Expert Blog Contributor:
Libby O
Corporate Coach
Libby O
Avoiding tough conversations is the root cause behind most of the issues managers, teams and organisations experience. Why do so many of us dread them?
A number of years ago I met a CEO whose team members were running riot!
They were stealing, falsifying timesheets, sleeping on shift and ignoring instructions. His plea was for me to find out why, then suggest ways he and his management team could deal with this faceless phantom that was white-anting his workplace.
Five minutes with the team, minus the CEO, and the elephant in the room obvious. The CEO was avoiding difficult conversations.
Difficult Experiences Create Difficult Conversations
After a day of peeling away the layers with the team, I sat with our exhausted CEO who was desperate to discover the magic bullet.
Instead of delivering an answer, I asked another question: “What’s your experience with the Fair Work Commission?”
Without a word, his entire body released a thousand stories of pain, stress, overwhelm, fear, anxiety, inadequacy, shame, struggle and being wronged.
He’d had not one, but many negative and stressful experiences with the godfather of difficult conversations, the Fair Work Ombudsmen. So why would someone who’d been through something so gruelling be quick to jump into a conversation with a staff member about an allegedly stolen anything?
His answer dovetailed perfectly with the problem.
Lived Experience Follows You to Work – Then Spreads to Others
What our CEO hadn’t recognised was that his ‘once bitten, twice shy’ avoidance tactic had permeated his management team, so no-one was having those accountability conversations. The only managers he attracted were the ones who wouldn’t make him feel uncomfortable by challenging problematic behaviours. That in turn meant the only staff they drew were those targeting their highly prized possessions.
Now you may not have met the Ombudsmen, but I guarantee you will have a swag of people you could substitute for our CEO’s negative experience: an oppressive schoolteacher, a bullish boss, or a nit-picking NDIS auditor?!
You’ll also have truckloads of experiences where you came off second best during a difficult conversation.
None of us walk into the office and leave our personalities and prior experiences in reception. Being conscious of how they influence our behaviour is one of the keys to removing the ‘difficult’ from those conversations.
Next time you hear yourself bemoan “my staff are… not doing what they should be doing/ ignoring procedure/not completing incident forms/insert other complaint”, ask yourself how your experience with difficult conversations is directly impacting the way you’re managing (or not managing) accountability within your team.
Changing conversations, one chat at a time
Once our CEO had identified his runaway emotions, he also recognised he had control.
Nobel Prize winner, Herbert Spencer once said: “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
Our CEO’s next step was to brave those challenging conversation with consciousness, mindfulness and large dose of self-compassion. One conversation at a time.
If you’re also an avoider of difficult conversations, a similar attitude of self-awareness and action is the way forward. There’s no magic bullet, but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard.
Next time, let’s talk about some easy techniques you can learn (and put into practice) in order to step your way through mastering conversations!
Let’s gO!
P.S. In case you’re wondering, to spite the offer of private coaching to enable our CEO to manage this legacy issue, he went on to quit. Through the powers of social media, I see a pattern.
