Navigate Hard Conversations by Finding Shared Goals

When you’re having a tough time navigating a disagreement, put down the problem for a minute and identify some common goals. Some of those goals might be ones you haven’t thought of but that make sense once you hear someone else’s point of view. 

Story Time! A product manager I worked with was working on the release of a complex new feature. He got a lot of push back from our tech support team about the feature being too hard to use and not ready to ship. Being a good product manager, he started asking questions and found out that they were worried that their ticket volume would go up and they wouldn’t be able to meet their customer service goals. Well, he hadn’t thought of that explicitly, but after hearing their point of view, he realized he was one-hundred percent on board with their concerns. So he added a success criteria for the product launch that included a limit on how much ticket volume for his product could go up. His engineering team bought into the goal as well, and ended up taking time to improve both the user interface and the technical documentation to support that goal. When the support team saw that the whole product/engineering/design team was really bought in to preventing a ticket tsunami, they became more collaborative and enthusiastic about the new feature. 

If you can’t ferret out a common goal from someone’s concerns, here’s another technique that works. Start with a bigger goal, one that is less fraught. Let’s say you want to upgrade a database on a certain date and a bunch of people are throwing up blockers, reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t. Try this. Individually or with a small group, say something like “we all agree we want this upgrade to go well. Let’s talk about what going well looks like.” That gets people focused on the positive and lets them get their pet issues on the table. You might hear things like

• “Success looks like I don’t get paged every night the week after the upgrade.” This person probably has scars from a previous upgrade. 
• “It means our SLA's don’t take a hit.” Here’s someone who’s motivated by—maybe compensated on?—those SLA's. (SLA=Service Level Agreement)  
• “We’ve solved the duplicate primary key problem that we’ve had for five years.” This person has an axe, and it’s engraved with the duplicate primary key problem. 

The conflict wasn’t really about the date! It was about these three issues. So instead of endless rounds of debate about a date, you can tackle these real problems together. You can solve them or you can even, in an advanced take on Hard Conversations, move to disagree and commit.*

Let’s say that duplicate primary key problem just isn’t in the cards for this upgrade. You can approach that person with integrity by saying, “I know this primary key issue is causing problems but we need to go through with this upgrade without fixing it, because we don’t have time to sort that out and the downsides of waiting to do the upgrade are pretty bad.” (Insert appropriate technical realities here, which I’m omitting both because this is made up and because it would get really dry really fast.)

You can acknowledge someone’s goal without accepting it. Have the honesty and integrity to address it, and not just pretend you didn’t hear it because it’s not doable. You might agree that it should get done and sign up to help get that done later. You might honestly disagree and think it’s an edge case that doesn’t need fixing. The point is you’ve moved the conversation onto the solid ground of a real issue rather than someone’s fears or emotions. 

Your Dot Release: The next time someone starts telling you all the reasons your plan won’t work, don’t respond by explaining why it will. Start by asking what their goals are and make sure they understand yours as well. Sort out your common goals and then reevaluate the plan together, with that common framework and an open mind. Your plan will be the better for it and you’ll now have collaborators instead of naysayers.  

This post is one in a series on Hard Conversations.

*I realized I haven't written about the concept of "disagree and commit" yet so that post is up next! Meanwhile, here's Wikipedia.

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