The Four Conversations – Daily Communication that Gets Results

The Four Conversations
236 Pages
ISBN 978-1-57675-920-2

Realizing your goals takes more than passion, vision, and commitment: it takes communicating with other people. To be successful, that communication must go beyond basic skills and good manners. Getting more of what you want—in work and in life—will depend on how well you use four types of conversations.

“Initiative conversations” are the ones you use when you are suggesting doing something different, or proposing a new goal to work toward. “Understanding conversations” are the dialogues or discussions you have that flesh out the details of how something could be accomplished: who does what, and where are the resources to do it, for example. “Performance conversations” are the requests and promises – the agreements – that people make to take actions and produce results. Almost nobody is good at these. “Closure conversations” are the ones you use to update the status of a project, follow-up on a request or promise, or complete some piece of business or activity.

These everyday conversations can be improved by adding the right ingredients to each one, and by following up with people to keep things moving. Find out which conversations you’re good at having, and which ones you could strengthen. It’s a way to bring more trust into relationships, and to accomplish more of what you really want for yourself and others.

Laurie Ford

About Laurie Ford (Rochester, New York Author)

Laurie Ford

Laurie Ford is retired from a 30+ year career as a management consultant. She often collaborates on publications with her husband Jeffrey Ford, a professor of management, now retired from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. Management consultant plus management professor: it’s all about management for them.

Laurie went to college at SUNY Buffalo. After getting a BA in psychology, she became a computer programmer and got interested in the whole idea of “systems”. So, back to school, this time in engineering: a MS in industrial engineering and a PhD in operations research engineering – that’s the real systems stuff, networks and all. She translated her engineering education, with a little help from the psychology background, into tools and solutions that would help managers and executives implement changes in their… systems, of course.

In every client organization, whether business, government, or not-for-profit, the first questions were the same. How do we implement this change? How do we improve communication? How do we get people to help solve this organizational problem? The answer: look at the network of interactions that connect your people, then engage them in making those connections work smarter. Simple, and fun. Now she’s writing for managers, and we’ll see what happens.