Crucial Confrontations

Discover skills to resolve touchy, controversial, and complex issues at work and at home, now available in this follow-up to the internationally popular Crucial Conversations.

Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you'll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly, and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren't just irritating, they're costly, sapping organizational performance by 20 to 50 percent and accounting for up to 90 percent of divorces.

Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like:

• An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?
• Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can't meet, and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn't want to hear complaints about it.
• Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by 40 points. Speak now, pay later.
• An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?
• Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.
• A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers "how things work around here" and decides not to say anything.

©2005 Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler; (P)2005 AMI