In Crucial Conversations and Influencer you note studies that correlate changes in behavior to increases in productivity and/or profitability.

I will be going through Crucial Conversations trainer certification in January and would like to know how we can measure the impact of the classes after they are performed. What are some of the ways you've measured impact?

--Signed,
Results Oriented

I was glad to get your question because it's not one that we get too often: and that's unfortunate.

The reason I'm so happy to get your question is that it's a rare company that really pays the price to measure impact of organization development efforts. We cut our teeth on such activity and called ourselves VitalSmarts because we wanted to find the "vital skills" that profoundly and measurably affected crucial business results. It was that kind of measurement-oriented work that led us to discovering the principles in Crucial Conversations, Influencer, and our other published papers, books, and training programs.

Here are three tips for increasing the rigor of your influence work through measurement:

1. Something simple. If your goal is simply to improve the way your team functions, and the result you'd like to achieve is to improve communication about a few key issues within the team, you can gather useful data by creating a small survey and administering it yourself. For example, you and your teammates could agree on three to five different issues that you have a hard time discussing. Next, design survey items to measure the quality of your conversations around these few specific issues. Administer the survey before the training, immediately after the training, and again 60 and 180 days following. This approach with not give you hard evidence that you've affected organizational performance, but it will give you some indication about whether behavior in the team has changed.

2. A bit more rigorous. Something all three of these recommendations have in common is that the starting point is identifying the three to five crucial conversations that you and other leaders believe are integral to improving results. If you look at some of our studies (Silence Kills or Silence Fails) you'll see how we have identified these crucial conversations.

If your goal is to test for relationships between improvements in crucial conversations and key results, you can take the first recommendation and simply track changes in the team's results compared to improvement in survey results. While this is not hard statistical evidence, the comparison of improvements in team behavior to changes in bottom-line metrics will give you some reason to believe the two are related to each other.

3. Even deeper. Finally, you can go to the level of professional research to gather hard data that proves the correlation between training and results. We've used a variety of research methods in our work. All of the methods involve careful gathering and statistical analysis of data. For example, at Lockheed Martin we identified three crucial conversations we believed would influence improvement in quality, costs and employee engagement in the manufacturing area. We designed a survey to track improvement in these three crucial conversations. We then gathered data from 30 different teams in the factory from both behaviors (the crucial conversations survey) and results (quality, costs and employee engagement). When we ran statistical tests (both simple correlation and multiple regressions) we could demonstrate profound relationships between improvement in these three crucial conversations and results. Most importantly, by the simple act of drawing attention to both data sets, we helped leaders begin to see that there were literally no cases where teams substantially improved in results without also improving these three crucial conversations.

For those interested, I'd like to offer sample survey items you can use to get at various crucial conversations issues. These are drawn from various client projects and are available for download at: www.vitalsmarts.com/userfiles/File/pdf/SampleEvaluationQs.pdf

Good luck--and congratulations again on your desire to influence real and measurable change.

Warmly,

Joseph Grenny

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Can—Must Can

I came across an interesting saying as I was conducting a Crucial Conversations class in Singapore. It goes like this: "Can—must can. Cannot—also must can." This saying caught my attention because it came in the form of a question from one of the participants in the class. "Isn't that essentially what you're advocating here?" the participant asked.

I paused before answering for dramatic effect, and more importantly, to try to figure out what in the world this saying meant. Just as my eye started to twitch noticeably, the participant jumped in with an explanation, "It means that if you know you can do something, then you must do it. And, if you know it won't work, you must do it anyway."

At first, I thought of this saying as merely a catchy expression. But as I've pondered it, I've come to appreciate the meaning that lies beneath the catchy surface. In essence, it strikes at the foundation of one of the most common "yeah buts" we employ when we face a difficult situation. You know, the one that starts with, "That might work in most cases," and ends with "but not with this person." Or the "yeah but" that lets you off the hook for not trying to be on your best behavior because, "it's simply not worth it."

I found that this deeper meaning raises an interesting challenge. It suggests that instead of throwing our hands up in the air and uttering those soothing "yeah but" words at the first sign of an apparent no-win situation, we need to apply our skills and do our best.

So, if you're facing a situation that is easy to resolve through dialogue then you must can! And if you're facing a no-win, untenable, "if it were anyone else but this person...," type of situation then you also must can! Your efforts at dialogue will not make the situation worse and, most of the time, your efforts will make the situation better.

If you have an interesting saying you've either run across or created yourself, click on the link below and share it with me. I'd love to share some or your favorite mantras in future columns.

Share your favorite Crucial Conversations Saying

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