North Carolina's Child and Family Services Plan (CFSP), our state's blueprint for strengthening its child welfare system, is organized around the following goals:
1. Strengthen all child welfare staff's ability to assess ongoing safety throughout the child/family's engagement with child welfare services.
2. Increase access to services for children and their families to keep children in the safest, least restrictive setting.
3. Develop and support a stable, competent, and professional workforce in child welfare.
4. Implement continuous quality improvement.
To help achieve all these goals, the NC Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) is striving to build the capacity of everyone in child welfare to identify and engage in crucial conversations.
Crucial Conversations
In the field of child welfare meaningful, high-stakes conversations-with families, community members, service providers, and with each other-are the key to success. That is what a crucial conversation is: a discussion between two or more people where the stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong (Grenny, et al., 2022). Common examples of crucial conversations in our work include:
- Discussing child safety concerns with a parent
- Talking with someone you supervise who is experiencing burnout
- Speaking with a resource parent about doing more to support parent-child visits
- Talking with a child about a change in their permanent plan
Despite the importance and ubiquity of crucial conversations, there are signs that this is an area where workers, supervisors, and agency leaders need to improve. For example, local child welfare agencies have reported that staff were either avoiding difficult conversations or approaching them too forcefully. At the regional level, continuous quality improvement (CQI) teams have found a lack of skill in difficult conversations to be a root cause of many systemic challenges.
Renewed Emphasis
To enhance the ability of staff at all levels to engage in crucial conversations, NCDHHS will soon offer "Empowered Conversations: Building Trust and Collaboration in Child Welfare." This advanced-level, in-person, two-day training is designed to help child welfare professionals develop the skills needed to navigate the tough yet essential conversations that arise throughout the life of a case. Inspired by the bestselling book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High and tailored specifically for the child welfare context, this course emphasizes how intentional communication fosters trust, strengthens collaboration, and supports better family outcomes. While reading the book prior to attending the training is not required, it is recommended.
"Empowered Conversations" will debut in fall 2025. This issue of Practice Notes is both a preview and a supplement to this new course. In it, you can learn more about this course and the framework it teaches, hear how using this framework is already benefiting North Carolina child welfare professionals, explore tips from a crucial conversations expert, and much more. We hope you find it helpful.
