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How To Have Difficult Conversations At Work
Most of your office life can come back to difficult conversations at work. Feels like it would be good to talk about what those tend to be and how to handle them, right?
Let’s start with a couple of basic concepts around the umbrella idea of difficult conversations at work. These concepts tend to create said difficult conversations:
Management isn’t actually intuitive for many people: What do I mean? Well, you typically get promoted for a specific set of reasons — often around being good at tasks or deliverables. People almost never get advanced to managerial levels based on interactions with people, which is very flawed (but interactions with people are harder to track and more subjective in the eyes of most senior leaders, and/or those senior people don’t really care about people and view them as interchangeable). Because management isn’t intuitive, and thus people are becoming managers without a good understanding of people, difficult conversations at work often arise.
Work isn’t logical; it’s emotional. We want work to be logical, which is why we throw process at everything (BPO, baby!). Work isn’t actually logical. It’s made up of people, so, uh, it’s inherently emotional. But again, we tend to promote and advance people who are…
