Speak or Suffer

Avoiding Hard Conversations is Destructive

“The customer complaints queue is too long!” the owner notes. Shortly, new metrics begin to be tracked for complaints opened and complaints closed. The employees get the memo and start closing complaints resulting in accolades from leadership. But the complaints are still coming in! “Figure out what’s wrong and fix it once and for all!” the department is told . . . ”Or Else!” The employees find a solution for that too.

The results of this progression are obvious, but the owner just sees the quantity of incoming complaints coming down and associates these metrics with some truth about his business. It does in fact convey a truth, but it’s not the truth the owner assumes. Why? Because the people who know the truth have not informed him otherwise.

This could easily become a lesson for the leader in goal setting, vision casting and creating metrics that reflect the actual aim and purpose of the business. But the point of this article is that YOU are responsible for transmitting the truth to the team … and that includes the owner.

I work with companies often and the usual refrain from middle management is “You don’t understand, that doesn’t work here.”

If that is the statement that went through your mind too, you are not alone in being wrong. Telling the boss how his metrics have produced an ignorance of customer complaints and is harming the real goal could be interpreted as an implication of the boss’s stupidity, and calling the boss stupid is not a good career move. In response to the fear, you dance around the facts and tangentially imply that the metrics are causing poor results for customers, but you never really state the fact.

This is a potentially difficult conversation with risks for you. The owner could be moody. He could feel attacked in his leadership. He could hold a grudge. You could get a reputation as “the complainer.” So, rather than take that risk, you allow hundreds, maybe thousands of customers and the long term goals of the business as well as your work-mate's futures to be put at risk instead. You know that staying quiet is a terrible choice, but quiet you remain.

But the better choice is to have that conversation more than once if necessary. But you are not sure how to do it successfully. So, start purposefully engaging in lower risk difficult conversations. Ones where your job isn’t at risk. Try this. The next time you are in a public place where someone is being a total jerk, try addressing the behavior yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do so. This is called “practice” and it’s uncomfortable. You will quickly learn what does not work, and if you keep coming back, you will start to learn what does.

What works is not nearly as straight forward as the list of things that don’t. That is why, when I am coaching an individual or a team on this topic, we start with what NOT to do.