The difficult conversations

Pre: This article was more than 1 year in the making. Not because I have a hard time writing, but due to the fact that I have switched jobs (possibly will write about that later) and wanted, out of respect for my former Employer, to avoid any sort of communication that could be related to situations that happened prior and leading to my resignation.

As Managers, Leaders, Directors, and/or other roles that have managerial responsibilities, we will inevitably have conversations where we have to:

• Transmit or receive strong feedback (course correct, performance evaluations)
• Explain or hear changes that very strongly affect the employee or the team
• Seek or Provide guidance/mentorship in a difficult situation

All the above can be expanded, sub-divided, maybe you can think of more topics but, for simplification, these categories will suffice. This article will focus on the first topic: Transmit or receive strong feedback. However, parallels to other messages can be drawn easily.

This article is intentionally short and provides practical guidance on your posture during these conversations. It is personal, raw, based solely on my personal or acquired experience, and is meant for everyday practice... at those hard times. My intent with this is to help to grow strong, integral, capable, respectful, and honorable leaders.

Quick advice

If your time is short and you want quick advice, here it is: as humans, we have a rational side and an emotional side. These are constantly in a battle for control over your response.

I strongly advise letting your rational side take over and "speak data", defer your feelings temporarily, giving yourself time to process, understand and then decide on the action. Always lean in on the side of data/facts and defer emotional responses to later: "I will get back to you"; "I need to digest this"; are perfectly suitable responses for a vast majority of situations.

Protect yourself and be quick, direct, and respectfully grant time for processing.

Friends and business - mix or not?

I encourage you to keep and have a mentor /mentee relationship with your manager and your reports. This helps to be less formal and have an open view of your progress - or giving an open view to your reports.

Regardless of this, consider that managers are doing their job to deliver tough messages. They may or may not like or subscribe to the message. If you are the manager, do your reports a favor and detach your feelings and relationship from the conversations and be as factual as possible.

The 4 quadrants of posture for difficult conversations

As you respond and/or lead a difficult conversation, here is a quick framework to guide you as you position your posture. The later segments of this article will be based on those and, fortunately, these are easy to memorize.

RD - You are the person on the receiving end of a difficult message that's based on facts/data points.

If you are on the receiving end then the message, the message is based on facts, is likely about you (your self or your performance), and facts (or "truths" - if they are such) hurt way more than emotions.

Examples:

• Your target growth was 37%. You achieved 23%.
• Your WHI was 83 which was 7 points lower than last year.
• You missed the delivery target by 3 weeks.
• etc

Advice: The message may trigger your biases. Give yourself space and time to process without rushing a reaction. Take notes (in your head or in the paper) about the points that are being said. Disconnect your response and fight the urge to refute claims or explain your actions. You'll thank yourself later for enduring and keeping a civic posture. Sorry to say that you should have had this coming. If you didn't one of the following is happening:

• You have a bad manager that does not give or clarify or enforce KPIs for the success of your org/business.
• You know you did not deliver the outcomes (or track) but subconsciously are looking for excuses.

Regardless, if you find yourself in this position, keep the conversation factual, civic, and show humility to learn and improve. Ask for clarity or updated KPIs, commitments, or evaluation metrics, and commit to return after 1 week with your plan for improvement in the next period.

PD - You are the person on the providing end of a difficult message that's based on facts/data points.

OK, so you have done your homework, gather the right metrics, and despite your honest attempt of helping your report succeed (if not, read this*) your report has still failed to hit the performance target. Note that performance conversations should be continuous. You should always let your employee know of their contribution.

Advice: Keep the conversation rational and present the data. Give a moment after each statement to allow for processing and questions. Respond to all questions in the manner of: how the data got captured, how the response was perceived, how it was evaluated, and why of this result.

If your report becomes emotional (engages on RE), pause and don't rush to counter their answers. Never say something as brute as "I can understand this is a tough message". This is both condescending and hurtful - if not hypocritical. Treat your employee with respect and give them the room to be their own leader.

Instead of saying: "I think you are mistaken/wrong/missing the bigger picture", encourage your report to "take some time to reflect on these results and come back to me with your assessment and reasons - be as detailed as you would like". Instead of saying "you should have followed my advice", highlight the risk aspect of their choices and that career is a long route. Don't ask what your report "is feeling", don't pretend to be in "their shoes", and, instead, ask "what is/was their goal in the career of for this period", ask them "what is their plan to make the goal in the next time around"; ask them how "you can be of help to them".

Never say something as brute as "I can understand this is a tough message". This is condescending and hurtful - if not hypocritical. Give them the room to be their own leader.

* If you feel you could have done more, do yourself, your learning, and your report a favor and actually take part of the blame. Admit to your own manager the shortcomings of your mentorship, coaching, tools, training.

RE - You are the person on the receiving end of a difficult message that's based on feelings

We have all, unfortunately, been here - hearing some ambiguous, fluffy message about something we have no control for. Our manager is not perfect. However, behind the cloudiness of the message, there is an actionable insight and it is your job to extract it at that moment. If you don't you will, possibly, lose that chance. You need to dig deep, shut your emotion and ask data points. Review your expectations later. By no means respond with an emotional response aka defensiveness. An emotive argument with your superior may have consequences - which are not good for you. Show humility and spend some time parsing through the emotions to find the meaning and the objectives of each statement. Show positivity and future intent of improvement and try to guide the conversation for factual terms.

Behind the cloudiness of the message, there is an actionable insight and it is your job to extract it at that moment. If you don't you will, possibly, lose that chance.

Examples:

• I feel you could have done better.
• I don't think your conduct was correct, overall.
• You need to achieve more impact (across group/market/project/...).
• I was expecting you to take initiative.
• You did OK / this is actually an OK result (when it's really not).
• etc

If you have said (or notice yourself saying) one of the above messages, see section PE.

These examples are full of trigger words:

• "I feel you could have done better" may sound like "you disappointed me".
• "I don't think your conduct was correct, overall" may be interpreted as "all that I did was wrong".
• "You need to achieve more impact (across group/market/project/...)" may be heard as "You are not good enough".

Advice: If your manager is saying these statements, take a moment to grab a piece of paper, introduce a break in the conversation, and ask your manager to clarify which KPIs were these in agreement to, and write down the facts. Which of these have you been missing and for how long. Write down actionable advice and save your apologies for later, after you have introspected on those facts.

Use the data captured to trace back to the period and spend some time composing a detailed response. i.e. What have you done? What were your obstacles? What do you need if you want to do better next year?

You definitely do not want to reply emotively to an emotive message. It will escalate and spiral.

PE - You are the person on the providing end of a difficult message that's based on emotions

RE and PE are very similar - only flipping the role you play.

So you had great employees that you had big expectations for and they didn't reach them. They let you down. You, not only want to show your employees the goals they missed, but also want to show them how much they frustrated you and how much you invested in them.

As you emit the statements, filled with your passion, and considering this is a tough message, you are, more than likely coming across like this:

If this is you, note that about 80% of your message will not come through, if there even is an actionable message behind your words. My father-in-law, who is the CEO of his own multi-national firm, told me this advice: "Never accuse someone by pointing your finger at them, as 1 finger points forward and 3 point right back at you".

What are your goals? What change do you expect to trigger?

"Never accuse someone by pointing your finger at them, as 1 finger points forward and 3 point right back at you".

Advice: You are not perfect and you let your emotions get the best of you. OK, you can still save the conversation, If you find yourself, during a conversation, emitting some of the statements mentioned earlier (in the RE section), try to stop and apologize for it. Mention that you were not fully ready for the conversation and would like to start over at a different, calmer, tone. If you can get yourself ready, do it then, otherwise postpone for a few hours or until the next day.

Preparation

As a common theme for all the postures described earlier, preparation is key for a successful difficult meeting. Preparation may include:

• Gathering data points
• Expecting replies and preparing for them
• Rehearsal of the speech in tone and content (or the replies to expected statements)
• Get feedback on the tone and message prior to the meeting
• Get peer feedback prior to the meetings (if they are about performance)
• etc

Pictures are royalty-free, attribution-free, and courtesy of Pixabay.