Joseph Grenny
Featured Keynote Programs
Crucial Conversations
Tools for Talking when Stakes are High
Crucial conversations (conversations where stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong) happen every day and impact all of our results, yet few people invest in the skills for holding them well.
Studies show that the inability to discuss a problem can be more destructive than the problem itself. Issues like poor productivity, declining quality, lack of teamwork, or strained relationships are often the effects of crucial conversations that aren’t being held or aren’t being held well.
Learn to step up to high stakes conversations skillfully and respectfully and begin to resolve the problems by.
• Surfacing the best ideas
• Making important decisions
• Act on decisions with unity and commitment
Creating an Accountability Culture
How to Change Behavior and Drive Innovation
Your organization’s ability to grow is determined by the employees’ capacity to do two things well.
Identify, respond and triumph over challenges, and Adapt to change.
Executive leadership, managers, front-line workers, everyone up and down the org chart must be rowing in the same direction on those two areas. Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done.
The key ingredient: people holding one another accountable. Accountable to adopt new processes, accept new ways of working, innovate products and services, and more effectively serve customers (to name a few). This is easily one of the most important – yet difficult things to achieve.
Joseph will share examples from a fascinating case study of The Other Side Academy where ex-convicts have created an accountability culture where relationships and results flourish. You’ll gain valuable insights and practical takeaways such as:
• Why accountability is vital to organizational success
• How to cut lag time and disappointment between what people say and what they deliver
• A step-by-step strategy for building total accountability in the workplace
• How to address performance in a way that solves the problem while actually strengthening the relationship
Financial Agility; The Four Crucial Conversations
Financially agile companies adapt to changing economic circumstances far more rapidly and effectively than the rest of the pack. A study of 1,400 executives and managers attributed thier financial agility to the capacity to handle four crucial conversations around fiscal challenges. Firms that handled the following conversations well adapted over ten times faster and weathered downturns far more intelligently than their peers:
1. Debate, Dithering, and Denial—managers drag their feet rather than respond assertively to financial challenges.
2. Undiscussables—enormous efficiencies and reductions are possible but seem politically risky to discuss.
3. Silent Collusion—when leaders fail to follow through on committed reductions, others fail to hold them accountable.
4. Irrational Slashing—executives impose across-the-board reductions or other policies that middle managers realize will create serious downsides the executives may be unaware of.
Silence Fails
The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution
An organization’s success is determined by how well people execute on its high-stakes projects and initiatives. However, current execution trends are anything but promising. According to recent research:
• Fewer than one in three critical initiatives will achieve intended goals, and almost half are deemed outright failures.
• 83 percent of employees say they are working on projects, programs, and initiatives they believe will fail.
• Companies’ collective inability to execute on major projects costs hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
The good news is that these failures are predictable—and therefore, preventable. In the groundbreaking study, Silence Fails: The Five Crucial Conversations for Flawless Execution, VitalSmarts and The Concours Group found that project failures are almost always preceded by conversation failures. Learn to step up to these five crucial conversations and improve results through better decision making, higher quality project execution, and more engaged leadership.
Silence Kills
The Seven Crucial Conversations for Healthcare
Every year, 195,000 people die in U.S. hospitals because of medical mistakes. Often, well-intentioned professionals in healthcare organizations choose not to speak up when they’re concerned with the behavior, decisions, or actions of a colleague.
The study suggests that creating a culture where healthcare workers speak up before problems occur is a vital part of saving lives. Learn to step up to these seven crucial conversations and drastically transform your healthcare organization.
Crucial Conversations for Conflict Resolution
Is the cost of conflict killing your bottom line? According to a VitalSmarts study, 95 percent of an organizations workforce struggles to speak up about concerns. As a result, they engage in resource-sapping tactics including ruminating excessively, complaining, getting angry, doing unnecessary work, and avoiding.