1: “How can I respect someone who behaves in ways I deplore?” Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, and their co-authors ask in their classic book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.
“What do you do if you’re upset because another person has let you down?” they ask.
What if this behavior has happened repeatedly?
“How can you respect a person who is so poorly motivated and selfish?” the authors inquire.
That’s a provocative question.
And, “dialogue truly would be doomed if you had to respect every element of another person’s character before you could talk,” they point out.
“If this were the case, the only person you’d be able to talk to would be yourself.”
2: A crucial conversation is one where the stakes are high, people have different opinions, and emotions are intense.
Having these types of conversations requires mutual respect.
“As people perceive that others don’t respect them,” the authors explain, “the conversation immediately becomes unsafe, and dialogue comes to a screeching halt.”
But what happens when you need to have a difficult conversation with someone who has repeatedly let you down or whose behavior you don’t respect?
“Some people fear they’ll never be able to maintain mutual respect with certain individuals or in certain circumstances,” Joseph, Kerry, and their co-authors observe.
The authors suggest looking beyond your differences and focusing on what you have in common.
“In essence, feelings of disrespect often come when we dwell on how others are different from ourselves,” they note.
You stay in dialogue “by finding a way to honor and regard another person’s basic humanity. Without excusing others’ behavior, you try to sympathize, even empathize, with them,” the authors write.
You don’t have to approve of someone’s behavior to be respectful to them.
As the old prayer says: “Lord, help me forgive those who sin differently than I.”
No one is perfect. Recognizing that you have your own weaknesses can help you find common ground with others. Doing so provides a path to “kinship between yourself and even the thorniest of people,” they write.
“This connection to others,” they observe, “helps create mutual respect and eventually enables you to stay in dialogue with virtually anyone.”
3: Joseph and Kerry share the story of a manufacturing company whose workers had been on strike for six months.
It was a difficult situation. “Finally, the union agreed to return to work, but the represented employees had to sign a contract that was worse than what they were originally demanding.”
People were angry. The path forward was unclear.
“Concerned that although the strike was over, the battle wasn’t, a manager asked one of the authors to lend a hand,” they write.
He met with leaders from management and the union, asking each group to meet separately and write down on a flip chart what they wanted for the company’s future.
“For two hours, each group feverishly laid out what it wanted in the future and then taped the lists to the wall,” the authors write.
When they were finished, the groups were asked to swap rooms to see the goals the other side had written. They were charged with finding something—anything—they might have in common.
Both groups then returned to the larger training room.
“They were positively stunned,” the authors write: “It was as if they had written the exact same lists. They didn’t merely share the shadow of an idea or two. Their aspirations were nearly identical.
“All wanted a profitable company, stable and rewarding jobs, high-quality products, and a positive impact on the community.
“Given a chance to speak freely and without fear of attack,” they note, “each group laid out not simply what it wanted, but what virtually every person wanted.”
Each group began to question the assumptions they were making about the other side.
“They began to see others as more similar to themselves,” the authors note. “They realized the petty and political tactics the others had used were embarrassingly similar to the ones they themselves had employed.”
The exercise allowed both groups to restore mutual respect. “The dialogue replaced silence and violence for the first time in decades,” Joseph, Kerry, and their co-authors write.
More tomorrow.
Reflection: How might your relationships change if you focused more on what you have in common with others rather than what makes you different?
Action: Think of someone you find difficult to respect. Identify one goal, value, or concern you share with that person, and consider how recognizing it might change your next conversation.
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