As a brand new 22-year-old special education teacher managing a team of 5 paraprofessional aides, my school district sent me to a Crucial Conversations training to help me gain the conversational skills needed to be a better leader. At the time it felt like a lifesaver, because several of the aides were old enough to be my mother and I felt so uncomfortable being in charge. The tools I learned empowered me to have hard and awkward conversations with my team whose behavior I sometimes had to correct.
I recently re-read the accompanying book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, and was struck by how universal these communication skills really are. If fact, these conversational tools are the very same principles that I teach people in couple and family therapy, just packaged up in different, more business-like wrapping.
I would recommend this book to anyone. Implementing these skills can definitely improve your relationship with your romantic partner and kids. However, I would particularly recommend this book to those struggling with uncomfortable interactions in the workplace, as many of the examples in the book have to do with work and business. My personal example above indicates how useful it was to learn how to be a more effective manager, but it also has a ton of great content for those looking to improve relationships with peer co-workers or those seeking strategies for more successfully interacting with a difficult boss. I would also recommend this to someone who is more interested in business/leadership books than therapy/self-help books because the principles can be generalized for effective communication in all relationships. In fact, I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from learning how to handle tough conversations better.
The writing style is casual and very readable. The audiobook version is only about four hours long so it isn’t too much of a time investment, though you’ll likely need to go through the tools more than once for them to really sink in. There is a companion book called Crucial Confrontations which I have not yet read but is likely a good follow-up if you enjoy the content in this one. If you give it a try, let me know what you think!
