Hard Conversations and The Real Importance of Building Trust

Ben Madley, 26 Jan 2020

At some point, you will have been told how important trust is. I would like you to focus on one case and how it can benefit your team.

Hard Conversations

In your life, you will have to have hard conversations. Lots of conversations can be hard, from giving feedback that isn’t purely positive, to talking about poor performance and beyond.

Hard conversations are challenging for everyone. What makes them more challenging, is leaving them too late. Issues go through three phrases:

Phase	Description
What was that?	Something doesn’t seem right.
Watch and See	You will act if it gets worse.
Too Big an Issue	Now it’s worse.

Until the third stage you tell yourself it’s not important to act on. Even worse, sometimes an issue never reaches this third stage and you never deal with it. It just bubbles underneath the surface while you watch to see if it ever gets bad enough. When you’ve entered the third stage you know that you need to say something, but now it’s a BIG issue.

How did we end up here? You made an observation and decided not to mention it. The expected hassle or bad-feeling caused by the feedback was worse than what you observed. We’ve all been in this trap. I’m not going to tell you that you just need to grow-up and get on with it. I don’t believe that works.

Avoiding Too Big an Issue

At what stage do we want to have that conversation? Trying to talk at Too Big an Issue is really difficult, so instead try talking at the What was that? phase.

It seems absurd to have a hard conversation before you’re even sure it’s an issue, but what this does is make the conversation incredibly low stakes. Through some more changes, we can make the stakes even lower.

Create the expectation with the people you work with that at some point we will have a hard conversation (instead of our internal hope that there will never be any problems) and build the trust that everything will be ok in spite of a hard conversation.

With people I manage I do this very early. As part of our first 1-1 I go through a set of questions similar to this article by Lara Hogan. I also tell them “At some point in time I’m going to give you some feedback that you aren’t going to want to hear and you’re going to give me some feedback that I don’t want to hear.” The aim is to let them know that hard conversations are a normal part of working, and not something to be avoided.

You also need to make it possible for someone to have a hard conversation with you. The only thing worse than someone else having a Too Big an Issue is you having a Too Big an Issue and not even knowing. What do you do? Make it easier for people to have hard conversations with you. Let them know that you’re expecting constructive feedback and it won’t damage your morale. I do this with my manager, my team and the people I manage.

Through this system, you ensure that you don’t let issues fester until they’re too big to talk about and too big not to. You also ensure you get feedback when you need it.