Crucial Conversations: This book does a great job describing the landscape and problems in communications. Don't focus too much on the solutions (and all the weird acronyms they have). Even the authors at the end say that if you understand the big picture (people feeling unsafe to speak openly to you, etc), and take actions to mitigate that (it need not be identical to what they recommend), you're most of the way there.
Difficult Conversations: Also a great book on describing the landscape. It has good strategies, but the book is written in a way to be hard to follow in a real conversation. Consider it more of an educational/reference book as opposed to a guide.
Nonviolent Communications (NVC): The best I've read in terms of giving concrete advice. Poor on describing why the strategies work. Had I read this without reading the other two I likely would have dismissed it. The book's advice will seem very wishy-washy, but upon reviewing my notes of the other two books, I realized the advice is pretty much the same in all of them - merely presented differently. Warning: There is a bit of NVC cult out there (similar to TDD, Agile, etc) - ignore the cult/hype and just focus on the stuff in the book.
NVC is very polarizing on HN. However, most of the criticisms I see here about it are clearly from people who've never read the book. And some people are triggered by the use of the word "violent". Hard to help people who judge books by their title.
Getting Past No is also a pretty good book.
BTW, I do not want to come across as an effective communicator. I'm still far from it. However, I think reading all these books and occasionally reviewing my notes has made it much easier for me to identify the communications problems that I witness (mostly at work). I've been in teams with communications problems, and I often fantasize about synthesizing all the stuff in the books into a series of blog posts, using solely examples from work. When I first started reading the books, I kept saying to myself "Ah, this part of the book describes me!" and then "Ah, that annoying guy at work - he's in this book!" and before long all the annoying folks at work were to be found somewhere in there :-)
Difficult Conversations: Also a great book on describing the landscape. It has good strategies, but the book is written in a way to be hard to follow in a real conversation. Consider it more of an educational/reference book as opposed to a guide.
Nonviolent Communications (NVC): The best I've read in terms of giving concrete advice. Poor on describing why the strategies work. Had I read this without reading the other two I likely would have dismissed it. The book's advice will seem very wishy-washy, but upon reviewing my notes of the other two books, I realized the advice is pretty much the same in all of them - merely presented differently. Warning: There is a bit of NVC cult out there (similar to TDD, Agile, etc) - ignore the cult/hype and just focus on the stuff in the book.
NVC is very polarizing on HN. However, most of the criticisms I see here about it are clearly from people who've never read the book. And some people are triggered by the use of the word "violent". Hard to help people who judge books by their title.
Getting Past No is also a pretty good book.
BTW, I do not want to come across as an effective communicator. I'm still far from it. However, I think reading all these books and occasionally reviewing my notes has made it much easier for me to identify the communications problems that I witness (mostly at work). I've been in teams with communications problems, and I often fantasize about synthesizing all the stuff in the books into a series of blog posts, using solely examples from work. When I first started reading the books, I kept saying to myself "Ah, this part of the book describes me!" and then "Ah, that annoying guy at work - he's in this book!" and before long all the annoying folks at work were to be found somewhere in there :-)