Leaning into Crucial Conversations

How you have conversations in your organization, and the intention with which you speak, matters.

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
– Robert Frost

Overspeaking, looping with no point, and speech riddled with generalities or exaggerations do no good to move your organization and your team forward. But transforming speech turns out to be a difficult challenge. 

• Your speech patterns are habitual, and likely have been allowed by those around you for years and years. So if you loop in your speech and never come to a conclusion, it is likely based on situations of trying to make your point, yet never getting to the point, and others around you allowing you to do this.
• You can notice others’ speech patterns more than you can recognize (and change) your own. So you need others in your life to practice talking and allow them to reflect back to you what is working and what is not working. This process requires safety and trust with those involved in the communication. 

As a firm, we believe in the power of speech, noticing and seeing the results of our speech, and changing that speech to what benefits the greater good and the culture of our community. This year our team will dive into a deep study of crucial conversations. We’ll be reading the book Crucial Conversations together and leaning into our safe community to allow us to challenge one another to grow in this important area of service to our clients. Our conversations, or lack of effective conversations, change how we serve our amazing clients. We work with high-level entrepreneurs who require efficient and strong communication. So we commit to this work as a community so that we can be effective as a team. 

It may be time for you to evolve into an organization that works on these types of speech and communication changes. As a firm, we commit to our own communication so we can effectively deliver services that change our clients. And we do change our clients when we:

• Clean up their accounting so that it reflects what they are selling and how profitable it is
• Format and benchmark their agency financials so they can glean growth insights (meaning they learn what to continue doing, what to stop doing, and new things to start doing)
• Budget and project their financials into the future so they can compare their actual vs. budget financials
• Communicate with their team in ways that helps us run their financial department, invoice their clients, pay their bills, provide cash flow to the owners on a weekly basis, and use financials to tell them things about their business they can’t know without our team’s intentional communication

We teach and talk a lot about growth conversations with agency and design owners. You may want to come talk to us! Sign up for our Newsletter and subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn more about the design of growth!