A Master Class on Handling Hard Conversations
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How should leaders decide whether to coach, support, or discipline an employee?
If you're leading people, you're going to have hard conversations. There's no getting around that. But you can't treat every conversation the same way. Sometimes a person needs coaching, and sometimes they need support, and sometimes they need a kick in the pants. The real challenge is figuring out what's actually going on beneath the surface so you can lead well in the moment. So today, Entrez Leadership's head coach, John Felkins, is sitting down with communication expert, Jefferson Fisher and relationship expert, Dr. John Deloney, to talk about how good leaders handle hard conversations. Let's get to it.
Well, Jefferson, thanks for being here today. Thank you for having me. And Deloney, it's always nice to have you stop by. And also with you. So Jefferson, you spend a lot of time helping people have effective conversations and communicate effectively. Right. And Deloney, you're helping people with healthy relationships. Is that a fair way to say it? Is that good? If that works. I've watched some of your shows, so I was struggling how to describe it.
You've called in like five or six times. That's true.
That's true. So... Effective communication and healthy relationships, two big pressure points for leaders. And that's our audience. These are small business owners, people leading teams. One of the things that we hear in our coaching program is people a lot of times are walking into conversations and they're not exactly sure what they're dealing with. And some of those conversations, they need to give the person in the conversation a kick in the pants, but sometimes that's not what they need. And so I'm just imagining through your show and through your work as an attorney, you got to kind of decipher what you're walking into and what you're dealing with and where to take the conversation. So I'm curious, how do you do that?
First of all, is that valid? And if so, how do you do that? How do you determine what kind of conversation you need to have?
Well, it's going to depend on the context, but largely I always like to take the position of not taking it personally. Whenever you're taking something personally, you're picking up what nobody's asked you to carry. So people who are confident leaders, what I like to say is good leaders respond to conversation, great leaders leave room for it. So often it is leaving enough space to have the conversation, and rather than coming in pushing your own timeline, you're kind of having to assess of what's happening. And you really do that by making sure that however they're feeling, they know that they can bring it up to you. So how do you say, do they need a kick in the pants, or do I need to ask the question of what's happening?
I would always lean in favor of not the kick in the pants yet. because most likely there's something going on much deeper behind the scenes because the issue that you're having is generally not the issue that's actually happening.
Not the one on the surface. You got it, yeah. What do you think? When you're talking to folks on your show or in any conversation, because I know you've led big teams also, Delaney,
I'm thinking of, and I don't know the coach's name or the athlete's name, but I'm thinking about the most recent March Madness. And it was in the women's division. And there was an exchange between a coach and a player that went viral, where the coach was in the player's face and from afar, it looks like Coach is destroying this person. But when the commentators were reading her lips and decoding what she was saying, she was very strongly saying things like, I believe in you, and I can't want this more than you. And during the interviews, They talked about, we have built a relationship so deep, I know exactly what she needs when she needs it. And the player, I love it, she was like, she's coaching me exactly as I've asked her to coach me.
And so, because people were getting mad at her, how dare you yell at your player, whatever. And the player was like, that's exactly what I needed. But all of that exchange was built over years of grinding out a relationship together.
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