As trainers and facilitators, it’s our wheelhouse to help people gain the skills and abilities they need to excel in the workplace—especially the ones with high impact. But what are those behaviors? And how can we make a case to our organizations in favor of what’s often dismissed as “soft skills”?
Our clients often ask us for data around the impact of our courses, so we recently completed a survey to look for correlations between the crucial behaviors we teach and organizational performance—specifically how well organizations execute and innovate. Read on to learn what the data suggests—and how you can leverage that data to make the case for adding additional Crucial Learning solutions to get better results.
Four Crucial Behaviors That Predict Organizational Success
In a survey of nearly 1,000 professionals, Crucial Learning researchers set out to answer a simple but important question: how do the behaviors we teach enable organizations to execute effectively and innovate consistently?
We found our crucial behaviors are especially predictive of organizational performance. Those behaviors include:
- High-Stakes Dialogue: People can skillfully handle emotionally and politically charged discussions, ensuring the best ideas are heard and they know how to hold others accountable in a way that strengthens relationships. We teach these behaviors in our courses Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue and Crucial Conversations for Accountability.
- Personal Performance and Improvement: People can build productive habits that allow them to prioritize the most important work, preventing burnout and ensuring focus without overwhelm. We teach these behaviors in our courses Getting Things Done and The Power of Habit.
- A Stable Sense of Self and a Generous View of Others: People can prioritize connection, improving communication, collaboration, and engagement while reducing turnover. We teach these behaviors in the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) and our course Crucial Teams.
- Influential Leadership: People can leverage six sources of influence to create lasting behavior change, achieving ten times greater success than those who rely on quick fixes like incentives or restructuring. We teach these behaviors in our course Crucial Influence.
While there are a lot of factors that impact organizational performance like strategy, resources, having a blockbuster product, you name it, the survey data showed significant correlations between reports of using these crucial behaviors and reports of organizational ability to execute and innovate. Specifically, the data suggests that:
- 23% of an organization’s ability to execute and innovate can be attributed to high-stakes dialogue.
- 32% can be attributed to influential leadership.
- 28% can be attributed to personal performance and improvement.
- 24% can be attributed to a stable sense of self and generous view of others.
But while these behaviors make an impact in isolation, the real magic is found in combining them. When reviewed in combination, the data suggests that 43% of an organization’s ability to execute and innovate can be attributed to the presence of the four crucial behaviors.
In other words, organizations that embed these behaviors into their culture are much more likely to sustain success—even in uncertain and rapidly changing environments.
What Specific Behaviors Matter Most?
The survey also pinpointed five specific behaviors (many of which will feel very familiar to you as a Crucial Learning trainer) that best predict organizational success:
- Keeping every commitment—or renegotiating when conflicts arise
- Sustaining optimism in leadership’s bold new directions
- Holding people accountable for substandard performance
- Working productively with people who have very different styles or personalities
- Consistently finishing high-priority projects without getting derailed by urgent distractions
These findings help connect the dots across our entire suite of solutions, showing how these crucial behaviors combine to drive enterprise-wide results.
Location Doesn’t Matter—Culture Does
One particularly timely insight: the survey found that whether teams work remotely, hybrid, or in-person has no significant impact on performance. What matters most is whether leaders are fostering these behaviors.
In a time when many organizations are struggling to determine return-to-office policies, this data underscores that performance isn’t about location—it’s about leadership and culture.
As Joseph Grenny, Crucial Learning cofounder and lead researcher, explains:
“Leaders looking to improve performance, especially in an uncertain economy, can ignore many of the trendy strategies like return-to-office that are dominating the headlines. The viability of an organization is directly linked to the strength of its culture.”
What This Means for You as a Trainer
This research is a valuable resource as you work with your clients and learners:
- Arm yourself with data. Share these findings in your sessions to highlight the business impact of learning and applying Crucial Learning skills.
- Connect the dots. Help learners see how the skills from one course complement and build on those from others. Even if they’ve only experienced one solution, they’re gaining behaviors that contribute to their organization’s overall success.
- Position for broader impact. Use this research to open conversations with clients or leadership teams about expanding training to address multiple cultural competencies.
Ultimately, this data reinforces what you already know: the behaviors we teach don’t just improve individual performance—they shape organizational cultures that thrive.
Talk to your decision-makers about benefits of adding Crucial Learning course(s). You can always leverage our overview presentations to share information within your organization and/or check out our course miniseries:
