It’s the dreaded difficult conversation. Most people find these kinds of conversations so difficult that they try to just avoid them altogether. Now I call them a “crucial conversation,” and the reason being is that anytime I’m brought in for communication training, I always provide a pre-training survey.
It’s for the participants to anonymously submit different communication scenarios that we can then use for role playing, for coaching, for training, and for tips. I will tell you that a huge majority of the scenarios that people input are around these difficult conversations.
So while they may be difficult, they are crucial, meaning they impact our day-to-day work and they impact our day-to-day outcomes.
Now, I recently saw an HR article that was so great. It talked about the five kinds of traps to avoid when you’re in the middle of one of these difficult conversations. Now, for those who go through my training, I take you through a six-step process to help you navigate before you’d even get into any of these traps. But I’m going to take it one step further back, even more so today, and talk about how you can navigate things to avoid even getting into one of these difficult conversations.
It’s one of the biggest communication mistakes that I see across individuals, teams, and entire organizations. Let me share a story as to one way that it became really obvious. I was coaching one of my private clients, and he was sharing that his manager all of a sudden started to act very strangely, like completely different behavior. He had been out on a sales call with a client, and when he was done with that meeting, he looked at his phone and there were multiple text messages from his manager.
His manager is pinging him very aggressively, questioning things about another client. And this really was bizarre behavior, it was almost like this person, this manager, seemed to have had a dual personality with my client. It was completely irrational behavior, based upon the relationship that they had had for a year or two years. And so my client was sharing with me this scenario, and asking how he should respond.
While he’s telling me about it, he opens up and shares that he knows his manager is going through a divorce. And that is probably the reason that his manager is acting so bizarre, almost in a hysterical manner. My big caution to him was, we don’t know that that is truly in fact why his manager was texting him in this way. It might’ve been, but the mistake being made was the assumption that because of this personal situation, that was dictating why they were communicating that way.
And that is one of the biggest mistakes that I see, are these assumptions that we make when it comes to communication. Whether it’s assumptions about why someone’s sending something, it’s the assumptions that the message means a certain thing or is meant to move you in a certain way.
All of these assumptions are what then trigger our response – or worse – our reaction.
And when we don’t clarify those assumptions upfront, meaning when we don’t clarify those assumptions before we respond in our communication back, we are risking getting into a difficult conversation. Instead, if we were to clarify those assumptions before we respond, then we could potentially avoid many of the difficult conversations that we find ourselves inherently being a part of.
Today, my challenge to you is that when you receive some sort of communication, whether it’s through verbal communication, it’s through a text or an email, that before you respond, check what your assumptions are. Is there a moment where you may want to clarify? You may want to ask some questions before you respond. Let’s avoid one of the most common mistakes, which is making assumptions, before we ever find ourselves in the trap of a difficult conversation where we now need to navigate it.