CHAPTER EIGHT

How to have difficult conversations

Whether you are retrenching someone or laying off many employees, whether you’re dealing with poor performance or telling someone they didn’t get the promotion, being the bearer of bad news is the toughest thing a manager could do. It’s the worst part of the job.

It’s not just because of the potential impact that piece of news might have on that particular employee (what if they cry? What if they do something stupid?). It also has an impact on everyone else. Other employees are watching. A badly-communicated message could affect productivity and retention. It could damage the company. And the worst part? No-one is going to praise you for handling it brilliantly. You become the bastard for a day.

Still, conveying bad news is part of every manager’s job. It comes with territory. The problem is that many managers are not skilled at doing it. Many have fallen into the job because they were operational or technical experts in their given field. They managed projects, not people. It was a completely different skill set. Telling some home truths requires certain skills you don’t pick up on your way to becoming a manager.

Those skills, however, are more important than ever before. Years ago, the best-loved managers were the ones who never had to have these sorts of conversations. That’s no longer the case now.

Still, experts, many of whom have had to do it themselves, say it is a skill that can be learned. They also say many managers are now suffering from “bad conversation fatigue”. It happens with more companies laying off staff. The ability to have a difficult conversation and the necessity to have the skill to have that difficult conversation is a fundamental requirement for management. It’s not an option. You have to be able to do this. You’re never going to go in with a comfort factor because it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but you need to be comfortable that you can come into it with the knowledge to appropriately address it.

The challenge for managers now is whether conversational skills are now being undermined by the avalanche of electronic communication that takes over the manager’s working life. There have been instances where online or text communication took over face-to-face conversation. For example, Sydney retailer Modestie Boutique was fined $10,000 by Fair Work Australia for sacking an employee by text

Nothing replaces a face-to-face conversation. People might talk about the tyranny of distance or time, but you know what? Make the effort. You can’t delegate this type of conversation to technology. It’s about respect, courtesy and a message to the rest of your staff about how you value them.

Experts say the most important thing any manager should do is to be prepared. Hillary Armstrong, the director of education at the Institute of Executive Coaching, says managers going into these conversations first need to sort out a number of questions.

“The first step is preparation,’’ she says. “The most important thing is you work out what belongs to you and what belongs to the conversation. That means getting the emotions out of the way but recognising that any of these conversations to be successful have to be based on mutual respect.

“It is important for us in that preparation to think of what outcomes we want, why are we here, what is the purpose, and what relationship do we want with that person in the future, even if they’re leaving the organisation. To me that establishes the mutual respect. You start thinking of this person not only in terms of the conversation but also in the future as well.”

“I always ask myself if I was on the other side of the conversation, how would I like the person to be telling me what they are telling me?”

She says getting those questions down is not a complicated exercise – it only takes five minutes. Not doing it, however, would be disastrous. “Relationships are broken one conversation at a time. It only takes one clumsy and poorly managed conversation for a person to lose trust in you,’’ she says.

As for the conversations, there are some basic ground rules. And you have to be ready for push-back. “It’s important to state clearly and succinctly what you have to state with the idea that you recognise there will be other perceptions that are not only yours,’’ she says.

“You are stating your side very clearly and respectfully and then you are giving them the opportunity to state their side and avoid going, ‘Yes but yes but’.

“When you state your own side, it’s important to give concrete examples and give people something specific to acknowledge. I think it’s important to listen to people very openly without judgement and clearly state the next step ahead, what you want.”

Armstrong says managers are struggling these days with the emphasis on electronic communications over face-to-face conversations. “The rise of digital communications has made it worse because people have these emails firing off at each other, and even I have heard when feedback is delivered by digital communications or off the cuff, this is a real problem,’’ she says.

That said, she does not believe managers are worse communicators these days because of technology. “I know a lot of the top layers of organisations who don’t have digital skills are still appalling at difficult conversations. It’s not a generational thing in my mind,’’ she says.

Other experts, who have had to do it themselves, point to some basic rules. Treat people with respect, where possible try to have a good relationship with them so that the conversation will be more productive, don’t put it off, don’t let your emotions get the better of you and keep the conversation business-like. If you have to explain why someone didn’t get a promotion, keep it simple and emphasise that you felt they needed experience. What’s important here is avoiding the negative. Similarly, if you are retrenching someone, look at making the transition as painless as possible.

Tim McLean, chief executive officer of lean manufacturing and project management company TXM Lean Solutions, says preparation involves working out a communication plan. That means letting every manager know what the message is and making sure every manager is giving the same message.

McLean says good company leaders take a different approach. “You have to get them all together on the morning of the announcement,’’ McLean says. “You need have it all worked out. You would have a couple of key people who’ve been involved and you’ll have cheat sheets for them.

“Before the event, you have to think about who you communicate to, like your managers, your people, potentially the media if it’s big enough. You have to be prepared in case the union whips up the media or there is some other little storm.”

McLean, a former operations manager in manufacturing who has had to handle all sorts of difficult conversations from retrenchments to performance issues, says that in the case of large layoffs, it’s a good idea to have Frequently Asked Questions distributed to staff, either by intranet or in hard copy. Sometimes, these might have to be updated daily.

The important part, he says, is to remember that people switch off once they hear the bad news.

“Basically, people stop listening once they hear the factory is going to close and people are going to lose their job,’’ he says. “They start thinking ‘Oh shit, I have just bought a new house’, ‘Oh shit, my wife is eight months pregnant’. As soon as they hear the bad news, they start thinking about them personally.

“So you need a process where you communicate with people individually. Some of them might be doing a little dance and saying ‘I want a package’. They want to know how much they’re going to get, they want to know if they can keep their job. So you have to know those kinds of answers.

“You need to have thought out the likely questions people will ask and how you would answer those, and have that information for managers.

“The very first question people are going to ask is: ‘What will I get?’ If you don’t immediately know, you need to have a process that says this is what’s going to happen and this is when you’ll be told. Otherwise you will have people annoying you and the HR department asking: ‘What will I get, when do I find out what my package is?’”

He says another trick to ease the conversation is to try to find points of agreement with the other party. It defuses the tensions and emotions.

“I had to demote a guy and he was a guy I had a very close personal relationship with and I promoted him and he didn’t cope with the promotion. He got promoted, it didn’t work out and the factory he was running was going to hell in a hand basket and we had to undo the situation,’’ he says.

It’s the sort of conversation that will start off with something like this: “Barry I know how you feel, I know you’ve worked hard and it’s been tough.”

“You don’t try to rationalise it and talk about the company’s economic situation,’’ McLean says. “You have to say ‘Yes I understand, you have done a great job on this and I agree with you’. What you will find is that their emotion will drift away but then you have to get back to the point and say we will have to find you another role.’

“Don’t use the word ‘but’, you try and use the word ‘and’. ‘But’ is a real killer, almost a putdown word in these conversations. So you say: ‘You’ve done a good job and we understand, we need to find you a role that suits you the best.

“Initially, they’ll go ballistic and then he’ll calm down and then you’ll find the common ground. You find the points where you can agree and you defuse the emotion without giving away the key points you had to make.

“What you don’t want to be saying is ‘No, no, no, no, this is going to happen, black and white, suck it up, the company has to do what it has do’, because you will get people becoming completely irrational and you lose them and they stop listening to you.

“You have to listen to what they’re saying to you and don’t see it as a black and white discussion. There will be things they’ll be saying that you can agree with. Whatever you do, don’t make promises you can’t keep. Don’t say we’ll review the situation if the decision’s already been made but find things you can agree with.”

He says the same conversation can be used when the manager is retrenching someone. He gives an example: “We’ll give you an opportunity to interview for the new job. Yes, I understand you have worked here your whole career but we’ll give you some outplacement assistance. You’ve never written a resume? We’ll make sure you get some help writing a resume and if you want to show me your resume to make sure it’s good, I’m happy to do that for you.”

“You find that you then defuse a lot of the emotion,’’ he says. “You’re not trying to have a negotiation. What you’re trying to do is defuse the emotion because usually the situation is not as bleak as the person first sees it. You have to get them out of the situation where they see it as the end of the world and you’re a bastard to ‘Here’s the situation, it’s not your fault, let’s try and help you make the most of this bad situation.’”

And if a person gets emotional and starts crying? Let it happen, he says. You might ask them if they want a glass of water, do you want me to stay, do you want some time on your own,’’ he says. “It’s a grief process, it’s the same as a divorce. You might want to consider counselling services or chaplaincy services.”

Jannine Fraser, managing director of outplacement company Directioneering Victoria, says conversations about redundancy should take no more than 10 minutes. She says managers should not try to make it less unpleasant for themselves by shooting the breeze. “In fact, I worry when a meeting goes longer than that because they can’t possibly be talking about the actual agenda item, Fraser says. “They will no doubt be discussing other subjects. If you’re communicating job loss, there is not a whole lot of other conversations to be had.

“If you’re having a meeting about job loss, stick to it being about job loss and don’t get distracted by the employees agenda or by your personal needs to soften the blow by talking about other things or shooting the breeze about the footy results from last weekend.”

She says managers can learn the skills but hands-on experience is critical. “The people who tend to deliver bad news the best are people who are quite seasoned managers,’’ she says. “They have seen a lot in their time. Unfortunately for everybody, and it is a pretty natural thing, people have learned from their own errors of judgement around communications.

“Quite often in our work, when we work with people who have to give bad news about job loss, inevitably the people who are prepared to be very direct and forthright and tell it as it is but keep the emotion out of it will tend to do a better job than someone who thinks they’re doing the right thing by couching it in overly gentle terms.

“There is real method in planning and being prepared for the conversation you are going to have, keeping the personal out of it, even though it’s a personal experience losing your job, and not trying to cushion the blow with confusing messages because that’s what happens if you go off script.”

She says managers can best cope with stress of doing by going in extremely well-prepared. “It will set you up for a better outcome at the other end and you will have less to mop up if you do prepare well,’’ she says.

“You should practise your message at home and privately. Getting your mouth around the words means your delivery of the message will be better.

“People worry that sounds overly rehearsed but it never does because even from the manager’s point of view, there’s a degree of emotionality associated with delivering a message and it will always have a human feel to it.

“The other thing from a manager’s point of view is to think about the individual. Do pause and breathe as you’re telling the message. Also, have somebody outside of the organisation that you can talk to and debrief about it or you can have a peer within the organisation that is able to handle it confidentially.”

And the final bit of advice? Delivering bad news is a manager’s job but don’t expect kudos.

“When you deliver bad news, you’re never going to be told you’ve done it well,’’ she says. “Don’t look for that feedback because it’s not going to happen. You need to be resilient in a situation like that and step aside and reflect on how it’s gone and realise your normal measures for how effective you’ve been are quite different for cases like that.

“The measure of whether you’ve done a good job is how well the person coped with and exited the organisation. You live in a bit of a vacuum when it comes to getting feedback about that aspect of your performance because you’re doing one of the most unpopular jobs.”