What Makes a Conversation Difficult?
You know the feeling: that knot in the pit of your stomach; the fog that descends on your mind. You’re avoiding a difficult conversation. Maybe you fear the public confrontation if you ask a colleague to stop interrupting you in meetings. Perhaps you don’t know how to tell a fellow team member that she’s not pulling her weight. Or you want to ask your boss for a promotion, but you don’t know how to begin the discussion. Maybe you tried to bring up what you thought was a straightforward matter, but it fell flat. When you have a problem, people tell you to “talk about it,” but no one tells you how. This book will help you move from paralysis to productive action and find the right words and the right methods to express yourself.
At work we tend to focus on work: knocking off tasks, meeting our performance goals, getting a raise. But our inner lives—our personal goals, needs, aspirations, and fears—inform and influence everything we do. Both our functional agendas (“I need that production schedule by tomorrow!”) and our emotional agendas (“The production manager’s stonewalling made me look weak in the status meeting!”) will sometimes collide with those of our coworkers. Misunderstandings, even conflicts, arise. Whether those disagreements throw us off balance and disrupt our work or lead to conversations that yield valuable insights and creative solutions is up to us.
A difficult conversation is one in which the other person has a viewpoint that differs from yours, one or both of you feel insecure in some way, and the stakes seem high. Whether you have tough feedback to deliver to an employee or colleague or whether you feel wronged, thwarted, or misunderstood by the other person, these situations can be unsettling, even if you’re a pretty good communicator.
Understanding what’s at the heart of your situation helps you conduct a more productive discussion. Let’s look at some of the reasons why conversations are difficult.
Your role in the organization influences what you want to achieve in a situation. If, for example, you’re a marketing manager on a major product update, your priority is probably hitting every rollout deadline. Your colleague in production, however, is focused on meeting design requirements. Of course, successfully delivering an important product requires meeting both quality and schedule specifications. But those differing interests will naturally cause conflict at times. You may find it tough to talk about them because each person quickly gets entrenched in their position (“We’ve got to improve call quality” versus “We have to cut costs by 5%”). Sometimes interests also become misaligned when outside-the-office needs, such as family commitments or health issues, conflict with those at work. Developing an awareness of the factors that affect each person’s approach to the project in question allows us to find ways to accommodate them.
You think of yourself as a doer—a no-nonsense person who just gets the job done. No intrigue, no drama. Your teammate is a talker. He asks lots of questions, thinks things through aloud, considers the unintended consequences. Usually your different styles are able to coexist—but there’s a deadline looming, and the project feels bogged down. How do you get him to move from exploring possibilities to picking an approach and closing the deal?
Working closely with someone whose communication or work style, personality, values, or life experiences differ greatly from yours has the potential to spark creativity and innovation, but it can also lead to misunderstanding and tension. What seems like a self-evident conclusion to one person may not have even occurred to another.
The more you understand about your own personal style, the more you will become aware of how your counterpart’s habits differ. Table 1, “Example of different work styles,” shows how understanding your own and your colleague’s traits helps you work together effectively despite your differences.
Later we’ll look at how to use your understanding about personal style to decide whether to initiate a conversation and, if you do, to prepare and successfully conduct one. We’re not suggesting that you’ll be able to change your natural preferences or those of your counterpart. But if, say, you recognize that your extroverted colleague loves lively group discussions while you prefer to work independently, suggest that you take notes at a brainstorming session or send him a preliminary list of ideas to seed the conversation as a way for both of you to participate productively.
TABLE 1 Example of different work styles
Addressing a sensitive issue or working with someone on a contentious project is difficult, and it’s likely to be even harder if you don’t have a trusting relationship.
People’s work styles often have an effect on their ability to build trust. If one person wants to carefully map out a detailed plan and the other wants to just get going on the project, it may be hard for them to connect. But small gestures of respect and concern for the other person’s approach go a long way toward bridging differences.
There’s more to trust than compatible personalities or work styles, though. We typically feel more trusting toward people with whom we share common interests and experiences. Positive past interactions, such as being on a team that delivered a successful project, can build trust. But if past interactions have been tough, or if your counterpart is in a position of relative power, you’re more likely to be guarded. In addition, the specifics of your circumstance often dictate how trusting you feel (a board room presentation creates more formality and distance than a team lunch at a local café). And sometimes a situation just makes you feel vulnerable and thereby less likely to proactively address it.
Each of us has our own understanding of the facts. Our view is based on what we’ve experienced and observed from our unique, and limited, perspective.
If your job requires meeting weekly with a customer, your view of the essential facts of a project relate to deadlines made or missed. If your teammate is developing the product, her view of the essential facts relate to satisfying specifications or resolving bugs. You may well be unaware of what your counterpart’s view of the “facts” consists of. Without shared information, you may both draw conclusions about the other’s actions. Taking the time to think through your counterpart’s perspectives will help prepare you for a difficult conversation.
Your emotions are never far beneath the surface. Fear, anger, anxiety, and shame often underlie difficult conversations in the workplace. If you feel attacked, or if you feel that someone is trying to take advantage of you or sully your reputation, your natural response may be to fight back or to hide. Likewise, if you have to deliver bad news, such as a poor performance review or a missed deadline, you may warily anticipate the other person’s strong reaction. This fight or flight response prevents you from stepping back and responding to the perceived threat in a calm way. But when we become aware of what we’re feeling, we can start to manage those emotions. Likewise, when we think about how the other person’s feelings affect how she responds, we’re better equipped to take her feelings into account when proposing a productive way forward.
. . .
We’ve seen how varying interests, work styles, and views of the facts, as well as a lack of underlying trust, make it hard to communicate effectively. But the good news is that whether you’re a new manager, a member of a mission-critical team, or an independent consultant, it’s possible to make even a fraught relationship better through skillful communication. You’ll alleviate the likelihood for duplicated efforts or working at cross-purposes. You’ll be on the same page with your team and in front of your customers. You’ll boost your self-confidence.
This book will be your guide. It will give you the tools to peel back and understand the complicated layers of difficult discussions and develop and practice the skills you need to manage them. In the next chapter, we’ll look at when to have a tough conversation and how to discover opportunities amidst the challenges. In the middle of the book, we’ll walk through the steps of shaping an effective conversation: thoroughly preparing for it, mindfully and adaptively conducting it—and, post-conversation, following through on next steps. Finally, we’ll look at how to develop proactive communication skills to forge transparent, productive relationships going forward. Along the way we’ll look at fictional examples of challenging interactions, assess what’s actually going on, and explore how to shift the dynamic—and the outcome—by successfully navigating a difficult conversation.