In every relationship there are issues that are difficult to talk about; his mother, her ex-husband, money, how to raise children. At work it is difficult to talk about poor performance or to confront issues of disrespect or insubordination. Sometimes we don’t talk about these things at all because they are too sensitive, we’re too emotional or the stakes are too high. At other times, we do have conversations, but the problems remain.
The starting point is to identify exactly what you need to talk about. It’s all very well planning and holding a conversation word perfectly, but nothing is achieved if it’s the wrong conversation. How often have you heard people at work say,”I’ve told her about it several times but she still makes the same mistake.” In our social lives, friends and family members say, “We’ve often tried to talk but we never seem to get anywhere”.
The simplest problem to talk about is one that has occurred for the first time. As an example, your daughter is due home at 11.00. This deadline has been in place for some time and she has always stuck to it. Tonight she is late. An appropriate opening to a conversation would simply be “What happened?” Assuming you have a healthy relationship with her, this should be enough to find out the cause of her late coming and to agree on action to make sure it does not happen again. Exactly the same conversation would take place in the corporate world to deal with a performance problem.
Sometimes this straightforward conversation solves the problem. Sometimes it doesn’t! It all depends on how soon you have the conversation. If you tackle issues as soon as they occur, they can often be resolved quite easily. It’s when you leave them, hoping they will somehow resolve themselves, that you get into trouble. Problems ignored do not go away. They get worse! You’re also less able to handle them without blaming and accusing because as time goes on you become more uptight and emotional about the situation.
From the other person’s perspective, so long as you don’t speak up, they have no reason to think that their behaviour is a problem. As it then becomes a regular pattern, the more it is difficult to change. It’s likely that 80% of difficult conversations could be solved fairly easily if they were tackled as soon as they arose. When a pattern of behaviour develops the conversation must now address the pattern. “I noticed that you came in 15 minutes late this morning,” would open a conversation about a single late-coming incident. The opening to a recurring problem of late-coming would sound like,” Can we talk about your timekeeping? I notice that you came in 15 minutes late this morning, and you were late by the same amount on Monday and Tuesday this week.” Make sure you address the right problem!
Now let’s assume that you did; that a solution was agreed; that behaviour changed; and then it changed back again. The new behaviour, for example coming in on time, was not maintained. Now you have two problems. You’ve still got the late-coming problem but now you have a new problem which is perhaps the more serious. The person has let you down by failing to meet the commitment they gave after the previous conversation. Your next conversation must tackle this new problem.
Not many of us recognise that problems escalate in this way. Even fewer of us have the skill to set up the different conversations so that issues of non-performance and commitment failure are properly resolved. It probably explains why many of us are surrounded by people who let us down, fail to live up to our expectations, disappoint and frustrate us. We talk, but we don’t have the right conversations.
