Having difficult conversations with the right mindset can build trust and further develop your relationship with your team.
Welcome to Manager’s Toolbox, a column designed to help managers in biotech and pharma navigate the corporate terrain and grow professionally and personally while aligning with their own values. Each month, Bruce Wu, an executive coach, shares expertise and insights that will help you learn or hone your management skills.
In this installment, Bruce discusses how to have difficult conversations as a manager.
Unless we work solo, our interactions with others are bound to create friction. This is because each of us sees the world through our own lens that is formed by our own unique life experience. Having a conversation with someone who does not agree completely with us, or *gasp* read our mind, can be challenging for anyone and especially for a manager, particularly when the other person reports to you.
Unlike a conversation with your peers or your manager, in this instance you simultaneously have the power imbalance in your favor and the responsibility of caring for and guiding the participant. Nevertheless, when you approach these difficult conversations with the right mindset, you can not only enrich your own life experience but also build trust and further develop your relationship with your team.
Having Difficult Conversations Can Build Connections
A difficult conversation can be any conversation where you have reached an impasse or are stuck in a conflict, such as disagreeing about a project’s direction or an employee’s recent performance. Many of us are trained to avoid conflicts because we are told they disrupt harmony. However, I believe when both participants are fully engaged, having difficult conversations can help us build human connections.
Working together to overcome something challenging also builds trust. You trust the other person not because you know they will agree with you. You trust them because you know they have your back regardless of your relative positions on issues. And you know that because you have earned mutual respect from each other from the experience of confronting something difficult together. It is that mutual respect that allows you to find ways to move forward together, even when you disagree.
Tools for Having Difficult Conversations
I am not advocating for you to go and intentionally trigger a difficult conversation just so you can build human connections and trust. However, when you have a choice between avoiding conflicts by shutting down and resolving conflicts through a genuine conversation, I would recommend the latter. In any event, when you inevitably find yourself in a conversation with your team and feel stuck, consider using the four tools described here.
1. Climb the ladder of inference
Conversations with conflicts can often be difficult because the participants can’t understand each other’s perspectives, and they begin to dehumanize each other as a result. Informed by our own experience, we tend to presume what the other knows or thinks or make incorrect judgments about them. For example, you believe that your direct report must be incompetent because they ran the experiment differently from what you told them to.
Rarely do people act without a reason, and trying to understand the why is what can facilitate having a difficult conversation. The exercise of climbing the ladder of inference can be particularly helpful.
The ladder of inference is a model of decision-making behavior developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen. In essence, each of us forms our conclusion at the top of a figurative ladder based on our knowledge and bias, and to understand the other’s reason in reaching their own conclusion, we need to climb down our ladder and up theirs. Going through the climbing exercise helps us understand the other person’s perspective so we might find common ground.
Climbing up and down a ladder, physically or mentally, can be exhausting and counterintuitive. The next three tools, which I discussed in the previous installment of this column, can help with that process.
2. Be empathetic: understanding the why
Empathy is the ability to understand emotionally what other people feel and to see things from their perspective. It does not require you to feel what they feel or even agree with what they feel. Appreciating that they have their reasons in reaching their position (or action) can humanize them. They are not just some soulless antagonist! The attempt to understand their reason can also help you find common ground.
In other words, empathy can help separate the person from the issue, which is critical in managing a difficult conversation. That direct report whose experiment looks different than what you anticipated? They might have a reason to deviate from your instruction. What is that reason?
In other words, empathy can help separate the person from the issue, which is critical in managing a difficult conversation.
3. Be intellectually curious: asking open-ended questions
Once you are willing to appreciate there are reasons behind a person’s position, find out what these reasons are. Be intellectually curious. Ask open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions most often begin with any of these five words: why, when, how, what and where. They are helpful because they invite the respondent to answer in a way that allows you a glimpse into their thinking—to help you climb up their part of the ladder of inference. When the person provides an answer, follow up with more open-ended questions.
Through this iterative process of inquiring and learning, you continue to humanize the other person and better understand their perspective. Too often, we jump to a conclusion about another based on what we perceive as facts, and intellectual curiosity can help us be better informed of the situation and reduce our own bias.
The direct report we met earlier? It turns out by inquiring, you learned that they ran the experiment differently because a fresh-off-the-press journal article taught a new standard to run that type of experiment, and you did not know about the article. They might not be incompetent at all!
4. Be vulnerable: bringing your authentic self
It can be uncomfortable being in a conversation where you are asking questions to understand instead of giving instructions to be followed. However, by being vulnerable and genuinely trying to learn about the other person’s reasons, you build connections with them.
To be clear, at the end of the day, you can totally disagree with the reasons you learned, and the buck stops with you because you are the manager, but by being receptive to others, you open a door to new possibilities. Furthermore, your team no longer sees you as a manager beyond reach. Instead, you are a fellow human they can relate to. That connection and mutual respect is the foundation of trust.
With that hypothetical direct report, you begin to see them as someone who takes initiative by reading journal articles, and your direct report starts to respect you as someone who sees them. Oh, the icing on the cake? Because the experiment was done with the new protocol, your group saved itself from having to re-run it just to conform to the new, updated standard.
Difficult Conversations Can Be Growth Opportunities
Don’t get me wrong. The tools I described here do not make a conversation with conflict easy. The conversation is still going to be difficult. However, my hope is that with these tools, you will begin to see difficult conversations as opportunities to build connections, rather than as an obstacle.
It is also my hope that by learning to appreciate the diversity of views and learn from others’ perspectives, each of us can grow and evolve while staying true to who we are. More importantly, we can be role models by passing down these skills to our teams so they too can grow. After all, isn’t one of the jobs as managers to grow the next generation of managers? Onwards!
