Succeeding in Managing Difficult Conversations
Long-standing professional relationships sometimes require having what is sometimes called a difficult conversation. Others have called them “courageous conversations,” and for good reason.
A Diffcon is a structured, prepared dialogue that helps increase clarity and spirit of collaboration between two people. It is often used to raise the performance of a person who might be acting in a way that is out of alignment with performance goals or organizational standards of interpersonal behavior.
Presumably, this behavior is problematic enough to cause you stress and/or impede the success of the enterprise.
Your goal is to have a successful outcome to a difficult conversation.
Begin with applying a POP process.
A successful outcome is one in which:
Both parties feel honored, challenged, and respected.
The conversation is successfully framed as a “shared problem” rather than “you are wrong and I am right.”
Greater clarity is achieved on what performance expectations are, and what behaviors are not helpful.
Tension is reduced/transformed.
Solutions are explored in a collaborative spirit.
The results of the conversation are shared, checked for agreement, and stored somewhere for easy retrieval.
To do that, preparation is critical.
The first thing to do is to perform a risk assessment.
How important is this conversation?
Sometimes we are just annoyed or upset and we want to “win” something by raising an issue. A clear sense of your motivation helps here.
Is the problem mission-critical? If you are reading this, chances are it is, but it is always good to review, with you and others, the value of wading into a conversation with a colleague.
Is the person’s behavior changeable?
Often hard to know, but again, a good question to ask.
Are they open to coaching? Do you have a trusting relationship?
If the relationship is quite broken, with active unmistakable conflict, you will want to prepare in a different way than if the differences in perspective are simply unexplored or relatively minor.
Are there other ways to accomplish the same outcome?
An inventory of your conversational assets/team tools is critical. For example:
Is there an onboarding process or “team culture” deck/discussion that can be referenced?
This helps depersonalize a little bit.
Do you have a regular review process in place?
Probably good to refer to it, rather than start anew.
Is there a history of the behavior that has been addressed, however successfully, before?
A good leader knows the narrative of the relationship and the context in which the conversation sits better than anyone (except perhaps the person under scrutiny, who may know quite intimately what is coming their way). Not knowing the history of the conversation/HR framework/cultural agreements/past attempts to correct behavior is a great way to go into a conversation at a disadvantage, and lose traction in reaching your goal.
Next, what is your approach going to be?
There are at least four ways to go (and probably more):
Have a bilateral, structured conversation, just the two of you.
Seek outside support, facilitation, conflict resolution expertise, a more senior person to mediate.
Drop it, in the sense that you are going to attempt to induce a change in more subtle ways, or simply try to work around the reality of the relationship.
End the relationship completely, through restructuring, firing, or some other solution that eliminates your obligation to lead the conversation.
Next, determine as exactly as possible what your desired purpose is:
Is it to create a new working relationship that includes a new set of values and practices with a colleague who is of equal rank?
Is it to redirect the performance and behavior of someone who reports to you?
Is it to reassign, and realign, the duties and responsibilities of someone who works for you so that their impact on the system is reduced?
Is it to share your experience, and renew a sense of alignment and collaboration with someone who is a senior rank to you in the organization?
And what your exact desired outcome is. It may be that you are not sure which way the conversation will go at the beginning. So you might want to reserve some options. Having an inventory of what is available/acceptable is very helpful going in.
Is it:
A re-contracting? Shared and signed, perhaps? Legal or collegial or both?
Writing some kind of agreement on paper and sharing it is your way of capturing and holding the results of a conversation.
In certain cases, there are legal imperatives that are associated with performance reviews that you need to track. These are not part of this conversation, but they are important to understand.
It might include a specific set of guidelines and practices that will guide the relationship going forward, and that establish norms that can be referred to in the future.
A significant reassignment of roles and responsibilities that separates, to some degree, the work, or the relationship, that has prevailed before.
TIPS: How to set up the conversation for success.
Communicate by writing:
Announce your purpose/outcome/process upfront, and perhaps even some possible outcomes.
And then ask for permission to have a conversation
Reserve more than adequate time and the best setting you can. In-person, if you are in control of your triggers, body language, and tone, is best.
Use all your other tools – good questions, self-tuning, managing triggers, and staying on your side of the net, small and big feedback, and bring them all to the conversation.
Other tips:
Slow Down:
Let the conversation marinate; entertain the possibility that this is just the first of several interactions.
Announce up front that you have no expectation that this will be the total exchange. That you simply want to start.
Accept a small bit of progress at first.
People often need to ruminate on things and think about what was said. It is tempting to try to solve everything in one conversation. On the contrary, the very act of asking for and receiving a yes to a diffcon is in itself great progress. Give the other person as much agency over the tone and tempo of the conversation as possible so they can feel ownership over it, rather than the victim.