Balancing Tough Conversations

Even when the message is crystal-clear, there are gonna be times where team members fall short of our expectations. And while this won’t likely ever happen when we have an abundance of time to push all our other responsibilities aside to deal with it, a significant part of maintaining the influence and respect we’ve earned as leaders will hinge on making sure we address those situations. It can certainly be easy to procrastinate on this, especially if the miss on a deliverable wasn’t a huge deal or the poor performance was from someone who has a history of solid behavior. But putting off a tough conversation sends a very distinct message to two separate groups of team members - and the way either group interprets it can kill quite a bit of profitability!

As I wrapped up our look at the cost of an unaccountable workforce, I shared about a fellow reading an article I had contributed to a quarterly industry magazine and feeling the need to fill out a form on the homepage of our website telling me that my views on addressing unacceptable behavior in the workplace were supporting a woke culture. I’m still trying to figure out how he got that from what I had written but I’m guessing it will be easier to find out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-pop… To avoid even the appearance of supporting said culture, I’ll emphasize once more that two key responsibilities for each of us in leadership roles is maintaining high expectations throughout the teams we lead AND addressing the scenarios where anyone falls short of those expectations. I’m certainly not suggesting that this is always a hard-line approach right off the bat but we cannot turn a blind eye - regardless of who may call us names…

Quite frankly, this may be the one thing I’ve seen leaders struggle with more than anything else. And to be perfectly honest; I understand why! Having this kind of conversation, whether it’s a long time friend or one of the most skilled members of our workforce, comes with the potential for undesired consequences. 

Over all the years that Cindy and I have been writing and delivering new lessons for our Leading At The Next Level program, we’ve had quite a few requests to share specific ones with various clients. More than any others to date, there have been two that we’ve been asked to package and customize so supervisors, managers, and even executives within each respective organization had a clear roadmap for handling these types of conversations with the right balance of candor and care. We provide a foundation by detailing The Power of a Candid Conversation - and just how much profitability can be lost by avoiding them for any reason - then we provide a set of practical steps by sharing How Leaders Improve Results by Balancing Candor with Care.

We’ve seen leaders at all levels of their organizations walk away from these lessons with the framework they need to deal with tough situations while maintaining strong relationships with the individuals they’re addressing. That’s played an important part in each company’s overall performance and profitability but it’s also been something we’ve been able to include for the folks who don’t have positional authority but do have tremendous knowledge that needs to be passed on to the less experienced folks around them. But we also saw that capturing the profitability that’s so often lost to poor training needed something with a unique focus so we’ll look at that next…