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Hello and welcome along to another episode of Management Matters. This episode is another one straight to you, direct from my coaching with a client earlier today, and we were talking about difficult conversations.
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Why are they so difficult? How do we figure our way out of that difficulty? And what are some of the things that you, the listener or the client, in that case, as a manager and leader and someone who's thoughtful, considerate, compassionate, but also ultimately holding accountability for the service that you're leading?
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How do you hold all of that together and sort of balance the different parts of that mental model in order to? Support yourself, and be able to actually move through the conversation and to ultimately move things forward in the best possible way for yourself, for the individual, for your team at large, for the service that you're providing, be it to students, alumni, research, whichever part of university life it is that you are operating in.
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So, I think there are a few, like this is one of those issues that I think there's quite a lot of quite poor training out there about difficult conversations and why they're so difficult and what to do about it.
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And they're poor because
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they, I think they can be quite reductionist. You know, it's like they can't, ultimately boil down to you feel the fear and do it anyway, which I don't think is very helpful, and I think trainings like that and messaging even broadly like that can be quite damaging because I think it leads to shame for people where they think, "Well, if we're just meant to feel the fear and do it anyway, but I can't do that, does that mean there's something wrong with me?" And in that, that is the vein in which shame lies.
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It's...is there something wrong with me? Am I wrong somehow? So, if you are somebody who struggles with having conversations, maybe you soften the message at the last minute. Maybe you don't know exactly what to say, and so you sort of don't say anything, or maybe you hedge towards nudging somebody forward rather than explicitly and clearly saying the thing that needs to be said.
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I want you to know that's so so normal. It's so normal and it comes up in conversations with clients all the time. All the time. It's one of the most common recurring themes in my work. And I think that's for very good reason.
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Some of those reasons are that difficult conversations can and often do pose some flavour of psychological risk. So the part of our psyche that's trying to keep us safe all the time is like scanning our environment, being like, "Oh, this thing we're about to do sounds like it might be kind of risky.
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Like maybe the person that we're talking to is going to." Judge us or be disappointed with the message we have to deliver or, be upset. Maybe they're going to be angry. Maybe they're going to reject us.
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Maybe there's going to be some conflict arising out of this. All of those are really valid reasons why your subconscious is going to be like putting the brakes on, making you feel discomfort, and that discomfort is your subconscious mind's way of communicating with your conscious mind and going, "No, this feels bad.
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Let's slam on the brakes and not go there." So, that's one part of it, the psychological risk of it. The other part of it is maybe the context that you're operating in and the individual that you're working with genuinely makes this a difficult conversation.
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You know, might we think long, long ago in the dim, distant past before COVID, the operating conditions in Higher Education were very different. Most issues, well, most teams were fairly well resourced, if not optimally, at least fairly well resourced.
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And most people generally had a good sense of what they were supposed to be doing. There was a good sense from institutions about what direction the institution was moving in, what the strategic goals were. Not always, I'm not saying it was easy by a long stretch, but I think compared to the conditions that a lot of you find yourselves in now, where there's like government policy changes left, right, and centre, there's stricter and stricter compliance requirements around like visa, UKVI requirements, HESA, Office for Students, you know, it's coming at you from all directions, not to mention all the research side of things.
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And there are significant infrastructure and IT service and system updates and changes happening. There are often restructures and redundancies happening. There are increasing, not just in Higher Education but across society in the UK at large, increasing rates of mental health distress.
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Like it's not a pretty picture, people. You know that better than I do because you are living it day to day. But all of that means you've got your stuff, the psychological risk that you carry, and the people that are coming into the conversation with you are carrying all of their stuff.
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And you're probably a thoughtful, conscientious manager and leader looking at their stuff, going, "Oh, I don't really want to be responsible for adding to that burden." And If we go back to last week's episode about the leadership styles, then you'll know that part of my thesis on finding your leadership style is about knowing what your values are, and where our values become overexpressed, sometimes tripping us up.
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So, in the context of difficult conversations, that can be around being kind, where we think we're being kind, by holding back information, by not upsetting people, by you know trying to couch what we're saying in a sort of softer way than we might otherwise if we felt and believed that the other person could really hear it and handle it.
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I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, and going back to the leadership styles conversation, I think it is important for you as managers and leaders to give yourself permission to manage and lead with situational flexibility.
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And what that means is, let's take it out of a work context for a second. If you're a parent, you've got three kids, one's a toddler, one's like in that sort of pre-teen, maybe they're like nine or ten, and one's like 12 or 13, are you going to apply the same rules to each of those children?
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No, you're probably not going to apply the same rules because the rules that are appropriate and the expectations and standards of behaviour that you might have as a family for your toddler. Will not be the same as you have for your 12 or 13 year old.
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Just it like you just need to have that situational awareness about the management and leadership that is appropriate to apply for different people. Now, I'm not suggesting that your team members are children at all.
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I'm not. But what I'm saying is we can borrow that skill set and mental model to apply to team members, because if you think about, let's say, even two people in the same job or in the same type of level of job, like let's say you're managing senior managers, one senior manager is brand new in their role, they're still in the real steep part of their learning curve where they're understanding your institution's culture and strategy, they're understanding your specific team processes, they're getting to know all of the team members, they're building their network, all of still figuring out what on earth all the acronyms are about, all of that stuff, so they're brand new, and you're probably keeping quite a close eye on what they're doing and how they're doing, because you're looking to probation and thinking, am I passing this person for probation/ What other support, advice, and guidance do I need to give them?
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How can I make sure that this person has the best possibility of success in this role? Now, jump to the other end of the spectrum. You've got someone in the same level and essential job title, job position, but they've been in their role for five years.
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They're very well established. They know all of the institutional stuff. They are your, let's say, for the sake of example, your "safe pair of hands person." Big air quotes around that. How you manage and lead that person will necessarily be different.
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So that person, you're probably taking more of a sponsorship type of role. You're leaving them to do their job, by and large. You know, you want to hear from them. You want to know what any emerging risks or challenges are so that you can answer questions from your leadership, but you're not really involved in the day-to-day of what they do.
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You're not even probably watching the day-to-day of what they did all that closely, and that's because you have different situational leadership. So, now let's bring it back to difficult conversations.
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So we've covered your stuff, their stuff, contextual stuff. The way through some of this is to, firstly, like I said with the situational leadership, we need to kind of evaluate the context that you find yourself in and understand what are the constraints that need to be considered.
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But also, from your position as a leader and manager, what. Organisational and business risks are there if that person continues to not get whatever this message is that you need to deliver to them, whether it's a feedback message or a, underperformance or a boundary or whatever it is.
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What are the risks that you become exposed to if that thing is not addressed adequately well? And this starts to then balance some of that psychological personal person-focused risk that you might be feeling, where you have some personal exposure.
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Now we're thinking about the business exposure. Well, if I don't tackle this thing, and that person continues to underperform, then this whole service could be exposed to impacts around I don't know, like user complaints, NSS score implications, maybe financial implications, maybe reputational risks.
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All of those things start to then balance your understanding of your personal psychological risk that you're experiencing. Now, I don't want to make all of that doom or gloom.
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Appreciate this is now getting a little bit heavy, but the point is, you need to take care of yourself. You also need to take care of that other person, and you need to take care of your wider accountabilities as a manager and leader in this situation. And I would propose that by dealing with this thing early and effectively, you will build trust beyond just your relationship with that person, but it will probably ripple out across your team and stakeholders, because they will see that there was an issue, it's been dealt with, and now things are better.
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And that's because of your management and leadership. So, how do we, once we've got this sort of mental map of the situation, how do we move forward from here? Well, I think there are two key practices or levers that we can pull.
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Actually, three. There are three. Ideally, the absolute ideal situation is you bring this to coaching and we talk it through. Obviously, that's not available to everyone, and I want to make this podcast really helpful and usable to everybody. So bring it to coaching if you can.
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Lovely stuff. The next thing is we want to think about preparation, and I don't mean the kind of preparation that is lying awake at 3 o'clock in the morning, imagining the first two sentences of that conversation on repeat.
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I mean the type of preparation where you're really boiling down. What is the thing that actually needs to be said? What type of conversation is this? And what are the impacts if you don't address it properly?
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And then the third piece is rehearsal. I'm a huge fan of mental rehearsal, like I said, not the kind of just repeating the first three sentences over and over and over, but actually rehearsing the whole thing from start to finish, from the moment that the conversation starts, even earlier than that sometimes.
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All the way through to the moment when you're on your way home at the end of the day, reflecting on how your day has been and what that conversation was like for you. So, I've created something for you. So, firstly, if coaching is accessible to you and you think, yeah, actually, I do really need some support with this, I've got an option on my website that is a single issue coaching offer.
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So it's just two sessions. You can bring something like this. This would be a great topic for that little two session offer. Then the new thing announcement, drum roll please, is I've added a shop to my website.
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It's called the tool shed, and this is where you can find things that will help you in the moment with specific challenges like this one. So I will put the link in the show notes. You can go and grab the Brave Management Conversation Starter Pack.
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In that starter pack, you will find a PDF that is a fillable PDF that walks you through how to prepare what type of conversation it is and what you want to say. And there's an audio visualisation, which walks you through mental rehearsal for this conversation, and gets you over that hurdle of actually saying the hard thing out loud, and then all the way through how you handle their reaction, how you handle your reaction, through to closing that conversation, taking any follow-up steps, and that person, you know, leaving and moving on to the next issue.
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So if you want that, I'll put a link in the show notes. Go and find it because I think for most people, the issue is not that you don't have enough information; it's that we're not preparing well enough in order to feel comfortable executing on the thing or like following through on whatever the knowledge is that we already have.
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It's that thing about going back to exercise and workout. We all know we need to move ourselves more, but actually, doing it is the hard bit. So that preparation worksheet and guided visualisation are going to help you to actually get into progress, taking those action steps, having that hard conversation, and moving this situation forward in alignment with your values and leadership style, like we talked about in the last episode.
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So go and grab that in the show notes if you would like. It's on an honesty box situation. That's the other thing I should say. Everything in the tool shed is either free or pay what you like because I know that budgets are increasingly tight and, you know, not everybody needs a whole coaching package.
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You might just need a quick tool so it's a pay what you like. You can have it absolutely for free if you prefer, and do let me know if you try it. I'd love to hear how you get on, and if there are other topics like this that you would like some tools for, just let me know.
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Alright, I'm going to go see what the cat's yowling about. Thanks for listening, and I will speak to you again soon. Bye.
