now the argument I want to make is that all these different profound effects come from one simple lack the lack of speaking up in a way that is direct Frank right honest and yet respectful when you've got a concern about somebody's performance people would rather suck raw eggs and then hold somebody accountable now we wanted to document this using some research and I want to spend the next five minutes or so sharing what we found so a bit on the research we had about 1,100 respondents 97% of us think of yourself can identify at least one what we describe career limiting habit a behavior you've got like for me I tend to procrastinate and not just anything I tend to procrastinate the jobs that I dislike the most right I who else has a career limiting habit anybody here right yeah we all do right so that's sort of obvious now here's where it comes into performance review almost three out of four managers say the biggest barrier to advancement is not technical skills right don't go back to school its behaviors it's these career limiting habits it's these behaviors that they see right and it gets worse these same bosses give you less than a 1 in 10 chance of ever changing that career limiting habit that you've got so there's a real pessimism out there it's like a stereotyping that's going on here you are you're not going to change but it gets worse ok we don't feel much more optimistic than our bosses do when we identify a career limiting habit in ourselves we only give ourselves a 1 in 3 chance that we'll ever be able to change it this is really holding people back right so I'm gonna argue that the 20th century approach to change has failed us it's failed us because people haven't changed and they've suffered because they haven't 87 percent of employees have suffered economically because they didn't change and here's the situation they know they have to change they want to change least they say they want to change and yet they're unable to change that's the situation performance management processes don't lead to performance improvement so this is sort of setting the stage for for the rest of my talk I want to argue that the health of a relationship a team or an organization is a function of the following the average lag time between identifying and discussing problems discussing them in ways that are honest that are frank that are respectful and I want to have you be able to walk out of here with just a few tools that you can use to make that happen so I'm going to look at three big ideas the first one is pretty simple some conversations are more crucial than others right that 98% of the time 98% of us do 98% of the right stuff around conversations that means that 2% of the time 2% of us do 2% of the wrong stuff and my argument is that those that little percentage has a hugely disproportionate impact on our success and the organization's success big idea number two is the way you start a conversation determines whether you'll like the way it ends is what we call the hazardous half minute that first 30 seconds that sets the tone and then third I want to argue that we don't have performance problems so much as we have influence problems rather than simply describing someone's performance and hoping they get better we need a robust strategy for influencing them to get better and influencing ourselves