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A difficult conversation is anything you find it hard to talk about. When was the last time you had one? When was the last time you avoided one? As business owners, and in our personal lives, we are often faced with difficult decisions and difficult conversations. These conversations (or the lack thereof) can lead to hurt feelings, damaged and severed relationships, broken contracts, unfinished projects and even lawsuits. But they don't have to.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by authors Douglass Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project offers clear and practical advice on how to approach and manage difficult conversations. But the authors don't stop there. They also offer the skills to transform business disagreements and misunderstandings from problems to engines for change and innovation. After reading this book, you'll wonder how you ever functioned with out it.
The goal of this book, and my article, is to help you make all kinds of difficult conversations less stressful and more productive. Our focus at COSE is on our businesses, but this book has obvious applications to our personal lives as well. Effective communication and satisfying relationships are at the very core our businesses and our selves. This book can help with both.
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Yours, Mine and Ours Difficult Conversations: is premised on the belief that there are at least three sides to every story: yours, mine and ours. Mediators and conflict consultants know this to be true. In fact, much of what we do is help parties understand their own story and the other side's story, and then work together to discover the "third side" where the parties' stories intersect. Moreover, what matters most is not whose story is right or wrong, but rather what you are going to do about it. In order to make difficult conversations meaningful and productive, the emphasis needs to be on solving a mutually defined problem, rather than on blame or on determining who is right. Rather than looking backwards, it needs to be focused on the future.
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Beyond Dueling Monologues: There are a couple of key insights in this book. The first is that many difficult "conversations" are not actually conversations at all. Instead they are two separate monologues, with each side trying to persuade the other that they are right. Often, each person is so busy delivering their own message that they don't take the time to listen and understand what the other person is saying. When a job doesn't get finished on time, when there are cost overruns and change orders, when the wrong product is ordered or delivered, when an employee is underperforming, when a boss or a client has unreasonable demands, and in countless other similar situations, the people involved are often too busy blaming each other, defending themselves and expressing their outrage over the situation to have an actual conversation about what went wrong and, more importantly, how to fix it.
This book reminds us that in order to fix the situation and limit the chances it will happen again we need to truly understand the situation and each other. In most cases, that can't happen without having an honest conversation with the other person. This is what the authors call leaving the "message delivery" stance behind and adopting the more productive "learning" stance.
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Three Conversations at Once: The next major insight of this book is that each conversation is actually made up of three separate conversations. The first is the "what happened?" conversation. This is where we spend much of our time trying to figure out who's right and who's to blame. The authors state that when we assume that we are right we ignore the fact that most difficult conversations are actually about conflicting perceptions, interpretations and values. At best, trying to prove that we are right and they are wrong produces disagreement and distracts us from what is truly important: solving the problem and getting on with our lives. Also, the "what happened?" conversation often involves erroneous assumptions about the other person's motives and intentions. Rather than assume we know what the other person intended, it's better to ask them.
The second conversation is the "feelings" conversation. The question is not whether feelings will arise during a difficult conversation, but how to handle them when they do. Difficult conversations do not just involve feelings; they are often at their very core about feelings. Acknowledging feelings and figuring out when and how to express them is an important part of any difficult conversation. This is true of your own feelings as well as those of the other party.
The third separate conversation is the "identity" conversation. This is a conversation we have with ourselves about what this difficult conversation says about me. Questions like "am I a good boss" and "do people like me" are just two of the identity questions triggered by difficult conversations. Just knowing that having a difficult conversation may raise questions about your own identity can help reduce the anxiety that difficult conversations often produce. By shifting to the "learning stance" and moving away from a right or wrong position, the identity conversation can move from one that produces anxiety to one that provides strength.
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There is a Better Way: Sometimes we can manage difficult conversations on our own. Oftentimes it's better to enlist the help of a neutral third party. This can be a trusted colleague or friend. It can also be a professional mediator or conflict consultant. With practice, you will get better at having difficult conversations. Though difficult conversations will never be easy, they can be more productive and meaningful. They can even help your business run better and more efficiently.