Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

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Description

Your stomach's churning; you're hyperventilating -- you're in a badly deteriorating conversation at work. Such exchanges, which run the gamut from firing subordinates to parrying verbal attacks from colleagues, are so loaded with anger, confusion, and fear that most people handle them poorly: they avoid them, clamp down, or give in.
But dodging issues, appeasing difficult people, and mishandling tough encounters all carry a high price for managers and companies -- in the form of damaged relationships, ruined careers, and intensified problems.
In Failure to Communicate, Holly Weeks shows how to master the combat mentality, emotional maelstrom, and confusion that poison difficult conversations. Drawing on her many years as a consultant and coach to leaders and executives, the author explains:
Why we turn to ineffective tactics when the heat is on
How to avoid the worst pitfalls of difficult conversations, and how to pull yourself out if you fall in
Ways to regain your balance and inject respect into stressful conversations, even when you've been confronted, infuriated, or wronged
Strategies for mitigating aggression and defensiveness, and for clearing the fog of misconceptions
How to get through the hardest conversations with your reputation and relationships intact
Using proven techniques paired with detailed real-life examples, Weeks equips you with the strategies and practices you need to transform even the toughest conversations.

Author Bio

Holly Weeks is the founder of Holly Weeks Communications, a communications consulting company, and a coach to executives and their organizations on negotiations, presentations, and writing, with a special emphasis on sensitive and difficult communications problems. At Harvard University, Holly is Adjunct Lecturer in Policy Advocacy and Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School; Communication and Speech Consultant to the Urban Superintendents Doctoral Program at the School of Education, teaching the analysis and development of the Vision Speech; and Instructor of Professional Practices at the Landscape Institute at Arnold Arboretum. She is Senior Lecturer in Negotiation at the Simmons School of Management. She has been a keynote speaker, presenter, and workshop leader at national and international conferences.