Hard Conversations

Here’s something weird but true: sometimes really great work gets more critical feedback than work that is mediocre, bad, or good enough. That’s because when a deliverable or work product is almost perfect people get excited and want to help push it over the line. And when work

Getting critiqued as a writer is hard. You take this fragile creation that only exists because you made it up from scratch and ask people, sometimes even strangers, for feedback.  When I went to my first fiction writing workshop I was very nervous about getting and giving feedback because I’

Today I’m wrapping up a three part mini-series that looks at how you can improve hard conversations by understanding the hierarchical difference between you and the person you’re talking with. I’ve already talked about hard conversions with peers, and hard conversations with people in power. So logic

The delightful fantasy novel The House in the Cerulean Sea features a good-hearted bureaucrat’s struggle with his organization’s leaders, known only as Extremely Upper Management. This week I’m going to talk about how to have successful conversations with people above you in the hierarchy and I’m

A real-world factor in hard conversations is the relative status of you and the person you’re talking to. Every social group has formal and informal hierarchies, and taking that into account increases the odds of a hard conversation going well. I’ve teed up three articles about this, each

We all have biases and opinions and it’s often helpful to just be up front about yours. You don’t have to do it like a jerk, and you can leave room for discovery and changing your mind. Doing that actually builds trust and can make it easier for

Last week’s article was about asking questions to protect yourself in hard conversations. Rebecca Campbell shared this on my LinkedIn post about the article.  “I've been thinking about this one for the last couple of days—probably because I've advised people to do exactly what

Today I’m going to talk about why it’s often a good idea to start a hard conversation with questions. And while there are a lot of good, values-based reasons to start with curiosity, today I’m going to explain the benefits in very pragmatic terms.  Let’s face

When I talked about how you should start hard conversations with altruism, I said this works even when you’re the topic of conversation.  Sometimes you need to have a hard conversation whose goal is to benefit you. Here are some examples from my own career: * Telling my boss that

One obstacle to approaching hard conversations with altruism is other people. Other people make us grumpy. They’re not good at their jobs. They have it out for us. They have secret agendas. They’re stuck in their ways. They will never admit if their team is wrong. All those

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

People tell me that one of my superpowers is my ability to productively have hard conversations. In other words I can get and keep people engaged in a conversation about a difficult topic, navigate the conversation to satisfactory (or at least clear) outcomes, and keep or improve relationships in the