Does this sound familiar?
You’re stressed about a hard conversation at work – maybe you’re giving difficult feedback to your manager, or you’re giving a warning to your employee for missing deadlines, or you need to fix a conflict with another department.
And in the middle of the conversation, they either:
- Start crying
- Get angry and yell at you
- Start demeaning you or criticizing you
- Changing the subject to someone else
- Go off on tangents that don’t make any sense
- Push back and refuse to accept what you’re telling them
And you were already stressed, but now:
- You’re getting flustered
- Maybe you want to start crying yourself
- You try to back down from your own position
- Or, your heart starts beating a million miles a minute and you want to yell too
As I’ve said before, difficult conversations are going to be difficult. That’s just the name of the game.
But, you have more control than you think.
Opening strong and setting ground rules at the beginning can help you set the tone and the boundaries for the conversation. That makes it safer for you and truthfully, for the other person too. Because at the end of the day, they’re really acting that way because they’re in the fight, flight, or freeze response too.
By setting the tone at the beginning of the conversation, you won’t 100% prevent any of those behaviors, but you can really reduce them AND have a way to firmly respond if they still show up
It helps you:
- Get buy-in on the goal of the conversation
- Set boundaries for acceptable and unacceptable behavior
- Set the tone that it’s meant to be a collaborative conversation
- Get agreement on action steps if things start getting out of hand
- Give you a structure to fall back on if the other person isn’t playing nice
Here’s a sample of how I like to do it. Imagining the scenario is I’m trying to squash a conflict with another department and the other person has a history of getting angry:
“I appreciate you being willing to meet with me. I wanted to talk because there’s been some tension between our departments, and I’m hoping we can find a way to work better together. How does that sound?” [Wait for their response]
“Listen, I’m hoping we can talk openly and honestly today without yelling*. Please feel free to stop me if I say something that makes you uncomfortable. That way, we can pause and talk about it together. How does that sound? [Again, wait for their response] Do you have any rules you want to make sure we follow so we can have a good conversation?” [wait for their response]
*Here, you can add any rules you want to make, such as agreeing to postpone discussions about other topics, etc. It’s all about setting the expectations up front.
It might seem overkill to keep asking them their thoughts and waiting for their response. And what if they say “no” to anything?
First, hearing them say yes is your cue that you can move to the next step. And if they later start doing some of the behaviors they said they wouldn’t, you can point back to the beginning where they agreed to these terms.
Second, if they say no, then that’s your cue it might not be a productive conversation. You’ll have to figure out with them whether it’s worth coming back at a later time to discuss or not.
Whatever you do, DON’T skip the beginning and the ground rules.
Set yourself up on the right foot for the entire conversation.
Let me know how you like to open up conversations?
Cheers,
Chris
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PS – Whenever you’re ready, I have 3 ways to help you:
- Free Strategy Assessment >> If you’re a nonprofit leader, take a free, 5-minute quiz to evaluate your nonprofit’s strategy implementation plan
- 1-hour Effective Performance Coaching Course >> If you’re a manager looking for strategies to be better at coaching your employees, take this free 1 hour course to boost up your coaching ability
- Podcast: The Art and Science of Difficult Conversations. >> If you’re interested in more ways to manage difficult conversations, I also have a podcast, Available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
