In his role heading up workforce management for DCMS Department of Personnel Readiness, Lt. Timothy Sargent is no stranger to tough conversations.
“The Coast Guard is a large enterprise, and its interests can be contradictory,” said Sargent who often finds himself negotiating to shift billets to ensure proper training and mission coverage. “You really have to be able to deal with people having different viewpoints than you do and know how to collaborate.”
That’s one reason Sargent signed up for a recent 3-day Crucial Conversations course at Coast Guard Headquarters. The training, which has helped high performing organizations around the world, is designed to provide participants with the tools to work through disagreements and achieve better results when stakes and emotions are high. It’s applicable to everything from negotiating with another department for more resources or debating the best marketing strategy with management to talking to an employee about missing deadlines or asking your boss why you didn’t get put on a particular project.
The course is based on the book, “Crucial Conversations,” by Joseph Grenny et al., which was coincidentally on Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan’s reading list. CG-6 began offering the class in 2019, after poor results on the Defense Organizational Climate Survey (DEOCS) revealed communication both up and down the chain of command at the directorate needed to improve.
Since then, CG-6 has held sessions annually, says Sonia Kendall, communications policy manager, who runs the course and is one of its instructors. To date, 75 percent of the CG-6 staff have taken it, and Kendall has offered it to other directorates when there were extra seats. “Interest has just spiraled,” she said.
But because she has just four instructors, Kendall now only offers the class to members of other directorates who want to get certified. That way they can teach the course to their programs.
“My goal is to have enough instructors so that everyone in the Coast Guard can take the course can take it,” she said. “Ideally it would be great if we all knew these skills.”
So, what are crucial conversations and why do they matter?
For many of us, crucial conversations are the ones we’d rather avoid. Talking with someone who has an opposing viewpoint about a matter where stakes are high and it’s easy to get emotional is challenging. At work, it might mean discussing why you got a poor performance review with your boss. In our personal lives, it could be confronting relationship problems with your spouse or talking politics with differently minded friends or relatives.
But avoidance keeps us stuck and doesn’t get either side any closer to fulfilling their goals. So, this course provides a framework for how to prepare for and conduct these conversations productively. Some takeaways for success:
Choose the right topic for the conversation
First, you need to decide whether the problem you want to discuss is a process, pattern, or relationship issue. Did your employee miss a deadline once or is this part of a pattern that has hampered your team’s productivity before? Is this behavior starting to impact how much you trust this employee or your relationship with them?
Start with heart and share your good intent
This means identifying what you really want – for you, for others, and the for the relationship – so you understand your goals going in. Then you should share your good intent as a way of opening the conversation. For example, say you feel your boss is lax about enforcing deadlines and want to talk to him about improving efficiency on your team. You might say, “if you have a minute to touch base on this upcoming project, I have some ideas that might lighten our workload.”
Learn to separate facts from stories
A popular exercise in the course had participants review the stories that they were telling to determine which were facts, and which were based on emotions. Too often, it’s easy to make ourselves out to be the victims, while the person who disagrees with us is the villain.
Master Chief Anitra Keith says she took the course after reading the book because she wanted more practice. In her role as CMC at the C5I Service Center she regularly holds tough conversations up and down the chain of command.
“I’m embarrassed to say I’ve gone into situations where my mind was made up and then I find out that things I believed to be true were wrong,” she said. “I want to be able to go into a meeting where I can be candid and respectful and know when to take my feelings out of it.”
Make the other person feel safe
If the person you’re holding the conversation with doesn’t trust or misinterprets your intent, this can shut down communication before it even begins. So, it’s important to be observant and know how to address these misunderstandings when they happen. One of the skills taught in the course is using a contrasting statement to rebuild trust. For example, in the case of an employee who is missing deadlines, you might say: “I’m not saying that I want you off the team. Your contribution is really important. I do want to talk to you about a pattern I’m seeing with deadlines.”
“If people could really internalize the part about calming people and getting them to a safe space, that would go a long way towards making these conversations productive,” Sargent said. “I feel like I’m already starting to make inroads.”
Keith also found the training beneficial. “The best part was when broke into groups,” she said. “It was useful to practice our conversations and talk about how we could have handled a situation better.”
To learn more about Crucial Conversation course, check out a class description at www.cruciallearning.com
If you’re interested in take the course to become certified as an instructor, contact Sonia Kendall at Sonia.L.Kendall@uscg.mil.
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