The old acronym K.I.SS. - Keep It Simple Stupid - is as well understood and relevant today as it ever was. In spite of that, much business communication is ineffective, whether it’s written or spoken.
People tend to ramble, never getting to the point. They focus more on showing what they know, rather than on [...]

My heart sinks when I hear someone say, ‘John isn’t performing well these days. I must send him an e-mail’. Doesn’t everyone know by now that you can’t do sensitive and difficult conversations by e-mail!
In any conversation that has a strong emotional tone you must be face to face. These are the kind of conversations [...]

I have been working with a client in Lexington, Kentucky this week. It is one of the largest NGOs in the USA, serving the needs of impoverished communities in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Some of the people on my workshops were the managers of particular projects; others were from building maintenance, finance, HR and donor [...]

When we don’t solve performance problems as soon as they occur, it’s obvious that people will continue to perform badly. Patterns of behaviour and bad habits become established and conversations become more difficult.
If someone misses a deadline, you might say, ’Your report was due in yesterday but it’s not yet on my desk. What happened?’ [...]

Being authentic is very scary. It must be, or we wouldn’t have so many ways of avoiding it.
Think how often you have posed as someone or something you are not; prevaricated to avoid telling the whole truth; procrastinated when you should have faced up to difficult conversations; pussyfooted around sensitive issues instead of dealing with [...]

People often say they make difficult conversations even more difficult by becoming emotional; and later regretting, deeply, what they have said. Expressing our feelings is not easy, and most of us have learned to be very cautious, scared even, about doing it: scared of the negative reaction we might cause, scared that we’ll look foolish [...]

Anytime is a good time to think about how straight you talk and how you typically handle difficult conversations. Many of us say we talk straight, and we genuinely think we talk straight. But how straight do you really talk?
Check yourself out by scoring each item on a 10 point scale.
I am confident in my [...]

Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, there’s one thing you can do to sway things in your favour. You can speak up when others are driving you crazy.
People drive you crazy even when you are on holiday.
Your mother in law has been critical of you all through the holidays.
A partner [...]

I was listening to a client this morning as she described how she planned to manage her new team. She has a number of relatively new managers, people with great technical skill but, typically, little management expertise. As best as I can remember, she put it like this.
“They avoid conversations. They let small things slide [...]

Difficult conversations happen to everyone. The more emotion that is involved, the more likely it is that the conversation ends in a blame game, wild accusations, tears and anger. Everyone retreats into silence, only to have the whole thing erupt at some later timewhen emotion gets the better of us again. There is a better [...]