Mastering Crucial Conversations | For high functioning senior management teams

Travis was the head of people for a world class electronics multinational. The 17,000 employees were his charge. He had seen the company grow from 2,000 to that number and across geographies. That was a decade of his life. A lot many people that the company started with had left along the way. With new people, new folks in senior management and in leadership positions, the company was an amalgamation of mini cultures. 

Travis had worked long enough to know that this was part of being a corporate. But he couldn’t shake off the feeling that some factions of the marketing team didn’t trust each other and there was more politeness than he could handle. Every-time he came from a meeting with them , he sensed this pervasive mistrust in their teams. What was worse was that it bled from the top. It got his attention because a young employee who had quit had come up to him after the exit interview and said that there was some crazy stuff brewing down there. 

In an effort to be polite, people said yes to many things on the face but never carried it out. Then there was a ton of back and forth defensive behaviour, which led to more delays and further compounded the mistrust. Travis himself was privy to it. As part of an HR campaign, he wanted some messaging and artefacts from the marketing folks. They agreed to do as he wanted, he was surprised when he got no new ideas coming from them. And then nothing happened. A week went by and when he approached his counterpart, she said that she was working out the best way to do it, because really she wasn’t in agreement with his suggestions. Sue was a strong marketing player. She came with glowing recommendations and it took Travis by surprise that a woman of her stature wasn’t finding it in her to come clean about this. 

Over a coffee, she confided in him that this was how things worked here. Her boss had explicitly told her to withhold all opinion about anything until it was discussed with him. Travis realised this was dangerous. He hired strong players with the best industry packages and then the culture here didn’t let them do what they were hired for. In the 6 months that Sue was working with them, she hadn’t closed even one project with any of their stakeholders and this had begun to get to her. But individual whistle blowers rarely if ever bring about any kind of lasting change.

The absence of trust is often marked by politeness, which then feeds into apathy at a grand scale.

In this case, the team had begun to feel that it wasn’t safe for them to talk about what they truly thought about the projects. There was no sense of psychological safety whatsoever. 

Now get this, Travis, Sue, Sue’s boss Harry, all of them were part of the senior team. And the most meaningful conversations that the team was supposed to be having with each other were happening over informal coffee meetings and after the formal exit interviews. That’s a big big indication of when something isn’t right. The absence of trust is the driver in these discussions and when later stuff hits the fan, there’s absolutely no accountability whatsoever, because people are still playing polite. 

Travis took a lead and decided to do something about it. He was quite sure that if he dug around enough, this wouldn’t stay limited only to this one team. 

Be comfortable getting dirty 

Any conversation worth its salt is going to be supremely difficult. At times it will be about confronting your own false pride and at other times it may mean coming clean to somebody else about why you don’t trust them. In any case, the conversation could go either way. He confronted Sue’s boss about his reluctance with delegating authority. Turns out Harry had it tough the last year when one of his juniors did something underhanded and he didn’t have an answer for his bosses. His bosses went onto say that it was sheer incompetence that Harry didn’t know what was going down in his team. Travis and Harry took it to the bosses and battled it out. Both sides took time to acknowledge that Harry ran a 50 person team and it wasn’t humanely possible to know what everybody was up to the whole-time. Also Harry came clean and said that micro management wasn’t his style and he was okay with a few people falling flat and hurting themselves rather than making it tough for people to work together as a team. Of course this isn’t as easy as what I wrote out to be. It took weeks of conversation and lobbying, for people to work at their blind spots. 

Don't just be transparent, make it a value 

Transparency doesn’t mean only sharing information that you earlier categorised as need to know only. Travis took it to mean that people shared their emotions and beliefs too. Emotions influence our perceptions and our judgements. By building openness to emotions and frustrations and anger, people were easy on each other. They understood that everybody had their own share of bad days. As it turns out, the earlier emotion sharing conversations were all venting sessions. But over time, emotions normalised and it was easy to talk to each other. Travis made it a point to start saying “I feel _____” and then encouraged people to ask why he was feeling what he was feeling. 

There is much responsibility in the senior management roles, not the least of which is to facilitate tough conversations and to create an environment where it is easy to talk to each other. By baring themselves and acknowledging that they are human, ergo given to human feelings of anger, jealousy, irritation, it made it possible for people to talk to each other without worrying about judgement. Being polite may make it seem respectful, but not sharing what was actually going on is probably the greatest form of disrespect towards each other and your own work. 

More from the author in this series-

?

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).