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Moving Relationships Forward: Clarify Motives to Speed Up Difficult Conversations, with Todd Davis, Chief People Officer, FranklinCovey, and Author, Get Better
Declare your intent
Don’t wait to formulate the perfect response or the perfect intro to a conversation. Declare your intent. I have a lot of reps, and I’m not pounding my chest saying I’m so great at this, but it has become a natural thing for me to do. I will start most of my conversations with, “Elizabeth, I just want you to know my only intent in meeting with you is to see if we can resolve this situation.” Or, “I want you to know my only intent in holding this meeting is so we can get to a better place. I don’t have all the answers, I don’t believe anybody in here has all the answers, but I think together we can come up with the answers.“ It is so clarifying. It puts everybody at ease. It lets us put our guard down so we can say, “Oh, wow, this is just a real person trying to do the right thing.”
I think about how many times a week I talk to people and they say, “Well, I don’t know how to address this.” Tell them you don’t know how to address it. “Really? They’re going to think I’m dumb.” No, they’re not, they’re going to think you’re human and they’re going to know your heart. So say, “I’m really worried about the project and I don’t know how to say this right…” Start with that. They’ll appreciate it. It puts you all on the same playing field, and they’ll work you through it. They’ll say, “Well, tell me some of the things you’re concerned about,” and it starts the dialogue going. We wait so long to have this perfect, structured conversation that we all play out in the car as we’re driving to work, or on the subway, or whatever, and boy, we slow things down instead of speed things up as far as moving our relationships forward and therefore our effectiveness forward.
I had a very difficult conversation with a person in our company several years ago who had been doing some things that were grounds for termination–using his computer for visiting inappropriate sites and things like that. It was really awkward, and I knew this person quite well. I was taken aback when I first learned of the situation, but I sat down with him, and I’ll call him Tim. And I said, “Tim, I need to have a difficult conversation with you. And I want you to know my only intent is to help, because I’m really concerned about something that I’ve found out you’re involved in here at work. And I want you to know my intent is to help, but if we can’t get this resolved it’s going to mean you’re losing your job.” Tim is still with us, but years later he brought this situation up to me. He said, “I just want you to know that I reflect on that conversation. I knew why you were coming to visit me. I was sick to my stomach. I thought you were coming to fire me.” And we debated whether or not we were going to be doing that. And he said, “When you said those words to me, it kind of took this all down a few notches and I was actually able to hear what you were saying.” So, declaring your intent can be a very, very powerful thing to do.
Assume good intent in others
Understanding what our real motives are starts to help us drive down to what is really the intent of others. Many of my discussions are centered around someone who has a real issue or bone to pick with someone else. And I’ll listen, and I’ll listen, and I’ll listen, because a lot of times people just want to feel understood. But then when they’re finished feeling understood, they feel like they’ve had a shoulder to cry on, I will always ask the question, “I wonder why Jim would’ve said that?” Or, “I wonder why Gail feels that way?” And the person will usually say, “Well, I have no idea. I’m not Jim.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, I understand that. But if I think about Jim, I wonder what motivates him.” And if I can start a discussion like that, more often than not people will say, “Well, you know he was pretty depressed over that issue last year, or she got passed over for that promotion, so maybe she’s still feeling defensive about that.” And it’s my way of not manipulation at all, but helping someone gently, but directly, start to see something from another person’s perspective. And that helps in leading them try to understand what someone’s intent is.
When we can get that type of a conversation going, it’s not always easy, but it becomes easier to start to assume that maybe everyone doesn’t have it out for you, or bad intent. In general, people have good intent.