Five Tips on How to Have That Critical Conversation You’re Too Afraid to Have
Here are five tips that can help.
1. Frame the issue thoughtfully and in advance.
People hate to be caught off guard by a challenging conversation.
Understanding what’s on the table before you get to the table helps so much.
Obviously, if you’re dealing with personal conflict, a short window of notice is helpful. (Hearing, “Hey, we’re going to talk about your poor performance next month,” isn’t helping anyone.) But a heads up the day before (“tomorrow we’ll review what happened last week”) can help everyone prepare.
If you’re talking about a chronic issue that your church needs to address or a topic that can help lead you into a better future, framing the issue well and framing it in advance is critical. It helps everyone show up having thought through what’s at stake.
That’s one of the reasons I wrote each chapter of Lasting Impact the way I did. My hope is it will frame the issues for your team in a way that makes the conversation healthy and meaningful.
2. Stay clear about what you’re discussing.
I personally find one of the greatest challenges of having conversations with leaders is keeping people focused.
Even if you frame the issue well in advance, meetings can veer off on rabbit trails before you know what’s happening. Frankly, this seems to be a characteristic of many leaders (I’m the king of rabbit trails in meetings).
How do you combat that? Write down the exact points you want to cover to keep you and your team focused.
And don’t just keep it to yourself. State what you hope to accomplish in the meeting so when you leave you know you made progress.
So what does this look like?
If you’re navigating a longer, multi-meeting conversation, your goal might be to ‘introduce the topic’ or to ‘establish whether we want to tackle this issue.’
If you can accomplish the discussion in a night, your objective might be to decide on three possible courses of action or to create a six-month action plan.
If you know ahead of time what you want to accomplish, you are far more likely to accomplish it. People will also feel their time has been much better spent.
3. Attack problems, not people.
If you’re really having an intense discussion (and you should be having these if you want to make progress), emotions may get heated.
When they do, make sure you attack problems, not people. It can be so easy to personalize conflict. We do it in our marriages all the time when we say things like “You always …” or “You never …”
Big mistake.
Let the people you’re talking with know that you’re for them, and what you’re trying to do is to attack a problem together. The fact that you disagree might actually be an advantage because it can help you get a more varied perspective on the problem.
When my emotions get charged, I just have to remind myself over and over again to affirm people and attack the problem.
You’ll make far more progress when you do.
4. Empathize with opposing views.
I went to law school. It’s instinctive to me to dismiss an opposing point of view immediately. I can even come up with five reasons why their idea is a bad idea pretty quickly.
But when you do that, you don’t gain ground; you lose it.
A better approach is to actually show empathy for the opposing point of view.
Instead of saying, “I can’t believe you won’t let that tradition go. That’s crazy!” what about saying, “I can understand why that would be difficult to give that up. I’m sure if I were in your shoes, I would feel the same way. But what do you think about the people we’re trying to reach? Do you think our old strategy is the best strategy with which to engage them?”
Then just listen.
Do you see the difference?
When you empathize with your opponents, you often create allies. And even if you don’t, you’ve given their point of view dignity and respect. And you’ve gained the respect of the others listening.
