173 - How to have a difficult conversation

My wife's a forest school practitioner.

That's her half of the business.

We have a virtual PA who does five hours a week for us, and I use all these skills and tools, obviously with less regularity because we're a smaller team, but I use them in my own business in the way I try and lead and function as a human here.

So, yes, they are for any scale.

Brilliant.

So let's talk about tips now.

Let's share some tips.

I've given you some examples of where I think medium or small, medium-sized businesses might have the need for difficult conversations with their staff, but don't have your big HR departments and all things like that.

So I don't know what scenario you want to take and how you want to take it, but do you want to start off with one of them?

Yeah, so we were talking about either a low-motivated member of staff, a member of staff who just seems really comfortable, comes in, does their job, kind of gets it done, but it's a bit lacklustre.

I think that was one you were picking up on, Chantal, weren't you?

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

And what do you do about that? How do you manage that? Well, I think, firstly...

I would want to be asking the question, what is the impact of their lacklustreness? Because often as managers, we kind of see things as a really big, and what it can be really helpful to do is kind of break it down into really tight specifics.

So what would someone who is lacklustre not be

doing? That would tend to be my question to people in that environment.

Is it just that they're not buzzy around the office and you feel like, or is it that their work rate is 75% of what you'd expect, you know, and actually you'd expect them to get 100%? Or is it that they're not putting in those kind of extras that you kind of hope everyone in your business would do? So I think the first thing to do is, with with any of these conversations ask yourself actually um what what is the real specific impact of this behavior that and what is it costing us either as a team relationally personally or kind of you know productivity success wise because i think to say to somebody oh you just don't seem yourself you're a bit lackluster feels like you may really know them they may have worked with you for 20 years and actually over a cup of coffee you may be able to say that But it's very general.

It's a really hard question for them to actually answer.

And it could just be they're having a bad day that day, that you ask that question and they could just say, oh, I just had a bad day.

But for you, it's not really answered that question, has it? Because you haven't approached it in the right way.

Exactly, again, because we're keeping it really general.

And so I think the first thing about difficult conversations is if you're going to have a difficult conversation, you're going to need to get really specific.

General A, general questions actually tend to make people a bit scared.

When a senior member of leadership starts asking general questions, people's heads start whirring about what on earth does that mean? So, for example, you might say, can we just have a 10-minute chat tomorrow? Because I'm just worried you're not quite yourself and productivity isn't quite – productivity is a crude word, but I'm just using it to shorten the conversation.