Joseph Grenny

Creating sustainable change is a constant struggle for organizations and individuals. We often lack the skills to influence the behaviors behind issues like failed initiatives, short-lived change efforts, unproductive corporate cultures, and entrenched bad habits. Influencer draws on the best practices of many of the world's leading change agents and on five decades of social-science research to create a powerful model for changing behavior.

You'll follow the experiences of influence masters who have succeeded in solving some of the world's most profound problems. Examples ranging from major healthcare reform to reversals of destructive social behaviors to unprecedented corporate turnarounds will illustrate how a proven set of skills makes change not only achievable but sustainable. This is a fast-paced presentation based on Joseph Grenny's New York Times best-selling Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.

Financially agile companies adapt to changing economic circumstances far more rapidly and effectively than the rest of the pack. A study of 1400 executives and managers attributed their 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 diligently than their peers:

• Debate, Dithering, and Denial—managers drag their feet rather than respond assertively to financial challenges.
• Undiscussables—enormous efficiencies and reductions are possible but seem politically risky to discuss.
• Silent Collusion—when leaders fail to follow through on committed reductions, others fail to hold them accountable.
• 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.

This fast-paced, hands-on session demonstrates how these four crucial conversations profoundly affect the resilience and responsiveness of teams and organizations. Participants will learn how to step up to these conversations to improve their organization's financial agility.

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.

In this speech, you will learn to step up to higher stakes conversations skillfully and respectfully and begin to resolve the problems by surfacing the best ideas, making important decisions, and acting on decisions with unity and commitment. Based on the New York Times best-selling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, this presentation reflects over 30 years of research in the trenches of real organizations.

A crucial confrontation is a face-to-face interaction in which we hold another person accountable for a broken promise, a violated expectation, or bad behavior. Accountability issues such as lagging performance, quality, and low morale can keep you from getting the results you need. Crucial Confrontations presents a straightforward step-by-step process for identifying and resolving performance gaps, strengthening accountability, eliminating inconsistency, and reducing resentment.

Based on the New York Times best-selling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, this presentation reflects over 30 years of research in real organizations. Use these skills to turn every disappointment or broken promise into an opportunity for enhancing accountability, improving performance, and ensuring 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 will say they are working on projects, programs, and initiatives that 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. In this interactive presentation, you will learn skills for engaging more effectively in these emotionally and politically risky conversations.