motives are in the right place, you are ready to dialogue with others. Your goal in dialogue should be to maintain mutual respect for one another, share your path, hear others' paths, and come to a pool of shared meaning.
Maintaining Safety:
At any point during the conversation, you or the others involved could start to feel unsafe resulting in the loss of mutual respect. You cannot continue the conversation until you regain safety for all. During your conversation be on the lookout for signs of someone feeling unsafe (including yourself). When people feel unsafe they usually respond in one of two ways:
- Violence: Raising of voice, defensiveness, sarcasm, cruel comments
- Silence: Shutting down, leaving the room, not talking
If you see any of these signs in yourself or others, pause the progression of the conversation to regain safety - regain mutual respect and mutual purpose.
- Decide which condition is at risk.
- Mutual Purpose: Do others believe you care about their goals in this conversation? Trust your motives?
- Mutual Respect: Do others believe you respect them? - Apologize when appropriate
- Contrast to Fix Misunderstanding
- I don't want…
- I do want… - Create Mutual Purpose.
- Commit to seek Mutual Purpose
- Recognize the purpose behind the strategy
- Invent a mutual Purpose
- Brainstorm new strategies.
Starting your conversation with a mutual purpose (the real hope for your conversation) will help you establish the real purpose of your conversation and allow you to return to it to maintain safety.
STATE my path:
When you start to share your view, you can use the same path of action from knowing our stories above. This allows us to maintain facts rather than jumping ahead and giving in to our emotions. This process spells out STATE:
- Share Your facts: Start with the least controversial, most persuasive element from your Path to Action
- Tell your story: Explain what you’re beginning to conclude.
- Ask for others’ paths: Encourage others to share both their facts and stories.
- Talk tentatively: State your story as a story - don’t disguise it as a fact.
- Encourage testing: Make it safe for others to express differing or even opposing opinions.
Pair and Share:
Turn to the person next to you and share one thing that is coming to mind if you have learned about dialogue so far. You could share an aha moment, a double, a question, or something you are wanting to do back home.
Explore Others' paths:
In the above process we explore others’s paths but it is possible that others blow up or calm up. Here are some suggestions if the other person does not engage in dialogue:
- Ask: Start by simply expressing interest in the other person’s views
- “What are you thinking/feeling”
- “Say more” - Mirror: Increase safety by acknowledging the emotions people appear to be feeling.
- Paraphrase: As others share their stories, restate what you have heard to show that you understand and that it is safe for them to share.
- “Say more”
- “What I hear you saying is…” - Prime: If others continue to hold back, prime. Take your best guess at what they may be thinking and feeling.
Remember as you both share your views:
- Agree: Agree when you share views.
- Build: If others leave something out, agree where you share views, then build.
- Compare: when you do differ significantly, don't suggest others are wrong. Compare your two views.
AFTER: The results
The pool of shared dialogue will remain a pool if two more skills are not put into place. The last skills of crucial conversations are deciding and action. Dialogue alone is not a decision.
Decision Making:
Depending on the situation there are different ways to come to a decision:
- Command - Decisions are made without involving others.
- Consult - Input is gathered from the group and then a subset of decides.
- Vote - An agreed-upon percentage swings the decision.
- Consensus - Everyone comes to an agreement and then supports the final decision.
Determining which method of decision-making:
- Who cares?
- Who knows?
- Who must agree?
- How many people is it worth involving?
Action: Determine who does what by when. Follow up!
Pause and Reflect:
Woah! That was a lot. There is so much that goes into a crucial conversation. Take a moment and reflect on the questions below:
- What did you hear that was helpful?
- What did you hear that you need to learn more to understand? What parts of the book do I want to explore deeper?
- What aspects do you think you need to work on the most?
Learning these skills comes with lots and lots of practice. The more you practice them, the more you will strengthen your conversion skills. Practice can also fail at times. Give yourself grace!!
Action STeps
- Consider the conversation you want to have when you go home. How will you prepare for it after learning these new skills in this lesson?
