During his Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit presentation Friday morning, author and business strategy expert Joseph Grenny outlined one of the most important myths most people believe when it comes to their friendships: “You have to chose between telling the truth and keeping friends.”
Most people believe if they have those important conversations with others, hurt feelings will lead to estrangement. Just like in business circumstances, this myth creates tensions in relationships that ultimately lead to their deterioration. He identifies what he calls “moments of disproportionate influence” where the opportunity to have the crucial conversations that can resolve conflict arise.
Grenny’s talk was just one of several I was able to watch at Baylor’s Waco Hall this past Thursday and Friday through my internship at the LAUNCH Innovative Business Accelerator. The building served as one of hundreds of host sites that presented a live video feed of the Global Leadership Summit, which took place at Willow Creek in Chicago.
Avoiding these crucial conversations in order to avoid conflict, Grenny said, “is at the heart of most of our dysfunction and barriers to achieving our potential.” He went on to describe an effective leader as someone who identifies the two or three crucial conversations that most affect his or her team or organization.
In the first session of the summit, Willow Creek’ pastor, Bill Hybels, also touched on the importance of these conversations. I’m paraphrasing here, because I wasn’t able to write fast enough to get it word-for-word, but it went a little something like this: “Conflict should be seen as an opportunity to strengthen a relationship and establish deeper levels of trust after you have resolved the issue.”
Grenny described a situation he encountered while working with an authoritarian CEO at a client company. The CEO wanted to dismiss certain parts of the plan that he and Grenny had worked on and Grenny had to decide whether to voice his objections or not. His advice for approaching these situations is to 1. Help them know you care about their problem in an effort to create “mutual purpose” and get them to relax in order to make them more likely to listen to what you have to say; and 2. Create mutual respect so they know you care about them and respect them.
Leave a Reply