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I’m much more comfortable having tough conversations than I am skilled at describing them. Ten years ago, I would have said just the opposite is true. Back then, I preferred not to talk about anything that made my heart race or palms sweat or jaw tighten. I had no illusion that avoiding these conversations would aid productivity or improve my relationships. Rather, I feared that having them would make things worse. Then, I had an experience that led me to a different conclusion. In the middle of a performance review with one of my employees, she suddenly blurted, “I know what everyone says about me.”
The details of what she knew were unimportant. Days earlier, I had listened to my boss saying things about other employees that appalled me. Uncomfortable, I said nothing. I waited for the conversation to end and returned to my work. From this experience, I drew the following conclusion: I’d rather live through the discomfort and awkwardness of a difficult conversation than live with the resultant feelings of shame and embarrassment that result from conversations that needed to happen and didn’t.
Much of my work nowadays involves helping clients develop the courage and skills to discuss issues they believe are better left alone and to have conversations they never imagined possible. Leaders face a daily barrage of unpleasantness, including wage freezes, layoffs, bankruptcies and foreclosures. And these are simply the crises that the current economy is forcing them to confront. They also struggle with seemingly more mundane concerns about poor performance, diminished quality and productivity, customer complaints, and employee disengagement.
When the economy is humming along, it’s easy, often, to rationalize that we don’t have time, shouldn’t rock the boat, or can’t afford to lose an otherwise productive employee who happens to mow people down in the act of bringing a project in on time. While I would recognize these as mere justifications, the simple fact is that businesses often succeed despite leaders’ failure to address these issues.
If there’s any good news about these economic times, it’s that people in leadership positions can no longer afford to avoid difficult, potentially game-changing, and radically honest conversations. Their very survival depends on courageously stepping to the plate and talking about how to reduce inefficiencies, increase trust and commitment, and implement much-needed changes. More good news is that mastering these conversations now sets a leader up for a lifetime of smarter, faster decision-making and better results.
What, then, are the essential ingredients of a leadership conversation? My current best thinking is that the must-haves look something like this:
- They need to create zones of safety wherein people can relax their defensiveness and not resort to the blaming, shaming, manipulation, and other counter-productive behaviors that are characteristic of stressful and fear-ridden environments. Absent these zones of safety, leaders will get, at best, mediocre employee effort and bottom-line results.
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