A manager can't figure out how to tell her colleague to stop staring at her chest when they talk. An employee is afraid to ask her supervisor not to yell at her in meetings. A boss can't figure out how to let his assistant know that he gets complaints from clients about her attitude.
Situations like these plague workers and managers everywhere. They are what drove Donna Flagg, a human resources consultant, to write her new book, "Surviving Dreaded Conversations: Talk Through Any Difficult Situation at Work." Flagg's main message: Stop procrastinating. "If we allow ourselves to be verbally constipated by a belief that speaking the truth is bad," she writes, "then bad is what we will indeed get." It doesn't have to be that way, she insists.
Flagg, who has master's degrees in both organizational development and business education, says that forging ahead and tackling difficult conversations is especially important nowadays. In a robust economy, workers made miserable by a colleague's or boss's behavior can move on to greener pastures. But few have that choice in this era of 9.7% unemployment.
Though Flagg's advice is all sound--get to the point but don't rush, don't issue blame, take responsibility for starting the conversation--she does wield a blunt instrument. "The idea of this book is that there's nothing to prepare for," she says. "It's just about getting out there and saying what you have to say." Many consultants focus on negotiating toward a specific outcome, but Flagg stresses how important it is simply to start that dreaded conversation. As they say at Nike, just do it.
Take the manager with the colleague who stares at her chest. No matter how uncomfortable she may feel about initiating a dialogue, Flagg says, she'll be much better off if she forges ahead. "Being truthful is not being mean," advises Flagg. The manager should strive for what Flagg calls the "clean, clear, lucid truth." Say to the colleague, simply, "I've noticed that when you speak to me, you don't look me in the eye; you look at my chest. That makes me uncomfortable." One of Flagg's favorite phrases, because it's relatively gentle: "I'm not loving that." In fact, she knew a manager who recently had that very wandering-eyes conversation with an employee. "He was embarrassed, and he said he was sorry," she says. The behavior stopped.
However, many work conflicts are thornier, involving crossed signals, muddy emotions, and clashing personalities. For a more sophisticated approach, the decade-old "Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most" is a helpful guide. Written by three members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a 27-year-old program at Harvard Law School, it advocates careful preparation rather than plunging ahead.
Its authors break the typical hard conversation into three elements: facts, feelings, and identity. The facts, raised in the discussion of what has happened, are almost always complicated and subject to multiple interpretations. Feelings make everything highly charged. And identity--the matter of whether a particular conflict makes one or both parties feel incompetent or unlovable--further stirs the pot.
The authors recommend that you "shift to a learning stance." Put your own ideas about facts and feelings aside, and explore the other person's story. Move from certainty to curiosity. Most of us usually assume we know the other person's intentions. It's better to put what we think we know on hold and gather information. Like Flagg, the authors advise leaving blame out of the equation. Work at understanding the other person's motivations rather than judging him or her.
It's also important to look closely at your own feelings and motivations and be clear about your intentions before you start the difficult conversation. Take responsibility up front for your contribution to the conflict. Come to terms with your own point of view. Acknowledge that though you have a legitimate view, it's limited.
By way of illustration, the authors recall a scene from the movie "Annie Hall": "We never have sex," complains the Woody Allen character. "We're constantly having sex," says his girlfriend, played by Diane Keaton. "How often do you have sex?" asks their therapist. "Three times a week," they reply in unison.
How does all this advice work in practice? Back to the manager and the employee with the errant eye. Sheila Heen, one of the authors of "Difficult Conversations," emphasizes that the manager should do her best "to separate intention from effect." In other words, don't assume the employee is even conscious that he's staring at the manager's body, or that he has bad intentions. The manager should start the conversation by saying, "I don't know if you're aware of what you're doing, and maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like you're staring at my chest, and that makes me uncomfortable."
Heen agrees with Flagg that it pays to initiate a difficult conversation, rather than postponing it and hoping the conflict will go away on its own. That almost never happens.
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