Dear Crucial Skills, I am writing to request a little verification about feelings. In a previous column, Ron suggested that one way to phrase the interpretation of what happened was as follows: “I felt insulted, disrespected, and falsely accused.” My question is this: Feeling insulted or disrespected is creating a story of the speaker’s intentions, right? …
Dear Crucial Skills, My eighteen-year-old daughter is beautiful, with lots of talents and a cheerful personality, but in the last two to three years she has become quite overweight. I know this is making her unhappy, but every time I attempt to talk to her about it, we end up in an emotional conversation. How …
Dear Crucial Skills, I struggle with showing my emotions when I’m confronted with a tense conversation or situation. What’s worse is that once I start to get emotional, I get mad at myself, and that only makes me more emotional and makes my eyes well up. After ten years of corporate experience, I still struggle …
Dear Crucial Skills, First, congratulations on such a terrific newsletter. I’d like to raise a question on the article titled “Addressing Mediocre Performance.” I recently departed from an organization I had been with for three years in a senior management capacity. When we were one year into a major merger, it became very apparent that …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Patterson is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Change Anything, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, and Influencer. READ MORE Dear Crucial Skills, What if you’re in negotiations and you are doing your best to build safety with mutual respect and mutual purpose, but the other side is playing hard ball and …
Dear Crucial Skills, I am a frontline supervisor of people from all different walks of life and from several different countries. A term we use and teach our staff is cultural diversity. It is part of our everyday lives, as we constantly interact with customers and staff who are “not from here.” We try to …
Our company probably has layoffs coming up. Some employees will lose their jobs, and most remaining employees will have to take on extra work to keep things going. Some of our employees have been in the same position for more than 20 years.
The “you are getting laid off” conversation is stressful, with potential for silence and verbal violence, as well as wrongful termination lawsuits. Our attorney advises that the less said during those conversations, the better.
Our administrators are really dreading these conversations. Do you have any advice for them?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Al Switzler is coauthor of four New York Times bestsellers, Change Anything, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations, and Influencer. READ MORE Dear Crucial Skills, At our company, management has the option of being flexible with certain time-off guidelines. Other bosses are quite flexible, while my boss is very restrictive. I also think she …
Dear Crucial Skills, After ten years of not speaking, I made the crucial call to my sister-in-law. Even though I wrote down what I wanted to say, my voice still cracked when I said, “I need to level with you about something and I feel bad about doing it so late. I had concerns and …
Dear Crucial Skills, I work in the HR department for a consulting company. I have worked there for almost eight months and I’ve noticed an ongoing issue with communication—or the lack thereof. On a weekly basis, I discover problems that could have been easily prevented with proper communication. How do I ask my managers to …
