My colleague Gordon White and I had a fascinating conversation recently with a leader we really admire. This leader has a collaborative style of communicating. There isn’t anything you can’t explore with this person: they are accepting, encouraging, listen well and assert cleanly. It’s a joy and an adventure to talk and discover together.
So, what’s the problem? Believe it or not, being nice can be a problem. I’m being a bit facetious, but consider times in your relationships when:
- the vibe is good
- the connection is positive
- the atmosphere feels upbeat.
Do you really want to bring up something to rock the boat? It makes sense that there’d be apprehension in bringing up a difficult topic when things are going well.
Even if you’re relatively easy to talk with, like our collaborative leader, there are still so many perceived risks people have in bringing up difficult topics and so hold back.
As mediators, when the door is closed and the other person is not present, we hear a lot of reasons why people think they can’t bring up a topic. When it isn’t about how the other person is wrong or bad, the other end of the spectrum sounds like this:
- “I don’t want to hurt their feelings.”
- “I don’t want to bring it up because they don’t need hassle in their lives right now.”
- “This could really damage our relationship and the atmosphere.”
We hear these reasons time and again. Does any of that sound familiar to you? Why should you bring up a tricky topic if there can be such calamitous consequences?
When the focus is on what the risks might be in bringing up the topic, there is an inevitable outcome: don’t bring it up; it’s not worth it; just keep quiet about it.
Let’s not rock the boat.
So, Why Bother?
We all have built-in cognitive errors in our biology that cause resistance to bringing up the tough stuff. Our brain’s negativity bias causes the negative to stay with us much more than the positive; our brains are velcrow for the negative and teflon for the positive. This causes the loss aversion thinking error: we experience a strong aversion to the thought of losing something, no matter how appealing the gain might seem.
These wired-in ways of thinking lead us to avoidance and silence as our status quo, if we don’t put in deliberate thinking effort. It’s easier to simply avoid.
The Status Quo Can Be A Killer
Yet, there are real risks in not bringing up a difficult topic.
This is seen most easily in the healthcare industry, as patient harm has been studied extensively. What comes up, time and again in various studies of calamitous events, is that the root cause of stupendous failures is the failure to communicate:
The failure to communicate is also the root cause for catastrophe in other well-studied safety industries, such as the aviation industry. In organizations, the failure to communicate upwards is seen in bad decisions by leaders, as the higher up you go, the more difficult it is to get information to leaders to make informed decisions.
In marriage research, couples who never broach difficult topics can seem happy on the surface, but are often hiding unmet needs, desires and pain points. This avoidance of tougher topics cause resentments to build and trust and connection to erode.
What About The Benefits?
So, if you want to avert disaster, it is often better to communicate, not to avoid communicating (which is what our biology wants us to do).
Communicating is key in work and in life. However, it does require effort to break out of the survival reaction mode of avoidance. You might even feel resistance to bringing up the tough stuff. If so, tell yourself you’ll only do this for a few minutes; it need not take long.
There are important reasons to bring up a difficult topic and worth considering. You can also create positive momentum by deliberately thinking through what the benefits could be in bringing up a difficult topic.
Gordon White and I co-created an easy and quick thinking tool we call the Risk-Benefit Worksheet to help you move past cognitive errors and get to the heart of the matter. It just might be that not bringing up the truth is more hurtful than keeping quiet. You won’t know for sure unless you inquire more deeply and, ultimately, until you have the conversation.
Create Your North Star Statement
In the Risk Benefit Worksheet, you have a chance to find your motivation. Having led 100s of people through this exercise, the benefit side of having a difficult conversation is large. In the classroom, learners start with their list of reasons why a conversation is risky but soon move to the benefits, which come easily and rapidly. Reasons like:
- wanting more freedom than is presently in the relationship;
- discovering a stronger sense of needing to talk to uphold their own integrity;
- desiring to be caring and compassionate to themselves and the other;
- wanting to be more authentic and truthful;
- realizing their voice matters and can impact future directions and possibilities.
The reasons accumulate to become a North Star statement, an inspiring and compelling reasons to go forward. This exercise strengthens the courage required to overcome the risks.
There are more steps to having a difficult conversation in a collaborative way and this tool gives you your starting place.
You need to discover the benefits to having the difficult conversation before you will bother investing in the effort to prepare well. Creating your own North Star Statement gives you the intrinsic motivation, energy and commitment to take the next steps that you know, deep in your heart, you want to take!
Your voice matters.
Click here if you’d like to receive our Risk-Benefit Worksheet. It comes from our online, self-directed course on How To Have Difficult Conversations and is the first step: Find Your Motivation.
Julia