ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph Grenny is coauthor of three bestselling books, Influencer, Crucial Conversations, and Crucial Confrontations. His fourth book, Change Anything, will be available April 2011. READ MORE Did you already blow your New Year’s resolution? You’re not alone. It turns out that fewer than one in twenty of us succeed at changing a …

Dear Crucial Skills, It’s my job to influence the people in our company to improve quality—both of incoming raw material and of our outgoing products—and it’s hard. We’ve got all the “head” stuff right—technical expertise and good quality tools—but we don’t have the heart. And to make it even more difficult, the people I need …

Dear Crucial Skills, Help! I am the wife of a hoarder. My husband buys and keeps everything. He has a hobby room, garage, and a rented storage unit full of stuff, including twenty-year-old key chains from vendor booths, console TVs from the 1970s, empty boxes, old magazines, plastic silverware, and anything others don’t want or …

Dear Crucial Skills, Our company is going through tough times in the midst of the current financial downturn. We are not downsizing but have been instructed to cut expenses, work more efficiently, and basically do more with less. We have implemented many initiatives—including staffing to workload, reducing overtime, and purchasing more efficiently. All of these …

Dear Crucial Skills, I was recently asked to lead an effort to implement job rotation in our organization. The problem is that the team I’ve been asked to lead thinks it’s a dumb idea. They are focused on their own jobs and have no interest in cross-training and rotation. How am I supposed to lead …