From same authors that produced Influencer they also wrote this New York Best Seller. It is extremely well written with humour about the sticky situations that we can all get into both professionally and personally. The authors lays down the groundwork by stating that people who excel in holding and carrying crucial conversations are the one’s who earn tremendous respect. They are also typically the glue that binds an organization together. Those same qualities also prevent couples from a break-up or divorce.
The book starts by saying that when humans get into very heated situations, our natural response is “fight or flight” . This means that your brain distributes 50% of its blood to your limbs to help you run away, but compromises decision making or communicating the proper response. When people feel unsafe they often don’t say what’s on their mind, they turn either silent or violent. The three most common forms of silence are masking, avoiding and withdrawing. Violence is made up of verbal strategies that tries to convince, control, or compel others to their point of view. It violates peoples safety by trying to force their opinions into the pool. Methods range from name-calling and monologuing to making threats. The three most common forms are controlling, labeling, and attacking. You need to be vigilant to monitor your own style under stress so you don’t become the “meanie” in your office.
Solutions to better handle crucial conversations are to keep in mind mutual purpose, and mutual respect. Three skills that will help keep dialogue going are:
Apologize when appropriate
Contrast to fix misunderstanding
Commit to seek mutual purpose, recognize the purpose behind the strategy, invent a mutual purpose, and brainstorm new strategies.
When people are angry, scared or hurt, they often jump to conclusion about situations which could lead to a much uglier development. When you suspect something has gone wrong, stick to facts, instead of sharing your accusations and assumed story. To speak persuasively, not abrasively, remember the following tools:
Share your facts
Tell your story
Ask for others’ paths
Talk tentatively
Encourage testing
When talking to people who’re blowing up or clamming up, it is important to ask questions to get the ball rolling, mirror them to confirm feelings, paraphrase to acknowledge the story. After all that, you must remember to practice agreeing, building and comparing to keep the dialogue going. The book goes much further detail into how decisions are made and how best to get others involved to make the best decisions and action plans….
I highly recommend reading and learning from this book, even if it’s just to take the quiz and find out what your style is under stress.
2011 marks the beginning of a shift for me. I tried recruiting and really missed the creativity and organizational aspect of events and PR. And as I became more familiar with the industry, I realized recruiting is another word for headhunting - something that does not appeal to me at all. So I began taking on clients with more of a focus on PR.
A while back, a long time friend became a part-owner of a very cool green technology firm called Greentail. Their product is revolutionary and helps get rid of food waste. Being a self -proclaimed environmentalist, I was SO excited about what he was doing. I told him I’d love to help him spread the word to EVERYONE when the company was ready. He called me in January, a week before going into the BC Food Expo and asked me to help him with PR, to get as much publicity as possible.
I’m proud to say, in 2 weeks time, I was able to get him a TV interview with City-TV, Omni TV in Mandarin and Cantonese, as well as Ahorn TV (German), and an online article with a video interview on The Georgia Straight! You can see all the videos at www.greentail.ca or
http://www.gracioushost.ca/press.php
They’re off to a restaurant conference in Toronto this Thursday, which will be 10 times larger than the BC Food Expo. I hope it creates a lot of excitement and orders.
The BC Food Expo was neat. There was tons of free food, beverage tasting, and a whole section for beer and wine. Too bad I’m allergic to alcohol. I enjoyed watching a Minister (don’t ask who… I can’t remember) made the announcement that BC government will now have $2 million dollars worth of subsidies to help out the restaurant industry put in equipment for a greener future to lessen the food wastage.