posted on Sunday, April 13, 2008 3:27 PM by AnjaliSastry

Saying no, touchy topics, and other difficult conversations

How can you get better at having the conversations that are difficult? You may be dreading--or even completely avoid--such interactions because the other person is difficult to work with, because there is bad news to share, or because you need to ask for something or raise a topic with which you are not comfortable.

Several themes emerged in our class conversation. When saying no: consider how to soften, if that's a concern, in a way that doesn't muddy the waters by making your "no" seem ambiguous. See my notes in Stellar, which are updated slightly from class.

Now, exploring a problem with a teammate or work colleague is an even more challenging situation. You need to keep working with this person, so, how do you raise a touchy topic without creating more problems? We drew on the ideas from the book written by researchers at the Harvard Negotiation Project (short news story listing main ideas). Their framework and some tips are presented in the materials I posted on Stellar.

I've been thinking about what we can learn from the work on giving and getting feedback.

The quality of a feedback experience depends on the stances taken by both people. Ask yourself, am I giving this feedback with the other person's needs foremost? Before you even get going, then, there's a kind of personal inquiry you must go through. Feedback recipients must do the same: keep this in mind when you're on the receiving end of feedback by asking yourself, am I ready to use this conversation as a learning experience? And then, in the actual conversation, make sure that you separate your actual feedback--observations you want to share with them--from your evaluation or assessment of the impact of the observed behavior. As for advice and suggestions, that's a third part of the conversation. A really important skill is learning how to separate these elements of the conversation. Sometimes you will need to pull back from offering advice or suggestions--maybe even setting aside that part of the conversation for another time.

I've uploaded a great book chapter on this topic to Stellar:  Feedback: Express appreciation, offer advice from Getting It Done: How to Lead When You're Not in Charge, Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp.

As the reading we've been doing underscores, it is the differences in points of view and perspectives that make such conversations difficult. The antidote is your own inquiry skills. Any change agent or leader must have such skills in their toolkit, so that they can truly learn from and collaborate with others. We all have different experiences, and different world views. In many ways, skillful influence and persuasion require you to downplay differences and instead think of ways in which you induce others to associate themselves with you (think of Cialdini's work, if you've read it). But in conflict situations, we (inevitably) make attributions, and often have the opposite problem, assuming we know or understand the other's point of view. These attributions can even become self-fulfilling, a situation that is garanteed to stymie learning.

Knowing that attributions are easily triggered and difficult to disprove may help you to avoid such traps. So remind yourself to pull out your inquiry toolkit when you are in any situation where shortcuts in your thinking might be deleterious. In addition to difficult conversations, consider how important it is to avoid a rush to judgement when brainstorming and problem-solving, as well as working with stakeholders and trying to better understand your customers. In the latter area, product designers and market researchers are looking to new approaches for learning about others that are more descriptive and less prescriptive. Here are one practitioner's thoughts on the challenges entailed.

Hope this helps as you move ahead with your projects. Let me know!

Comments

# re: Saying no, touchy topics, and other difficult conversations

Monday, April 14, 2008 1:35 PM by Ellen Correia
Last term I served as a T.A. for the first-year Communications lab, 15.277.
In that role, I led 5 core teams through weekly seminars on communications.
One of the sessions where I learned the most was the feedback session. This
session went through a very structured way to give feedback. First, you ask
the person if it is okay if you share some feedback with them. Then you
state the facts of the particular incident, i.e. "Last week you were late to
our meeting." Then you follow that up with how it made you feel, i.e. "I
felt powerless." What is important is that your feeling not have a
judgement in it. For instance, if you said that you felt annoyed, that
means that you think the other person is annoying.



Initially, this seemed like a very round-about way to give feedback to me,
but I feel there are some important takeaways from it. First, I think its
really important to talk about your own feelings. If you talk about your
judgement of a situation, the person you are giving feedback to could argue
with you. But if you are just talking about your feelings, they aren't able
to argue with you about that. Second, it makes you realize that however the
incident made you feel, that may not have been the intention of the other
person. If you keep that in mind (as is suggested in Difficult
Conversations), you are more likely to have an open conversation. Finally,
I had one student in one of my labs who was very excellent at this
particular form of feedback. It was the way he was taught to give feedback
at is former employer and it was extremely effective when he used it. When
given in a professional way, I think this form of feedback can be very
effective.

# re: Saying no, touchy topics, and other difficult conversations

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:37 PM by Mahnaz Hatami
I recently read a very interesting book from Dale Carnegie called "How to win friends and influence people". There was specifically one chapter, which was entitled "How to win people to your way of thinking". The author argued that there are many ways (in addition to words) to create discomfort between two people. You can tell people they are wrong by a look, an intonation or even a gesture.
Showing someone they are wrong (let alone saying it) can be considered as a "direct blow at their intelligence, judgement, pride and self-respect", according to Dale Carnegie.

Therefore, they will naturally get defensive and the tone of the conversation or feedback will become aggressive very quickly. Furthermore, it will not make them change their minds. Because their feelings have been hurt, they will not listen, even if you demonstrate to them all the logic of Plato or Kant.

The solution is to show rationality and admitting you also can be wrong, by saying for example: "I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts". This magic phrase will inspire my counterpart to be just as fair and open-minded as me. The conversation then turns diplomatic and courteous.

The secret is to handle the other person gently and tactfully, in order to not hurt their Ego and hopefully they will open up on their own. Dale Carnegie even makes a reference to religion by saying that Jesus said two thousand years ago: "Agree with thine adversary quickly".

I personally tried to apply this method by starting to LISTEN to the other person before saying anything. Also, starting by emphasizing the positive and the things on which we agree sets up the psychological mood of the conversation.
I am deeply inspired by Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers the world has known, whose method was to get a "Yes Yes" response, when dealing with difficult people. He asked questions with which his opponent would have to agree. One "Yes" after the other, the opponent would become more enclined to accept a conclusion that he would have disagreed with, if directly confronted with it at first.

# re: Saying no, touchy topics, and other difficult conversations

Saturday, April 19, 2008 12:52 PM by Amy Fazen
I’ve had what I thought would be a “difficult” conversation twice in the past two weeks. As what usually happens with a “difficult” conversation you know you have to have, I was completely dreading both of them. With both, I analyzed and re-analyzed the possible different paths each might take. I spent time describing each situation to friends and family and asked them their take on the situation.
I was surprised when both conversations went MUCH better than I possibly imagined they would. Then I started thinking back on all of the difficult conversations I have had over the past dozen years. A pattern starts to emerge. For the conversations I knew about in advance, I stressed, over-analyzed, and over-prepared only to find that the situations always went far better than I had hoped. On the other hand, difficult conversations that come out of the blue (even if, in hindsight, you realize they had to happen) are the ones that have really rattled me.
It seems simple enough – you can plan your tactics and reactions for difficult conversations that you expect, but when you aren’t ready, you are caught off guard and find yourself improvising – about something uncomfortable. What’s more, if you are the person being approached with a difficult conversation, it is likely that the other person has stressed, over-analyzed, and over-prepared for the conversation. So…how do you make the best of these types of situations?
I think the key takeaway for me is that when you know that you are going to have a difficult conversation, consider yourself lucky – at least you will be the one most prepared for the situation and it will likely never be as bad as you expect it to be. On the other hand, if you find yourself in the opposite situation, take a deep breath, try to think on your feet, and hopefully you will have been partly aware enough of the situation that it isn’t coming from completely left field and you have given it some thought on some level prior.

# Nice topics

Saturday, April 19, 2008 10:12 PM by Nukman
Nice jobs

# re: Saying no, touchy topics, and other difficult conversations

Sunday, April 20, 2008 4:23 PM by Harpreet Singh
Over the past few years, I’ve reflected extensively on feedback and the role it plays in professional settings. In my last job, continuous feedback was part and parcel of our daily interactions with our managers. In a high-performance environment, we were generally always trying to improve upon our work, and our managers strove to take our work to the next level.

I appreciated the feedback – my work performance and quality improved, and I became used to receiving feedback, so that it became – in general – a less stressful experience.

However, the quality of the feedback, and the manner in which it was given, varied dramatically from person to person. There were some managers who continually inspired us to work harder and improve our work – but largely because their methods of giving feedback were encouraging, not demoralizing. Other managers constantly told us that everything we did – including mundane tasks like phone calls and leaving voice mails – should and should be improved, and had a demoralizing effect that wasn’t particularly useful. In those situations, the constant battering otherwise called “feedback” reduced our ability to understand which specific points of feedback were important and should be prioritized over others.

I learned a lot about how I’d like to work with others on teams after that experience. Some of the specific things I learned, and the most important takeaways for me, are:

• Prioritize feedback that is given, so that the person who receives the feedback can focus on the most important areas to improve.

• Focus the feedback on deliverables or processes, and not the person. One of the themes I noticed in the aforementioned negative experiences with feedback was that the person giving the feedback attributed the problem to the person rather than a deliverable or process. Changing that is a simple thing. Instead of saying “you did a poor job with this financial model,” one could say, “this financial model should include X, Y, and Z.”

• Be clear about the pieces of feedback that are individual preferences rather than real, clear professional standards. I dislike feedback that is really one’s specific, idiosyncratic preference but is instead couched as a professional standard that should be upheld. The difference should be clearly distinguished if it’s not a firm or team’s norm.