![]() Culture is what you celebrate and tolerate, so consider the implications for your underperforming employee. Difficult Conversations will be appreciated by readers who wish to improve oral communication in all aspects of their daily lives. So give yourself some credit for at least remedying that underlying issue.īut likely your contributions also span day-to-day interactions both with that employee and with other employees. One of the biggest ways managers contribute to underperformance is by avoiding the difficult conversation. We attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day-whether dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with a spouse, or negotiating with a client. ![]() You also need to look at the ways you contribute to the problem. Book: Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen Reviewer: Bobby Powers My Thoughts: 9 of 10 Stone, Patton, and Heen spent 15 years researching communication as part of the Harvard Negotiation Project. This concludes our preparation… but it shouldn’t.įocusing blame on the other party is fundamentally a disempowering position. If they just fixed these things, we’d be squared away, right? Now we have a solution. Usually problems contribute by the other party, often an underperforming engineer or failing partner. So we rightfully prepare for difficult conversations.įoremost, we prepare a list of problems. We pride ourselves on planning the details. This feelings-first approach led to a much more productive conversation.Įngineering managers like feeling prepared. Then I encouraged the engineer to do the same. What the impact of their behavior on me was. You can get so involved in the content of an intense conversation that you lose track of what you’re doing and how others are reacting (your brain disengages and your emotions predominate). I started by describing what I was feeling and experiencing. Crucial Conversations Training Exercise 2: Monitoring Yourself. The second time around, I change things up to use this feelings-first approach. That’s when they either fight like a dog in a corner or tune you out. People can sense when the wall of facts is building against them or a gotcha is on the horizon. Who said what, who did what, blah, blah, blah.įocusing on facts can lead you down a very pedantic, nit-picky, and ultimately unproductive path. 90% of the subsequent conversation focused on facts. I once had a difficult performance conversation with an engineer and thought it best to establish the facts up front. That’s because difficult conversations are fundamentally about feelings, not facts. Books related to Difficult Conversations. If you can agree on the facts, surely you’ll arrive at similar conclusions, right? Well maybe not. Read Difficult Conversations How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone available. When you’re having a difficult conversation, it’s easy to focus on facts.įacts are objective.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |