Crucial conversations is a dialogue style that teaches you to calm your emotions and stick to the heart of the matter during high stake, highly opinionated conversations. For civility, this tool is a game-changer. With this technique, we learn to express controversial topics with respect for one another. New York Times Best Seller, Crucial Conversations, has been used in Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and corporations across the nation.

Our problems with civility come because we are under an immense amount of stress, whether from work or from home. It’s because we are stressed that communication gets strained. As employers, using this model, we can provide the framework for our managers in how to communicate with each other in times of high stress.

What are Crucial Conversations?

Crucial conversations have three critical elements: high stakes, high opinions, and high emotion. During high stake conversations, our emotions cloud our judgment and create a story around the situation. We then respond to this story and pursue a completely different initiative based on an emotional response. It’s actually quite bizarre once you understand what is happening and is very common.

This process is hard to clarify because it’s happening behind the scenes. For most of us, our brains go into fight-or-flight in a high stressful situation (and have a higher likelihood of doing so when we are under long-term stress). The adrenaline in our body naturally kicks in when we are under stress, hijacking our ability to communicate clearly, and causes the dialogue to become unsafe.

Crucial conversations give us a way to calm down our physical response to proceed appropriately with the situation and get what we want. The process is also about being 100% honest and 100% respectful. It takes individual self-awareness, tact, and our willingness to pivot from our traditional responses.

When emotions take over we can often speak from a place of hurt, it can make the conversation murky. Practicing the crucial conversation model is about taking charge of your body to get centered again by asking yourself a series of questions.

Self inquiry explains to your brain that you are not under any physical threat which sends blood back to the logical side and, most importantly, away from our body’s fight-or-flight response. This helps the logical side of our brain come back online and allows you to behave appropriately.

The author gives the example of a CEO wanting to set up the new corporate office in his hometown, but everyone knows it would be more economical to set it up on the west coast. Most employees would stay silent to avoid upsetting the power dynamics. Instead, one employee has the ability to disagree while maintaining respect for him.

This allows his boss to hear an alternative approach without becoming defensive. That’s why it’s important for your managers to model a healthy response when an employee has the courage to speak up. The leader sets the tone for the culture and allows for open and honest communication.

Your intention is the foundation for the whole setup. There is a central core question that helps keep your intentions in tack.

The Crucial Questions:

What do I really want here? What is the outcome I am seeking? Am I behaving in accordance with that outcome?

If not, it’s time to perform self-inquiry.

The Successful Elements of Crucial Conversations

When you are no longer contributing information, but are retreating to behaviors of silence or violence, this is a sign the dialogue is becoming unsafe. You want to watch for the moment that the conversation becomes crucial, and signs that people don’t feel safe in the dialogue based on how they are reacting to the conversation.

A good example of feeling unsafe is when employees fall silent in a meeting after the leader makes a decision they don’t agree with. When our stress level get high, we have natural reactions that make up these characteristics such as withdrawing from the conversation, rolling our eyes, or making back-handed comments.

Take the Crucial Conversation Style Under Stress Assessment!

There are several ways to get out of the Fool’s Choice. One way is by bringing ourselves back to the heart of the matter. We ask what we want for ourselves, the other person, and the relationship. This is self-inquiry that also conveys to our subconscious that we are safe. Once we are not responding from our emotional side, we clarify what we want and don’t want.

For the self:

What do we want for ourselves, the other person, and the relationship?

What to say to others:

What I don’t want ________________

What I do want _____________________

This forces your brain into a more complex inquiry that steers you away from your natural stress responses. Here’s the high-level breakdown of how to have a successful dialogue at a crucial time:

People become defensive when they no longer feel safe. The authors say this happens when it stops being about the content and becomes more about the condition of the conversation. When you believe the other person has your best interests in mind, however, you no longer become defensive. We communicate that we have each other’s best interest at heart by speaking respectfully.

People tend to hold back their opinions instead of risk upsetting or angering someone in a position of power. When people sit back, which happens in unsafe psychological workplaces, there is a rarely an investment in the final decision or outcome from the group.

We also may be on the other end of the spectrum where instead of silence we strive towards violence, which is a form of compelling someone else towards our point of view. This is also a tactic that isn’t invested in finding a solution that works for all.

Crucial conversations give us a guide on how to bring things back to safety. Psychological safety is the number one cause these days for toxic workplaces. In Overcoming 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni says it’s the foundation.

Through this process, it’s important to clarify what you mean to avoid assumptions and misinterpretations. This is especially common at work, when we don’t feel comfortable being vulnerable. Vulnerability is a key trait also found in healthy teams.

Mutual respect is a critical component which is also lost with civility issues. We must tap into our desire to come to a compromise that works for both parties. During stress, however, our amygdala is hijacked and a fight-or-flight response is triggered, rendering us incapable of no longer being able to think or get our point across in the best way. This process asks that you put aside the story and manage your physical response first to effectively navigate critical conversations.

Like Social Styles and Nonviolent Communication, Crucial Conversations give you a guide on how to act civil at work and stay in communication with one another through times of high stress.