Day 3 - Tough Conversations
Without a doubt, I had a tendency to avoid these. As Susan Scott says, “A universal talent is the ability to avoid difficult conversations.”
Sometimes I pretended that I didn’t know something, to avoid having to deal with it.
On other occasions, I would say to myself that the situation would sort itself out (which it rarely did).
One of my biggest problems was that I overthought things (as Seneca said, “We suffer more in imagination than in realty”), along with my natural tendency to avoid conflict.
But I did improve.
One thing I that was helpful for me was to use 5 folders (one for each day of the week).
Then, say on Monday, I would plan a difficult conversation that I would be having on Wednesday. Then I would drop the notes into Wednesday’s folder and not think about it again until then. It worked pretty well (and with other stuff too).
The other thing I realised was that some of the time I was not acting because I wanted to be liked, and the irony of this is that as a leader your team are looking for you to act when something is not right and needs fixing. By failing to act and have the tough conversation (through wanting to be liked), it was actually having the opposite effect; I was actually losing my influence.
If you’ve not seen the classic clip of Jony Ive (former Chief Design Officer at Apple) talking about a conversation he once had with Steve Jobs, then here is the link (you can start at 1:50 if you like).
