TC#011 - How to have the hard conversations the easy way
The world would be a nicer place if being nice did not mean being silent.
Nearly every conflict I’ve been involved in, directly or not, could be traced back to a moment in time where somebody had the opportunity to bring up the uncomfortable thing but decided not to do so — out of professional courtesy, mood of the moment, peer pressure, or any number of ‘nice’ reasons.
Fostered negativity multiplies. Problems shoved under the rug ferment into uglier forms. It may seem out of whack, almost ‘autistic’ in a sense to talk about the bad stuff when everything looks good, but it can be a lifesaver. The art is to figure out how to say it.
These are the hard conversations you should have had but didn’t and either led to a disaster or are in the process of it:
In all of these situations, there’s a possible downside: What if they leave or get disappointed?
If there were no downsides, it wouldn’t be hard. You can trust your emotions, but how do you trust anybody else’s?
There’s two ways to ensure that things don’t go south in these discussions.
Have them early
The earlier you can have the conversation, the better. If you ignore a problem for too long, it only gets worse, and by the time you are prompted to take action, your feelings (or theirs) have taken on monstrous proportions and there would only be a fight, not a ‘conversation’.
When the problem and your feelings about the problem are mild, that’s the best time to talk about it. In Antematter lingo, we like to call this “input-time callout” (contrasted with “output-time callout”, when things have gone south). A small course correction is better than a major route change after ending up on the wrong port.
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That means if your current fees are constraining you, you make the client aware of it. You let them know that this cannot be sustained for too long so we have to act accordingly. You have set the right expectation, and it’s best if you do it in written form. When the time comes, everybody is already on the same page.
If that employee has consistently underperformed, you let them know and wish them the best, before your company culture devolves and everybody understands that incompetency is tolerated around here.
If the new employee is failing to understand how you work, you sit down with them right now before they began pushing code in production and cause real damage.
Lead by example
To ensure that nobody loses their cool, you set the example of not losing your cool when people call you out. Plain and simple.
We give everybody a free rein at Antematter to call anybody out, and that includes the executives. Humans learn by examples, iteratively. When you see that nobody loses their cool and the world doesn’t end on being called out, that’s when you learn not to lose your cool too because that’s the appropriate behavior.
You still cannot control everybody’s emotions, so it’s important to have conflict-resolution strategies in place. The best conflict-resolution strategy is to simply urge the incumbent to sleep on it.
A more active strategy is to have specific policies in place. For example, we have a policy that whoever escalates the conflict will take everybody else to dinner. That works pretty well.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When you can begin treating the bearers of bad news with the same excitement that you treat good news, you know you’ve understood your business.
Sources
I highly recommend The Edge by The Black Swan Group (Chris Voss) for learning tonality and how to negotiate under tense situations. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I absolutely adore Josh Braun’s content on Linkedin too. These two are lifesavers.?Josh will also teach you specific phraseology that can be widely applied to different situations to diffuse any kind of conflict into a quest for truth-seeking.