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Improve Your Communication Skills:Use Facts To Make Difficult Conversations Safe

In any conversation where you speak up on something that is upsetting you it is important that you get your facts straight and that you use them to open the conversation. This is not as easy as it might sound.

When your emotions run strongly, it is difficult to separate facts from feelings and you are likely to open the conversation with an emotionally charged statement that will probably sound like an accusation to the other person.

Consider what should be a straightforward conversation between a manager and one of his people about use of an office telephone for private calls. The manager knows that the employee is aware of the limit on personal calls. They have spoken about it before. The facts are clear. The manager is looking at a phone bill that is ten times over the limit. He is furious.

He goes to the employee at his desk in the open plan area. What is going on here, he says, raising his voice, and waving the telephone bill in the air. This is ridiculous! You know the rules! People close by look up.

The accusation is unmistakable. The employee defends himself, says he did not know that he had made so many calls, and that he had forgotten about the limit. He mumbles something about being sorry and that he will not do it again. He goes back to work.

The manager thinks that because he has spoken to the employee about the problem, he has solved it. But the employee, instead of thinking about his use of the telephone, is feeling angry and resentful about the way his manager accused him in front of his colleagues.

There was no effective conversation about the behaviour of the employee. The manager opened with an accusation, in a public area. He did not find out what was going on and he did not in any way hold the employee to account for what he had done.

Consider how the conversation sounds when the manager uses the facts to hold the employee accountable.

Can we talk about this telephone bill he says, to open the conversation, as he puts the document on the desk.

Then he introduces the facts. There are three.

I have told everyone about the limit on personal calls.
Last month I pointed out that you had gone over the limit.
The figures for this month show that you are nearly ten times over the limit.

With the facts on the table, he explains how he feels about the situation. I am really concerned about this. When we talked about this before, you undertook to limit the number of calls you make.

Now he invites the employee into the conversation, to account for his behaviour, with a simple, open question: What is going on?

With this approach, there is no accusation, and nothing is said that creates defensiveness in the employee. With the facts on the table, the accountability cannot be avoided. The conversation that follows has a good chance of uncovering all sides of the story and the manager has the best chance of gaining commitment from the employee to change his ways.

When you want to get to the bottom of a problem, you need to create a conversation in which the other person feels safe to speak up. After all, there are always two sides to any story. If you start out with an emotional and perhaps insulting accusation, you do not create a safe environment for open dialogue: you never find out what is really going on: and the problem is never properly resolved.

Open conversations with facts: they make it safe to talk.

Seed Newsvine

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