Difficult Conversations

If you are a manager, it is inevitable that you will have tough conversations with your employees. The reasons can be manifold. You may have inherited a team from a manager who did not deal with its personnel problems. You may have an employee whose performance shows no sign of improvement despite several rounds of feedback. You may be required to deal with an employee whose behaviour is unacceptable, such as bullying or harassment. Occasionally, you may even have to deal with ‘difficult stars’.

These conversations are not easy, which is precisely why many managers avoid having them. Not wanting to confront a problem employee is tempting, but it can have several negative consequences. The bad performance or behaviour will continue unchecked, the team will suffer from the toxic influence of the problem employee and your own credibility as a leader will be severely undermined.

Why are these conversations so difficult? We may know the employee for years; he/she may be more a friend than a colleague to us. We may have put off this task for so long that it now looks daunting. Self-talk such as, “will my relationship with this person deteriorate?”, “what if this person who is critical to the company reacts badly and wants to quit?” and the convenient “I am sure matters will improve” are not uncommon. We may feel that we lack the skills to have these conversations effectively. We may even worry that we will fail in this task and make matters worse.

What then should we do when faced with such a situation? Here are a few tips:

• Prepare. Put together what you want to say with relevant facts and evidence in an objective way. You can use an index card to hold this information. When you prepare well, you will demonstrate thoroughness and fairness and this can discourage some problem employees from distorting facts and arguing.
• Check your own intent. Look at this meeting as an opportunity to solve a problem, rather than seeing the employee as a lost cause. Know why you are addressing this issue now and what you want as outcomes. If you want to settle old scores or address other unrelated matters in this meeting, it will lose its focus and you will not achieve your objective.
• Check your biases. If you harbour any unrelated feelings such as jealousy or annoyance, park them. Ask yourself if you have any deep-seated prejudices against the employee’s background, gender, race or age. Not only are they irrelevant and unprofessional, they can cause you to say something regrettable.
• Watch your own emotions. Your sense of what’s fair may be offended by an employee who is gaming the system. You may view the employee’s actions as a direct affront to you. You may be filled with frustration that the employee has already been given valuable and timely feedback many times. You may feel that this is a waste of valuable time, time that you really don’t have. Such emotions are dangerous because they can make you vulnerable to what the employee may say in the meeting. His/her words can be a powerful ‘trigger’ to cause you to lose control of yourself.
• Watch your words. In the best of circumstances, words are imperfect vehicles of meaning. In the heat of the moment, a wrong choice of words can derail the meeting. There is no shame in coming to the meeting with a prepared script. If it helps, assume the employee is secretly recording the meeting. A leader once told me to always assume that what you say or write will reach your family, your boss or the press. When the stakes are high, you may want to ask an HR manager to sit in. The mere presence of another person in the room can help you calibrate what you want to say in a professional manner.
• Practice. If it makes sense, do a dry-run with a peer or leader. Ask them to role-play the employee and try out what you would like to say in the meeting. As in everything else in life, the first time will be hard. You can expect that you will get better at this skill with time.

Knowing how to have difficult conversations is an essential leadership skill. Having these conversations without delay, getting a sense of the employee’s frame of mind by listening carefully to what is being said and to what is unsaid, asking for solutions from the employee instead of telling them what to do and ending the meeting with a written record of what was discussed will help deliver better outcomes to these inherently difficult conversations. I would like to hear from you on how you make your difficult conversations less difficult.