Start Hard Conversations with Altruism

I believe that to be great at hard conversations you have to start with altruism. To do this, you have you to take a good look in the mirror, be honest with yourself about what’s in your head and heart, then discard what doesn't align with your values.

This article has been the hardest one for me to write so far. Your time is so valuable and I’m committed to doing my best to make sure that each issue is worth your time. It’s a challenge for me to write about this clearly and (somewhat) briefly because it demands nuance and is, at its core, about my own values. This topic also connects to a lot of others that I want to write about, but had to keep cutting to keep this article a reasonable length. I’ll cover them in future articles. For now, I think I’ve got this one honed to something useful, so let’s dive in!

When you approach hard conversations with not just your self-interest in mind, but a greater good, you make hard conversations easier. You create space for both you and the others involved to learn and change their minds. When you focus on the goal, you can debate the goal and the best way to get there. You can even change the goal. You can, as Ted Lasso said, “Be curious, not judgmental.” You become fearless, or you have the courage to go on despite your fear. 

You can know a dozen communication techniques, but they are usually going to fall flat if you’re not grounded in an honest intent to do the right thing. Doing this requires taking a good look in the mirror to work through thoughts and feelings that aren’t aligned with your values.

Now this is where the nuance comes in and one reason I’ve rewritten this article more times than I can count. You can be altruistic and seek good outcomes for you or your team. In fact, you should! But you have to be honest with yourself about your motives. You have to know that your goal is truly altruistic, not just self-service masquerading as a greater good. It also means that your enlightened self-interest is sensible, not selfish.

So let’s talk about how to do this. 

An altruistic goal serves the organization and people around you. It might be improving a customer satisfaction score. It could be something values based, like treating people fairly. It could be an improving a relationship between teams that need to work together, like product and marketing, or engineering and design. It could be something technical like “let’s get the build time down to five minutes.” The point is it’s something that benefits the greater good of your organization.

The problem is it’s easy to wrap your personal agenda with something that sounds like an altruistic goal but isn’t. Ouch, right? A fake altruistic goal will not help you and can even do harm. If you think marketing is a disaster you can’t pretend that you’re trying to make the relationship better if what you really want is for marketing to stop asking difficult questions and just do what you tell them. If you want to learn a hot new tool that will, by the way, reduce build times, you can’t pretend it was just about the build times all along. People will see through you and lose trust and that conversation will only get harder. 

I used to think I had to just kill my ego to be a good person. I thought having an ego was bad. But then I realized that my ego does two things. First, it looks out for me. It wants to protect me and my legitimate needs. It wants me to get paid what I’m worth and get credit for my work. It even tells me to brag a little! My healthy ego tells me to be confident in the stuff I’m good at and accept the praise I’ve earned. That’s the good part of ego.

But my ego also has a lousy side. It can work so hard to protect me that it perceives threats that aren’t there. It can value being seen as right over being open to learning and changing my mind. It can be scared of someone else’s success and think it diminishes mine. It can try to find the path with the least personal risk instead of the path to greatest good. It has thoughts and feelings that are understandable but that aren’t in line in with my values. So I work hard to not let them determine how I act. 

So to settle on an altruistic goal, if your ego works like mine, you have to sort through the signals it’s sending you. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about your motives and not let ones that are based in greed, fear, anger, or other negative emotions have a say. Keep the self-interested goals that do align with your values. This is why you can have hard conversations that are inherently about you, like say, asking for a raise, with integrity.

Here’s an example. Suppose I’m the head of product and I’ve just seen surveys showing that neither the sales team nor customers know about the last five features we’ve shipped. After my initial head banging, I set a goal for product and marketing to work together to have great sales enablement to make sure sales people and customers know about and see the value in new features. Now, I ask myself, do I really believe this or am I just using it as a hammer to tell people they suck at their jobs? Would I change how my team works to achieve this goal? Am I willing to hear how we can do better and not be defensive if I get that feedback? Do I know what I’m not willing to do and can I defend that with integrity? I want to get to a point where I can look in the mirror and not roll my eyes or smirk when I say “I’m willing to have my team spend a lot of time to help build content and deliver training, but I’m not willing to have them on every sales call because that will detract too much from their core responsibilities. I’m ready to to learn how my team can do better and hear some uncomfortable feedback and not get defensive. Because I really just want better enablement to help sales and our customers.”

So, I’m not going in to tell marketing they suck at their job and nothing is my team’s fault. I’m also not going in saying “you’re bad at this, so I’ll just do it all” and be a victim or martyr or doormat. I’m going in ready to listen and learn and be part of the solution. (And for those of you wondering, yep, I will be talking about assuming positive intent in an upcoming article.) (And marketing, I love you. In this example I can think of five things product could be doing better.)

You're not ready to have a hard conversation until you know you're honestly onboard with your altruistic goal. When you look in the mirror do you see a clear and honest reflection or is there doubt? If that mirror is fogged or dirty, then you're not ready. 

It takes courage to sit down and have a chat with your ego about all this. It’s uncomfortable to honestly evaluate if your ego is thoughtfully protecting you or if it’s just freaking out. Sometimes this is going to be fast and easy and sometimes you’re going to have to work through anger, fear, disappointment, irritation, snark, and a host of other things to get there. You don’t want to veer so far towards self-sacrifice you’re just setting yourself up to be taken advantage of. And you don’t want to veer the other way and be a self-serving know-it-all. You might want to ask a trusted friend to help you, someone who will honestly tell you if you’re tipping too far in either direction. Take the time and space to be honest with yourself about what scares you and who annoys you and what is really best for the people around you.

If this seems overwhelming, trust me that this gets easier over time. Part of why this article has been so hard for me to write is that I had to figure out how to teach something that is now a habit. (Well, mostly a habit. I have bad days.) I worked to make it a habit because I want my actions to align with my values and this makes it a lot easier.  

This is why I think it’s worth the work: When you look inward and see that you truly believe in an altruistic goal it’s like you went from standing on wet rolling logs to standing on solid ground. That solid ground lets you be more curious, more adaptable, and more courageous. For me, it is truly liberating and I hope it is for you, too. 

Your dot release: Think of a hard conversation you need to have. Define the altruistic goal you want to center that conversation on. Look at your motives and needs and decide which align with your values and which aren’t worthy. Ask yourself if you’re honestly pursuing that goal or if there’s something else. Repeat as necessary. 

Nice work! Give yourself a gigantic pat on the pack. Or maybe a cookie. Why not both?