Crucial Conversations® Training Program Overview
Get Unstuck and Rapidly Improve the
Results You Care About Most
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Organizations mired in mediocre results (or perhaps not achieving
the heights leaders had hoped for) can generally count on a predictable
and correctable root cause: their employees are either not willing
or not able to bring up touchy, controversial, or high-stakes issues
and handle these discussions well.
Based on more than twenty-five
years of research, Crucial Conversations training asserts one thing:
If you can transfer skills that top performers routinely use to
effectively handle crucial conversations—particularly in
the presence of authority—then you can create more postive
results across an entire organization (everything from quality
to customer satisfaction to morale).
Crucial Conversations training
teaches individuals and teams from different backgrounds, departments,
and specialties how to willingly and effectively surface and discuss
ideas in a way that leads to virtually everyone buying into the
decisions—creating broad alignment, maximizing synergy, and
ensuring commitment to the best ideas. When taught, these skills
inevitably result in rapid, sustainable, and widereaching positive
changes in the results that you care about the most.
Make Crucial
Conversations skills your best practices and everything gets better.
COURSE DETAILS
Crucial Conversations training infuses fourteen
hours of classroom time with more than 120 original video clips
of “before and after” situations. Enjoy video-based
instruction from the authors of Crucial Conversations: Tools for
Talking When Stakes are High. Engage in extensive in-class practice,
group participation, and personal reflection as you explore and
master these Crucial Skills.
Who Should Attend?
Crucial Conversations
training is ideal for individuals who regularly deal with touchy,
controversial, or high-stakes issues—within a team or across
functional lines. Learn to facilitate rapid problem-solving and
improve results. For true change to be achieved, involving teams
and even entire organizations is essential. At a minimum, consider
attending our public training events (see www.vitalsmarts.com for
a complete schedule). Or, bring our professional facilitators into
your organization.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN
Skills taught in this training
deliver significant improvement in areas such as:
1. Performance—talk
honestly and openly no matter how delicate the topic.
2. Productivity—eliminate
resistance and act with conviction when making decisions.
3.Teamwork—reach
agreement on how to work together and treat other teammates.
4. Change
Management—agree with others on and follow through
with difficult changes.
5. Quality—develop productive processes
that are eagerly implemented.
6. Relationships—work through
differences with others and strengthen relationships.
7. Safety—Discusses
violations and solutions without finger-pointing or resentment.
8. Diversity—willingly and ably discuss diversity problems
face-to-face and in the moment.
9. Meetings—speak up when
things get off track and suggest how to improve them.
Lesson |
You’ll
Learn To |
| 1.
Get Unstuck |
- Spot the conversations that are keeping you from
what you want.
- Avoid moving to silence or violence
during crucial conversations.
- Share facts, ideas,
feelings, and opinions candidly and honestly.
- Discover
how better information helps identify problems earlier
and keeps them from getting out of hand.
|
| 2.
Start with Heart |
- Stay focused on what you really want and maintain
dialogue.
- Learn how to work on me first.
- Understand
how motives change when conversations turn crucial.
|
| 3.
Learn to Look |
- Spot the warning signs that indicate safety is at risk.
- Notice
various forms of silence and violence.
- Take steps
to rebuild safety and return to dialogue.
- Step out
of a conversation and notice how to make it work.
- Identify
your own Style Under Stress™ and manage it.
|
| 4 -
5. Make It Safe |
- Talk about almost anything—without silence and
violence.
- Use specific skills to keep everyone sharing
information.
- Establish and maintain mutual purpose
and mutual respect.
- Recognize when you’re
at cross-purposes.
|
| 6-7.
Master My Stories |
- Stay in dialogue when you’re angry, scared, or
hurt—“think” your way to the root cause
of negative emotions.
- Discover your stories—how
do you justify your behavior?
- Eliminate victim,
villain, and helpless stories, and improve your results.
|
| 8.
STATE My Path |
- Speak persuasively, not abrasively.
- Get your
meaning across even with potentially threatening messages.
- Share strong opinions without shutting down contrary
views.
- State
your mind while making it safe for others to do the same.
|
| 9.
Explore Others' Paths |
- Use exploring skills to make it safe for others to speak
up.
- Diffuse others’ violence and eliminate silence.
- Encourage
others to share issues they fear bringing up.
- Get
safely to the meaning behind others’ emotions.
|
| 10.
Move to Action |
- Put Crucial Conversations principles and skills together.
- Move from healthy dialogue to taking action and achieving
results.
|
Train-the-Trainer
Use our train-the-trainer program and Leader’s
Resource Kit to enable your trainers to offer the highest quality
in-house training program available today.
We also advocate leader-led
training and certify line managers as the most effective approach
for acquiring and retaining new skills.
Participant Materials
- Crucial
Conversations Participant Toolkit (224-page training workbook)
- Crucial Conversations Action Planner
- Contract cards and
model cards
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High—The
New York Times bestseller based on this training course
- Crucial
Conversations Audio CD Companion (6-CD audio workout for strengthening
Crucial Conversations skills)
- A course completion certificate
- A
subscription to the Crucial Skills Reminder, a weekly e-mail
service
- Follow-up Web resources (a self-scoring Style
Under Stress™ self-assessment, video examples, downloadable
samples, and more)
- Access to our complete line of books,
audio companion CDs, and Web Seminars at www.crucialskills.com
About VitalSmarts
An innovator in best practice training and
consulting research, VitalSmarts delivers significant improvements
to the results companies care about most. Based on ongoing research,
VitalSmarts award-winning training courses have created systematic
and lasting change in thousands of organizations, helping them
realize quick, hard-hitting results in a way that no other training
company yet offers. VitalSmarts also offers keynote speaking,
on-site consulting, and executive team development.
