Skip to Content
Crucial Confrontations
book

Crucial Confrontations

by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
August 2004
Intermediate to advanced
284 pages
6h 13m
English
McGraw-Hill Osborne Media

Overview

The authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations show you how to achieve personal, team, and organizational success by healing broken promises, resolving violated expectations, and influencing bad behavior

Discover skills to resolve touchy, controversial, and complex issues at work and at home--now available in this follow-up to the internationally popular Crucial Conversations.

Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you'll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly--and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren't just irritating, they're costly--sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces.

Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like:

  • An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that steps crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?

  • Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can't meet--and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn't want to hear complaints about it.

  • Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.

  • An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?

  • Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.

  • A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers "how things work around here" and decides not to say anything.

  • Everyone knows how to run for cover, or if adequately provoked, step up to these confrontations in a way that causes a real ruckus. That we have down pat. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn't harm the relationship--and in fact, even strengthens it.

    Crucial Confrontations borrows from twenty years of research involving two groups. More than 25,000 people helped the authors identify those who were most influential during crucial confrontations. They spent 10,000 hours watching these people, documented what they saw, and then trained and tested with more than 300,000 people. Second, they measured the impact of crucial confrontations improvements on organizational and team performance--the results were immediate and sustainable: twenty to fifty percent improvements in measurable performance.

    Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
    and much more.

    Read now

    Unlock full access

    More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

    AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

    QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
    Julian F.
    Head of Cybersecurity
    QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
    Addison B.
    Field Engineer
    QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
    Amir M.
    Data Platform Tech Lead
    QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
    Mark W.
    Embedded Software Engineer

    You might also like

    The Smart Way to Respond to Negative Emotions at Work

    The Smart Way to Respond to Negative Emotions at Work

    Christine M. Pearson

    Publisher Resources

    ISBN: 9780071446525Purchase book