Crucial Moments in Management

Are there moments in our day that matter far more than others - when the way we behave has a profound and disproportionate effect on many things that follow? And secondly, if suchmoments exist, what must we do during those times to ensure the subsequent effects of our response are the best they can be?

Three decades ago, my co-authors and I embarked on a study to discover these crucial moments. We began this search by asking leaders to give us a list of 25 of their stellar managers and 25 "good-but-not-great" ones.

While we set aside six months for the study, the crucial moments were obvious to us within hours. The moments that made the biggest difference in a manager's effectiveness were situations where they had to address an issue with another person or group of people. "Communication" in general was not a crucial moment. It was communication about a topic that had: (1) high stakes, (2) opposing opinions, and (3) strong emotions.

The differences between merely "good" and "great" managers were striking. The "good" managers tended to procrastinate, and sidestep or sugarcoat the real issues. When things got really tense, they occasionally spoke up - but they did it in a way that damaged relationships. The "great" ones tended to speak up more quickly and were far more direct - but they did it in a way that was remarkably unifying, calming, and respectful. Other findings we have come to in our ongoing research include:

Cost of conflict avoidance: According to our research, 95 percent of a company's workforce struggles to confront their colleagues and managers about their concerns and frustrations. In the study of more than 600 people, we found that employees waste an average of $1,500 and an eight-hour workday for every conflict they avoid. In extreme cases of avoidance, an organization's bottom line can be hit especially hard.

Impact on fiscal agility: Studying more than 400 companies that struggled to restructure financially in the face of hard economic times, we found that how well an organization makes financial adjustments depends on how well its leaders hold four specific conversations. For example, when managers could not speak up about financial "sacred cows" in their company, the pace of response was five times slower and the quality of the response (as measured by company profitability) was 10 times worse.

Silence fails: We studied more than 2,200 projects and programs attempted at hundreds of organizations worldwide and found that you can predict, months or years in advance, and with close to 90 percent accuracy, which projects will fail. We found that the predictor of success or failure was whether or not people could skillfully raise five specific concerns that arise during the life of an initiative.

But, as we've seen in many studies, these issues were not the problem. The problem was the silence. In those organizations where people candidly and effectively spoke up about these concerns, the projects were less than half as likely to fail (www.silencefails.com).

Most leaders have it wrong. The key to real change is not just to build a great process, policy, or system - it's for people to hold each other accountable to use the process. And that requires crucial conversations. What 25 years of research has taught me is that one of the most peaceful and productive ways to bring about change is to become far more skillful at handling just these kinds of crucial moments.