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Aim for Progress, not Perfection in Crucial Conversations

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In my last post, we learned that a key technique to resolving problems is fostering dialogue with another person, or even a group of people.  This wisdom comes from the best seller, “Crucial Conversations.” 

Having the other person’s best interests in mind goes a long way toward resolving work and personal issues.  That seems like a no-brainer.  But when emotions get the best of us, conversations can go sideways in a hurry.  Truly serving another person’s interests and seeing her point of view start with building mutual purpose and mutual respect during crucial conversations.

Here are some questions to ask oneself before engaging in dialogue:

  • Do others believe I care about their goals?
  • Do they trust my motives?
  • What would I do now if I really wanted to see results?

You may be saying to yourself:  I’m committed to those values, but I can’t get the other person to come around.  The authors, through their countless use cases and observations of crucial conversations, admit that sometimes one has to create a mutual purpose.  That may involve finding more meaningful goals, or longer-term ones.

It also means adroitly combining confidence, humility and skill to make people feel that they can safely contribute their thinking to a conversation.

Confidence enables various opinions to be contributed to the “pool of meaning” without threat or emotion; humility underscores that others have valuable inputs to contribute; and skill avoids the Fool’s Choice we learned about earlier.

Here are some phrases and questions to consider as you pursue mutual purpose:

  • “I want to talk about what each of us likes and doesn’t like.  That way, we’ll be able to see what we need to do to improve and why”
  • “It seems like we’re both trying to force our view on each other”
  • “I commit to staying in our conversation until we have a solution that satisfies both of us”
  • “I’m beginning to feel you are upset with me.  Did I do something to anger you?”
  • “Does anyone see it differently?  Am I missing something here?”

What the authors make abundantly clear in imparting their techniques is they’re not advocating that every decision be made by consensus.  “Dialogue does not equal decision-making.”

The real focus is on solving problems and building relationships.  And to achieve those things, you need everyone to feel comfortable adding information and perspective to a discussion. 

When people are silent for fear of retribution or respond with vitriol, the results are the same: loss of safety and dialogue.  But when they feel they can safely contribute, the greater the possibility for true dialogue and resolution.

 The ultimate goal in all of these techniques is to “aim for progress, not perfection.”

Let’s Bring the Human Connection Back to Communication

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We’ve all seen articles in the press about overuse of social media and technology by our kids and teens. It’s absolutely pervasive in school, during classes, and in many homes.

I’ve had numerous conversations with my high school sophomore about her generation’s overuse of technology as a communications tool and how it’s leading to shortfalls in interpersonal skills. These kids don’t really know how to interact with each other without their phones. In fact, they don’t even use their phones for actual phone calls. I could go on, but I won’t. If you have a teenager, I bet you can relate.

Technology can be a great thing for business. We use email universally and texts are even becoming more common. But perhaps like our kids we are overusing it a bit. Maybe we should take a step back and remember the importance of “conversations” either over the phone or ideally face-to-face.

Back in the day in high tech PR, we used to conduct press tours and analyst tours so our clients could have face-to-face meetings with key influencers. It was a great opportunity to educate them about new products or services. And more importantly, it was an opportunity to build or cultivate key relationships.

Through the use of technology, press tours are no longer needed not that the media have a ton of bandwidth for meetings these days. Nor are they concentrated in a few media hubs like they used to be.

We have learned to rely on email pitches, phone interviews and if it’s really something special, maybe a video conference call so we can screenshare and provide a product demo. Again, a great use of technology that saves time and travel budgets, but what about the relationship building?

In healthcare IT, we have conferences and tradeshows such as HIMSS, HLTH, AHIMA, and so on, where we try to schedule a few minutes with very busy journalists and analysts to get some “face time” for our clients and their customers. But these are rushed meetings where we hope to communicate the news ““ fingers crossed that the editor or analyst retains what we talked about along with their 20 other meetings that day. They don’t call it #HIMSSanity for nothing.

We are in public relations, but do we take time to actually build and nurture the relationships anymore?

I’m lucky that I have a local client here in Atlanta who I get to have face-to-face meetings with occasionally. We could certainly conduct our check-ins over the phone and quite often we do. However, when I get the chance to go meet with them and brainstorm in person, plan strategy, discuss new ways of talking about their solutions, and even talk about the weather and learn about their families, it builds bonds. And quite often we end our meetings with hugs not handshakes maybe that’s a Southern thing.

This is a topic that I have been thinking about a lot lately and I’ve tried to incorporate it into my daily work. When I’m planning to send a colleague a complicated, wordy email that would be better discussed live, I choose to pick-up the phone and have a conversation instead. There is no lost nuance that can often result in an email or text communication, and I leave the conversation knowing my colleague a little bit better. And we begin to develop a bond. And hopefully that bond, that communication, delivers a better outcome for our clients.

As entrepreneur Paul J. Meyer said, “Communication – the human connection – is the key to personal and career success.”

How can you spend more meaningful time communicating and building business relationships? Let’s not be like our kids.