Difficult conversations – those discussions we know that we need to have, but dread having – come in all shapes and sizes. Conversations like these can be difficult not only to initiate, but also to engage in a way that continues to enhance your relationships and trust.
Compassionate leadership skills are the most effective tools to bring to bear on these daily challenges to turn them into opportunities. Courage, non-judgmental awareness, and compassionate communications, all arising from a place of self-compassionate anchoring can lead to productive change as the result of your difficult conversations.
Difficult conversations require courageous compassion
There is nothing compassionate about allowing people to engage in damaging or substandard behaviors. Such behaviors cause harm and suffering for others and for the person acting badly, even if they are not aware of it. In these circumstances, compassion calls for wisdom and courage to name the behavior and recognize the actions that will remedy the problem. This is hard and requires a strong, compassionate leader.
It is important to remember what compassion is and what it isn’t. Compassion is an awareness of the suffering of another and the desire to act to ease the suffering and remove the cause of suffering. Compassion is not pity or sympathy. Compassion sees negative behavior and focuses intently on how to change the situation. For leaders, quite often, that means sitting down and having a clear, direct conversation about what is going wrong. Those conversations can be difficult.
Start by creating a growth mindset culture
A growth mindset views skill as something that can be developed through practice and hard work, as opposed to something that is a fixed, innate ability. Mindset has a significant impact on the meaning one takes from failure. For those with a growth mindset, failure offers a chance to assess what went wrong and learn from it. For someone with a fixed mindset, failure represents a condemnation of their innate ability.
Leaders create a growth culture through the values they express, the values they embody, and how they respond to failure. Compassionate leaders make it clear that they have their team’s backs, and that part of their job is to help the team grow and succeed. When failure occurs, identifying the causes of failure is not an exercise in blaming. It is about identifying the changes that are necessary to prevent the same trouble from arising again and to bring forth constant improvement.
Check in with yourself before engaging with others
Leading a difficult conversation requires great strength and stability, therefore, it is essential that you consider your own feelings about the approaching conversation. Are you concerned that you will be challenged or attacked for what you need to say? Are you concerned that this conversation will hurt your relationship with the other person? Does this conversation echo deep in your being from similar conversations you’ve had in the past, perhaps a time when you were on the other side of the conversation?
Acknowledge your own concerns, without judgment. Then recognize and honor yourself for having the courage to handle the difficult conversation knowing that it creates difficulty for you. If these conversations didn’t have big challenges, they wouldn’t be difficult. You won’t be able to eliminate the challenges, so it is important that you be comfortable and well-grounded in your ability to handle them. The groundedness arises from an understanding of yourself and your own emotional responses to the situation, coupled with a solid dose of self-kindness and self-compassion.
Don’t make it personal
Non-judgmental awareness is one of the most powerful skills a compassionate leader can practice, and that skill becomes particularly valuable during difficult conversations. This skill allows you to name a negative behavior and the resulting impacts, without causing you to label the person acting badly as a “bad person.” Keep the behavior and the person distinct in the conversation.
One way to do that is to stay focused on the behavior, without judging the intention behind it. For example, a compassionate leader can say, “You have missed the last two deadlines for our project,” which clearly conveys the behavior being named. On the other hand, saying, “The fact that you don’t care enough about our project to meet your deadlines is creating problems for everyone,” names the intention as a lack of caring. Finding a solution will be much more direct by staying focused on the behavior that needs changing.
Use compassionate communications skills
Difficult conversations are by their nature more threatening than ordinary conversational flow. For that reason, it is particularly important to communicate in ways that don’t trigger your colleague’s natural fight, flight, or freeze responses. Start by using clear, direct language that isn’t triggering. A very easy, simple example of this is to use the phrase “tell me more” instead of “why?” The word “why” often conveys judgment and can result in defensiveness. One of our most popular blog posts, “Language Matters,” focused on just this topic, and includes a few additional easy, specific language changes you can make right now for a more easeful conversation.
Stay focused on constructive outcomes by naming what you want to occur rather than what you don’t want to occur. And finally, listen deeply, and listen a lot. When you name a challenge objectively, and what you want to occur constructively, you leave space for positive solutions. Frame the issue as something to be solved collaboratively, and you just might be surprised that the outcome you create together is even more powerful than your originally hoped for result.
In closing…
We spend so much energy trying to avoid what is difficult. Facing it doesn’t make it less difficult, but it does help us grow from it. The more you practice these skills the more natural they will become. You still may not want to have difficult conversations, but you will know that handling them with courageous compassion will lead to positive change, and that will make the challenge completely worth it.
Photo Credit: Photo by Korney Violin on Unsplash.