How do you handle difficult or sensitive conversations with your employees?

Keep it simple. Keep it consistent. Start the conversations early, proactively - before they are needed. Work with the facts and baseline success portrait developed. Emotions can make these conversations difficult so starting before the tough times helps.

Kim Scott has written a book called Radical Candor explaining how to give effective feedback. To summarize her teachings, she encourages leaders to care deeply about all of the members of their team as they provide good and bad feedback with sincerity while showing support to help people achieve their dreams. The concepts in this book make complete sense to me, but I just have one problem when trying to imagine how this could scale across all businesses. Most people are not psychologically prepared to give or receive feedback like this. Most people are not able to overcome the psychological and emotional stress involved in both giving and receiving this type of guidance and do everything they can to avoid these conversations.

Praise in public hand punish in private is an age old adage and when we do this consistently it becomes clear to our people that we really care. Empty praise and generalities do not build trust. Thank you (name) For doing (action) That resulted in (positive result) We are grateful (your name(s)) This is a starting point for adding more intentionality to the recognition outside of rewards programs.

One of the easiest ways to lose credibility is to fumble a sensitive situation by being careless and inconsistent. The more complex the conversation, the more consideration should be given to preparing for the discussion, behaving during the conversation, and committing to appropriate next steps.

I couldn't agree with Bryttani more. We sometimes forget especially with new leaders that this is a skill, no one should just be dropped into the situation of having to have a difficult meeting. It requires a process and approach. Teach it, practice it, prepare for the conversation.

Empathy is a super power that is just now starting to become more recognized. Being empathetic makes your team feel valued, seen and heard. There is no way to build true rapport and trust without empathy. You need to be able to see situations from your employees’ point of view.

As much as we would like to believe that we can change the way that people interpret and respond to feedback, the reality is we are very limited in the potential expected impact. If we want to make a dramatic impact, we need to eliminate each and every step in the process where any potential emotional error could occur that would trigger feelings of anger, disgust, surprise, fear, denial, resentment, or sadness towards the other person. By carefully changing each step in the feedback process, we can better prepare for effective Feedback that is truly designed for the ‘Future of Work’.

When conflict is avoided, it doesn't go away, it gets worse. Conflict happens. Approach it at the onset. Lead conversations about the differences, the disagreements and the problems. Start with being curious with the goal of increasing understanding. Often, those differences will fit together instead of driving everyone apart.