How can scientifically adept people (not limited to but including doctors, scientists, nurses) do better at crucial conversations?

The last few weeks have seen my family in India in and out of a hospital very often. A close family member was suffering and the doctors and the family were doing everything possible to make him more comfortable. 

The ailment was of a sudden nature. Having lived a moderately healthy life so far and been robust and fit, nobody expected him to fall sick and that too so suddenly. Doctors explained it in the most routine way- citing age, accumulation of toxins in the system, lifestyle issues - pollution and stress, and so on. But our family was dissatisfied. We desperately wanted to know the why of the situation. Why him and why so suddenly and why was there no cogent explanation? 

How could such well-meaning, and highly educated doctors give us these blasé explanations? Of course we didn’t care for the scientific language, but it couldn’t be as simple as age. Our relative didn’t age overnight! 

Even as I write this, I feel the anger, despite being or may be because of being a crucial conversations practitioner. The doctors remained silent to our angst. Then there was the chain of command to contend with. The ones who came for the regular check-ups were junior practitioners, then there were the functional specialists, and then the Head of department. My family was unsure about the effectiveness of the treatment as each doctor in order to preserve instructions from their superior or maybe in ignorance of them chose silence. They provided us with very little information, mostly ‘wait and watch’ for the senior doctor to join us. My family was feeling stuck because of the crucial conversations that they weren’t having with the doctors, or the doctors weren’t having with my family.

Let’s leave this at that. 

Another friend of mine in Europe is suffering from a potentially fatal disease. While she does her research and notes down what she thinks is relevant to her case, her doctor takes the time to talk her through how she is feeling. They understand that her life is at stake, and she’s suddenly feeling sidelined in her own treatment. There is quite a lot of conversation around it. Diseases can have causes, but what you are feeling is almost as tangible as those causes and needs to be treated as such. 

Surely both these cases have different cultural contexts. The differences among cultures, communities, and individuals causes can create a feeling of insecurity too. What’s common though, universally, is the human experience. 

How can scientifically adept people (not limited to but including doctors, scientists, nurses) do better at crucial conversations? Read handling a personal, interpersonal and possibly volatile situation?

These situations are caused when emotions are rampant, stakes are high and there’s some major difference of opinion. For some it is an easy way of leading with logic and saying things in black and white. Unfortunately, for all of the brain’s right and left hemispheres, communication isn’t as black and white. 

Look first, shoot later: before you or your colleague start getting into a fight or flight mode, take quick action. Ask yourself how did the dynamic change so much and so suddenly that the other person is either withdrawing from the conversation or is on the verge of shooting their mouth off. 

Silence and violence aren’t necessarily two disjointed ends of a spectrum. It’s a continuum and there’s the beauty that you’ve got to acknowledge. When the person moves across that continuum there are visible changes to their body language, their language and their gestures and tone that you’ve got to train yourself to look for. 

Make it safe by not diluting the content: for those of us who shy away from confrontation it is an obvious choice to dilute the content so as to spare the feelings of the other. Don’t do that. Instead just restate your intent. For eg “my intent is to get us to a solution and I want us to go away from here with one that works for both”. This makes it safe. Yes. Saying it aloud really does. Show that you are on the same side, but don’t soft pedal your message. 

Listen to your story before you share it aloud: for each person who defied you in the last year, you’ve this feeling of detachment or resentment. In your head you’ve decided that they were coming in the way of your success, so it was just simpler to sideline them so as to avoid any kind of friction or distasteful experience for either. Now what if you changed your story and decided that all these guys were only trying to help you or push you into a more efficient direction of doing what you were doing. There, that feeling of relief and of curiosity is what makes crucial conversations successful. It makes feelings irrelevant to the actual content of the discussion. 

In organizations it is rather easy to lose good associates and also entire teams on that silence to violence continuum. It is tough to have those conversations, because even over time, they don’t get easier, but in the long run, they make your life significantly easy. Every conversation will start with that mild trepidation, but if you are able to have it well, then there’s a real solution there for everybody.

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About the author:

My passion is to create opportunities and catalyse relationships that help us thrive! I believe that personal, organisational and societal change is an interactive development process and through my interventions I seek to build awareness and action across all. I have had the privilege to have coached and trained leaders and management teams in 40 plus countries globally and on all continents.

Over the last two decades, I have engaged with leadership development, L&D and talent management across the entire spectrum from diagnosis to design to implementation. Currently I run my own niche Executive Coaching Practice to accelerate the leaders path to success through my focus on #LeadershipBranding.

Drop me a message at [email protected] or to schedule a call with me please use : calendly.com/shivangi/15-mins-call

Here are 2 initiatives I have founded : www.thrivewithmentoring.com, a non-profit that catalyses women to women mentoring (currently present in 5 countries) and www.xponential.cc (through which I bring award winning leadership trainings such as Crucial Conversations and Power of Habit).