Personal Development Project - Report #6 - Silence or Violence

Part of the Certified Public Manager program involves the completion of a personal development project.  My selected project is to prepare a series of lectures to my fellow managers about basic managerial concepts.  These series of posts are intended to document my progress in that endeavor.  This report pertains to a presentation made on 4/28/14.


Silence & Violence

 For this week's lecture on key management concepts I began what I hope will be a series of lectures covering some of the important concepts I have learned from my listening to Crucial Conversations.

 I started with the exercise of having the participants list behaviors of 4 year olds who don't get their way.  I then made the connection that adult patterns are not much different in their purposes.

Grouping these responses, we tend to have either silence or violence.  We either withdraw from the conversation into forms of silence, or we attack others in forms of violence.  Where what we need to be aiming for is dialogue and discussion.

So the two main takeaways from this discussion are to first realize when we see these responses in ourselves and realize that we are avoiding dialogue because of safety issues.  The second main takeaway is when we see others employing these responses we need to realize that they do not feel safe.

There was some very good discussion at the end of this session I will describe below.


I was most interested in Tommie's comments, he had previously had a propensity towards the violence response based on his background.  Now with some maturity and exposure to more "professionals" he has learned to emphasize the silence side.

We also discussed that their may be times when violence is appropriate, particularly if ones family is threatened.

Somehow the conversation moved towards the value of team building and having the group work together on a project as a way to build team camaraderie.

Tommie did thank me at the end of the meeting for the information.  I am very grateful that the material is being found to be helpful and is being well received.