Difficult Conversations
At least some of the personal interactions you are going to have as a leader are going to fall into the category of a difficult conversation.
Difficult conversations happen when there is conflict, or anticipated conflict, between the ways two people perceive a given situation. For example, when you have to tell a coworker that she is not doing her part, or when someone has done something that has affected you negatively and you need to keep it from happening again.
Getting through by focusing on the end result
Preparation helps, but it isn’t a magic bullet for a difficult conversation.
No matter how much work you do ahead of time you eventually must start the conversation and risk damaging your relationship with the other person. What can help you get through this is to concentrate on why you are having the conversation and understand what the possible outcomes—and their impact—are likely to be.
In performance situations, come in with a plan
If you are about to tell a coworker or employee that his work really isn’t up to par, then focus on your end goal: improving the work product, contribution to the company, and the eventual security of the job. After you deliver the news, be prepared to offer a plan to help the person improve. What, specifically, can they do to bring their performance in line with your goals?
Even though feelings and self-images will be bruised, having a plan for improvement will help make things better in the end.
Dealing with bruised feelings
Likewise if you are confronting someone who has acted thoughtlessly in a way that has injured or irritated you, focus on what you are trying to accomplish.
If you truly care about the person you’re dealing with, your end goal is probably to improve the relationship and restore it to a healthy footing. Even though what you are about to say will be difficult, and a heated exchange may develop, it will help if you stay focused on why you are making the effort in the first place.
On the other hand, it may be that the person in question is not someone you are close to, but the insult was public and subordinated the chain of command. In this case you are trying to restore order and authority, and it doesn’t really matter if you or the other person is uncomfortable as there isn’t a relationship to protect.
Keep in mind that you probably don’t already understand why they did what they did
Something else that can guide you safely through your difficult conversations is to remember that it is impossible to know for sure someone else’s motivation for doing anything until they tell you. You cannot, for example, know that an underperforming employee is striking back at you for not giving him a raise unless he has told you this is the case.
So don’t start a conversation from this point of view. Do start it from the point of view of what you know: lately the employee’s work product is not of the quality that you have come to expect from him, and you’d like to understand why and how you can help. It may be that he is striking back, but you don’t know that until he tells you, so don’t assume this is the case.
I cannot tell you how often I run into this personally. When I first started as a leader of a fairly large group I had several employees who committed serious infractions of our organization’s security policy. These were violations of really basic regulations, and I assumed that the infractions were committed as a willful disregard for the rules. Every time I made this assumption and meted out an appropriately harsh punishment, I later learned that there really was another dimension to the story.
The facts—violation of regulation—were the same, but the motivations were far from what I imagined them to be. And in every case I ended up eating crow and retracting my harsh punishment in favor of something more in line with the complex circumstances.
No matter what you think you know about another person’s motivations, don’t act until you know you know. You’ll rarely be sorry if you take the time to explore the why first.
