Communication Skills

These conversations are increasingly common for managers as people are having to do more with less.   It’s not just that you’re giving the person some difficult  news.  Other complications are that you are often under huge work pressure at the time and your team might be small so tensions loom large.

So there are huge emotions on each side. Some people say: ‘Just stick to the facts’ but this is a particularly bleak option.  The facts don’t ‘speak for themselves’ – the conversation is really all about the emotion – theirs and, as a result, yours.

If you are going to manage the conversation in a meaningful way you must do so through empathy for the person.   To achieve empathy, you have to manage your own emotions well enough to be able to focus on those of the other person.

Helping your team members through times like this touches the well-spring of compassion. You will be astounded at the impact on yourself and others.

Empathy can only really exist when it is honestly felt, but three tips can help in keeping your emotions out of the way and enable your honest concern to come through:

1. Know how you instinctively react during strong emotion.  This means that you can identify the emotion when it happens and control  it rather than have it control you. For example, if you expect your heart rate to go up, it won’t take you by surprise, plus you can plan to breathe deeply to lower it.
2. Work out the range of ways you think the other person might react and practice some effective ways of responding.  You need these responses to hand because it is hard to think of the right way to respond while you are coping with strong emotion.
3. Work very hard at just listening.  Discipline yourself to just stay in empathetic silence, rather than feeling that you have to provide a solution.

Once the conversation is over, take a few minutes to recover and check in with your own emotions.

Wellington is such a compact city that it is possible to have a complex conversation with someone just by meeting them in the street often enough. This morning I ran into a friend, Margaret,  who has her young child  in daycare. Over thelast  couple of months  we’d had pieces of an on-going conversations about Margaret’s concerns that her child was not very happy there.  Of course he was too young to express his fears adequately; she liked the staff; they said they were watching closely and there was no problem; but she just had this concern that he might be being bullied.

We talked about the validity of a mother’s instinct. I told her during a long period when my son was very ill and unable to communicate,  a nurse had advised me to never ignore my gut feel as a mother.  This morning Margaret  told me she had followed her instinct, shifted her son to another child care centre and he was much happier. And it was obvious that so was she! What do they say?: ‘A mother can only be as happy as her least happy child’

Until just now I have had a negative sense of the word ‘instinct’ as something a bit flaky, but when I checked the psychology definition it said:’ Instinct is a behaviour mediated by reactions below the conscious level’. So now I do believe in instinct – that definition of instinct anyway!

What is likely to have been going on is that Margaret  received many signals from her son that all was not well for him at the day care. Many of those signs would have been so subtle and fleeting that they didn’t register at a conscious level, but eventually accumulated into this gut feel  that he might be being bullied.

The closeness of the parental relationshiph means that mirror neuron responses registered between mother and child must be extremely highly attuned. Gut feel is immensely important to survival of dependent children.

We could apply the same rule – Never ignore your gut feel’ to any intense conversation.

How can we trust your instincts more?  We have to pause long enough in the intensity; cut through the static and listen to that gut feel. Don’t immediately leap into action as a result, but do take your instinct seriously:  Check out what you are sensing instinctively with the other person.  You can do this by asking a neutral open question to probe: ‘ I’m getting the sense that…  What do you think?  Then proceed accordingly.

For an easy practice, spend some time in a meeting tuning in to your instinct for what is happening and check its reliability. For follow-up, there’s an interesting conversation thread on this topic in TED