ITS provides managers and staff members a training course, Crucial Conversations, to improve the communication quality of workplace.  At first, I thought it’s just one of those “We need to really listen to each other” type of cliché.  It turned out to be a very valuable training for me in both professional and personal life.

Crucial Conversations defines a conversation become crucial when a situation calls for a change and a serious communication is needed.  It sounds self-explanatory but the skills involved go beyond what we think we naturally can do without awareness.

For example, for an effective conversation to happen both parties need to be willing to do it, sincerely.  However, most of the time, the situation came to that stage because there was some kind of  difficulty and at least one party is less willing to change than the other.  What happens when the party which initiates the conversation will face some resistance from the other party in the form of either silence or violence.  Unfortunately, when we encounter silence or violence, we tend to become part of it.  For example, if the person we try to talk to tries to avoid discussing an uneasy issue, we tend to let it go; if the person gets upset, we tend to get upset, too.

The course teaches some skills to avoid participating in the unproductive or even destructive behavior pattern.  Instead, we learn how to encourage the other party to join our intention of sincere conversation which involves honesty and the intention to improve situations.

Some of the self-observation exercises have made me realize that it takes a lot of awareness to be able to conduct an effective conversation.  One of the most important questions we usually forget to ask ourselves when we are engaged in a heated debate is: “Is this the result I want?  Did what I just say cause the effect I specifically didn’t want?”  We claim that we want to improve the situation but we forget that it takes real patience to achieve the goal — we need to allow the other party enough time to come from the defense side to the mutual side, from which we face the problem together.

All of the skills we learn make it very obvious that the key to successful communication is sincerity.  If we are not sincere enough, none of the techniques will work.

One of the reasons that I enjoy my job is that most people I work with are no-nonsense type.  They mean what they say.  And they do what they say.  I like that.  And a training like this is only meaningful to those who are serious about changes.  The reason that ITS chose such training and provides this training to its staff at such a large scale says a lot about the leaders here.

I am grateful for what I got from the training, and the reason why I got the training.