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How to Tell Anyone Anything - Discussing the Issue

If you have been following this blog series faithfully, you have seen the first steps in painlessly having difficult discussions with your staff: starting in a safe place, asking good questions, and acknowledging people. Now, in this final installment, we get to the fun part: getting the issue itself on the table, whether it is performance, attitude, or even personal issues like hygiene.

When you do these first three steps well, you will find that you can now be extraordinarily frank about whatever you want to discuss – IF you do the following two things:

Step 1: Boil the issue down into facts

I am a huge baseball fan. And do you know what my friends usually say when their favorite teams lose? Things like “they stunk” or “they choked.” Here’s the problem: these terms are not only threatening, they are completely useless. There is no such thing as an anti-stink drill or a non-choking procedure. What really happened is that their team dropped a critical pop-fly in the eighth inning, or the opposing team had a more accurate pitcher on the mound – and *that* is what you can actually change.

So suppose someone literally stinks, because they don’t shower as often as they need to? The facts are as follows: “Some people are more sensitive than others when people around them get active and sweaty.” Now, instead of criticizing a person, you are troubleshooting a problem. Let’s look at how to describe some other situations factually instead of emotionally:

Emotional: You act disengaged when you are on the line with a customer. You don’t care enough.
Factual: I can see why customers sometimes react badly to you. You jump right into problem-solving – but if you acknowledge a customer first, they would feel heard and probably treat you better.

Emotional: Your performance hasn’t been up to par lately.
Factual: Normally, a typical employee handles X transactions per day. Your productivity has been about 40% of that recently.

In general, the more factual you get, the easier the discussion will go – and when people push back, get even more factual. Suppose, for example, you are talking with a support rep who has a problem getting angry with customers, and he replies, “You’re wrong, I don’t get angry”? Break this down into “I notice that you say X to customers in certain situations, and here is how they react.

Step 2: Make the other person part of the solution

Boiling a situation down into facts is an important way to bring an issue on the table, but don’t stop there! Your goal isn’t just to present issues and make people squirm – or worse, tell them what to do and risk getting “yessed” with no real progress. Your goal is to create positive behavioral changes. And the best way to do that is to invite the other person to solve the problem. Use phrases like these, and be sure to state them in the same breath as your problem statement:

• Where do you think we could go with this?
• How would you solve this problem?
• What is your take on the situation?
• What do you think might be the reasons for this?
• What would you propose?

Statements like these have two important benefits. First, you are encouraging honest dialogue. Would you rather be told, “I’ll stop doing this forthwith” and have it still keep happening – or have someone frankly acknowledge their struggles so you can address them? I thought so. More important, you are showing the other person the respect of solving problems collaboratively, and that respect, in and of itself, is a big factor in your success.

Techniques like these are extremely powerful, not only because they work so well, but because they have the accumulated wisdom of decades of behavioral psychology behind them. And when I made this approach a cornerstone of managing my own call center teams, it was truly magical to watch people grow, change, and even welcome my feedback. So put them to work yourself, and discover the secrets of being able to tell anyone anything.

Rich Gallagher is a communications skills expert, author, and former help desk executive. His book What to Say to a Porcupine: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Excellent Customer Service (AMACOM, 2008) was a national #1 customer service and business humor bestseller that was a finalist for the 2008 Business Book Awards, and his latest book How to Tell Anyone Anything (AMACOM, 2009) explores the mechanics of difficult workplace conversations. Visit Rich online at www.pointofcontactgroup.com