3 Crucial Conversations to Maximize Your Success

In business, your success is heavily impacted by your relationship effectiveness. In the workplace, there are three conversation types you must master to have optimally effective relationships:

1. Coaching Conversations - A coaching conversation helps another person learn, grow, and become more confident at solving problems. People will often come to you, especially if you're a manager, with issues, problems, and concerns. If you don't learn to lead effective coaching conversations you may find yourself being tapped to solve other people's problems as a knee-jerk response whenever an issue arises. Before too long, your team will stop thinking for themselves and come to you as the default troubleshooter.
2. Straight-Talk Conversations - Straight talk conversations are one of the most difficult conversations for people to engage in. These conversations involve addressing thorny issues you may have with a direct report, a co-worker, or even your manager. Avoiding tough conversations is never a good idea, as it merely breeds resentment over time. Not preparing to have a straight-talk conversation in the most effective way increases the likelihood of the conversation going poorly, and you may come across as blaming, or critical.
3. Agreement-Building Conversations - These conversations ensure team alignment and are essential to foster accountability, consistency in communications and messaging, and keep team members on the same page.

When you think of your workplace, how often are you and others on your team using constructive coaching conversations to help others feel confident in owning and resolving issues?

Next, think about difficult feedback conversations. Are you and your team members approaching potentially difficult conversations with confidence and experiencing deepened respect and trust for one another through successful conflict resolution?

Finally, are you experiencing alignment, accountability, and consistent messaging across the team when coming out of meetings?

If you answered "Yes!" to all of these questions, great work! We have other Breakthrough Tools available to help you continue to build a strong organization that gets results.