How to Excel at “Hard” Conversations

In your work, how many conversations do you have a day? Could you produce and achieve without those conversations? How comfortable and competent are you at creating effective and powerful conversations?

Recently, Chalmers Brothers spoke to 50 of my #Vistage members about being a conversation architect. He began by establishing his six foundations for success that only work if you are self-aware. These are basic claims that can serve as healthy supportive context for how we think, how we speak, and how we act to move forward most productively.

1. You cannot change another human being. You can only change yourself and you can’t change what you don’t see. Becoming a more powerful, more competent observer of ourselves is the key (to success).
2. We are not hermits. You do what you do – already – with and through people. Everyone, to some extent, is in relationship with other people. Your success (results) is not only based on a set of functional or technical competencies.
3. If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. New results require new actions.
4. We are always engaged with choices. Many of us are not very powerful observers of the choices we have available.
5. How you see things matters. A lot. Your interpretation is a choice.
6. Change is permanent so get used to it. How you orient yourself and your organization toward change directly impacts performance, corporate culture, and the bottom line.

There were many essential observations and valuable takeaways from his presentation, but something that truly stood out was his invitation to actively grapple with language instead of simply being immersed in it. Language is far more than our descriptive capabilities.

While this may initially seem obvious, it opens up a new way of understanding language and provides powerful tools for more effective leadership. Language is widely understood as a tool for communication; it not only describes it creates and generates.

Given the centrality of conversation for leadership and management, it is worth studying and reflecting on language.

Leadership and management are primarily "conversational competencies" - that is, the actions taken by leaders and managers are actions taken in language. Leadership has gone from command and control to inspiring and enrolling. An effective leader must be competent in designing and conducting conversations that matter.

Point of reflection: can you be a strong leader without lifting 100 pounds over your head? Can you be a powerful leader without being able to conduct conversations? It’s essential to understand that independent of the level of physicality of what’s required of you as a leader or manager, you cannot be strong and powerful without communication.

Our ability to “lead effectively” and/or “build a more productive culture” and/or “drive sales” and/or “create alignment” and/or “improve performance” is equal to our ability to engage productively in certain types of conversations.

How to Have “Hard” Conversations

A foundational distinction to possess is what is the event or what happened and the explanation that we attribute to it.

Point of reflection: is it the events of your life or your explanations about those events that are more influential to the actual actions you take?

Explanations are always the springboard for the actions we take and our explanations live in language. Instead of evaluating our explanations as right or wrong, consider if the explanation is effective or ineffective, or if it is powerful or not powerful.

If there are difficult conversations that we need to have and we don’t know how to begin them, we need to “speak into our concerns”. “Speak into our concerns” means that we are creating and generating context. Ambitious people want to hear constructive criticism and they want to hear it with trust, respect, authenticity, and possibility. That is what we create when we are intentional about context. ?

A quick way to create context: declare the value of the relationship to you. State what you find difficult or are concerned about for the conversation. Establishing that first—the context—nearly always creates more openness and possibility for the content of the conversation.

Context is always more important than content. Explicitly separate these two elements of all conversations. Authenticity trumps delivery. If you do not purposefully create context for important conversations there is still a context, it is just unacknowledged and unintentional.

The purposeful creation of conversational context is a foundational leadership competency. The quality of any organization's results is directly connected to the quality of the conversations that occur within the organization.

Many things are out of our control but creating and generating healthy and powerful conversations is not one of them. How important and effective are conversations in your work culture? Are you a conversation architect?