Unleash Your Inner Courageous Leader: Transform Your Conversations Today
“The quality of your relationships is determined by the quality of the conversations you have in them. Too often though we play safe and avoid the possibility of an awkward conversation — too raw, too difficult, too sensitive, too risky, too uncomfortable, too much effort. ”
Supporting Our Client’s Offsite Event
Earlier this year, we were fortunate to be asked to participate in an offsite event for a client. To ensure optimal learning and a high degree of leader participation and interaction, our team consisted of seven facilitators leading seven sessions simultaneously, leveraging the same Courageous Conversations materials.
Integrating A Customized Learning Module to a Client’s Offsite Event
The Audience - Over 200 first-line leaders and some second-line leaders
The Topic – Courageous Conversations
The Format – A highly interactive half-day workshop, with seven facilitators running seven group breakouts simultaneously.
The Goal - To support the organization’s growth rate by ensuring leaders have transparent, authentic, and transformational conversations with their team members, resulting in critical success behaviors.
The Price of Silence: How Conversation Avoidance is Hurting Your Organization
The growth goal of our client is not an abstract one. Employers pay the price when leaders and their teams fail to engage in conversations that address conflicts. According to research by Crucial Learning:
Every successful courageous or crucial conversation could save the organization an average of $7,500.
90% of employees feel incapable of speaking up about an organization initiative that they believe is doomed to fail.
71% said they try to speak up to key decision-makers but didn’t feel heard.
19% don’t even attempt to have a conversation.
“These behaviors don’t just hurt company culture, they hurt revenue. In our survey, 43 percent of respondents said their silence has cost the organization more than $10,000, while 30 percent tabbed the amount at more than $25,000 and a troubling 19 percent admitted their reluctance cost at least $50,000.”
Courageous Conversations – Preparation, Reflection, and Practice Make Perfect
For Leaders
You are not alone if you are a leader who struggles to broach an important, difficult, or challenging subject because of discomfort, uncertainty, anxiety, or doubt. A courageous conversation means loads of uncertainty, especially if the stakes are high, opinions differ, or we anticipate a strong emotional response. As humans, we are hard-wired to seek certainty.
It’s up to you to create an environment where problems and differences are addressed without delay, and where employees feel safe speaking out when they have concerns or difficult feedback to share. This competency is so important we believe it separates great leaders from good leaders.
In the Reading and References section below, we’ve highlighted some books and other learning resources for leaders and aspiring leaders to develop their skills. We hope you find our recommendations helpful.
If you are fortunate to have an executive or leadership coach, consider adding this skill to your coaching goals.
For Organizations
If you are looking to develop this competency organization-wide, let’s chat. Our philosophy is to make learning and development an engaging and relevant experience by following the 80/20 rule (explained below).
For the client we mention in this post, we designed, developed, and delivered a half-day highly interactive workshop that ensured each leader was engaged in an activity (such as a meaningful discussion, small group exercise, or self-reflection assignment) at least 80% of the time. Our facilitators provided context, directions, or information 20% of the time, and tied into the “Stop Playing Safe” messages of the broader event keynote speaker.
We leveraged a range of models, strategies, tools, and ideas within the following framework or roadmap:
Begin with courage
Prepare for the conversation
Listen and connect
Manage emotional energy
Align on the path forward
Participants were able to immediately apply what they were learning to their individual and collective work. Here are some of their post-session comments:
I feel better prepared to have a tough conversation now.
Sure wish I would’ve known some of this two months ago!
Everything we discussed was applicable to our daily work. Excellent facilitator and content. Would welcome them back!
(Facilitator) did a nice job of getting people to share powerful and applicable examples.
Gained a better understanding of why these conversations are important.
I really like the aspect of understanding a situation and then having to pivot as more information was uncovered during the interaction.
If you want to learn more about our approach and the options we can employ to develop the courageous conversation skills of your organization’s leaders, please contact Jonathan Parker: jonathanlparker@journeycounts.com
Reading & References
Research
Drenik, Gary. “Hush Money: How Avoiding Conversations Is Costing Your Organization.” Forbes, 17 June 2022.
Maxfield, Brittney. “Office Haunting: 8 out of 10 Employees Are Running in Fear from a Scary Conversation at Work.” Crucial Learning, 17 Feb. 2022.
Learning Resources
“Crucial Learning Resource Center Assessments.” Crucial Learning. Take one or more of these free assessments to determine your communication style when it matters most, such as when you are under stress or need to address a performance gap. Scroll further on this page to subscribe to the Crucial Skills weekly newsletter to improve communication, habits, productivity, and more with weekly insights and tips from authors and experts.
Landry, Lauren. “How to Have Difficult Conversations with Employees.” Business Insights Blog, 30 Aug. 2022.
Numerous helpful resources on Mindtools and YouTube to help develop skills in preparation for a courageous conversation.
U.S., The Conversation. “To Have Better Disagreements, Change Your Words.” Medium, 31 May 2023.
Recommended Books and Articles
Gino, Francesca. “How to Make Difficult Conversations Worse, as Seen on ‘Succession.’” Harvard Business Review, 4 Apr. 2023.
Grenny, Joseph, et al. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Third Edition. McGraw-Hill Education, 2021.
Warrell, Margie. Stop Playing Safe: How To Be Braver in Your Work, Leadership and Life 2nd Edition. John Wiley & Sons Austral, 2021.
Wolfe, Paul E. “How Successful Teams Tackle Difficult Conversations.” Indeed, 5 Sept. 2019. Build in time for regular conversations through team meetings, weekly one-on-ones, and internal chats or email updates. By making open communication part of your team’s culture, you can prepare them to tackle difficult topics when they arise. Communication isn’t just about quantity, so take steps to make every conversation count.