How to handle difficult conversations

It’s one of the trickier aspects of a project professional’s job, but get it right and you’ll soon stop dreading them. Mediation expert Marie Coombes of We Restore Calm, and Sophie Paton of Make Happy offer their best advice to project professionals everywhere.

Q. What advice would you give about having difficult conversations?

Sophie: The number one thing that makes the biggest difference is just breathing. Our nervous system is being triggered in these conversations; our bodies are being pumped full of adrenaline, and it produces a response -- whether it's avoidance, withdrawal, or coming out fighting -- whatever it might be. None of those are going to help you have a good conversation and help you achieve what you need to. Something to really help you regulate that is just breathing because it's a two-way dialogue between that kind of nervous response and your brain. If you can start to just slow your breathing down, then that sends a really strong signal to your brain that actually, you're safe. It starts to give you a bit of control and dampens that adrenal response.

Q. How do you get a difficult conversation off to a good start?

Marie: In terms of mindset, it’s going into the conversation from a place of curiosity. It automatically changes the tone that you're using because you're coming from a place of wanting to understand rather than ‘you've done this wrong; we've done this wrong’. Go in with an open mind, and go in from a place of empathy. There are two words that are hugely important to me, and they are acceptance and agreement. You can accept what somebody's saying is their truth, but that doesn't mean you have to agree with it. Actually, what that can do as well is it can change the tone of a conversation because it's about accepting somebody else's perspective and understanding of a situation. But that doesn't mean you have to agree with it, because it's their perception and their understanding of the situation. All you can do is agree on how you move forward, and that's where the curiosity really comes into play.

Q. How do you stop the blame game in conversations like these?

Sophie: One thing that can be really useful is to set ground rules for any meeting or conversation you're having. So right at the beginning, often as for facilitator, you might have your own set of ground rules, so that's, you know, this is not going to be a discussion about personalities. This is not going to be about individual accountability -- it's about us taking accountability as a team. We always say you have to listen generously -- whatever your ground rules might be -- and then perhaps offer the group to contribute a couple of their own. Then normally we have them written up so they're on a flip chart or on a screen in the room and you get the group to agree that we are going to abide by these ground rules to ensure the success of this meeting or conversation. Inevitably it will flip back at some points into unhelpful behaviours from people in the group but you can just remind them gently to go back to the ground rules that we agreed at the beginning of the conversation: ‘Let's try and stick to them because they're going to help us get the outcome that we need.’

Marie: My very first ground rule in any facilitated conversation is to speak from the ‘I’. ‘I feel like this because…’, as opposed to ‘you've made me feel like this’, or ‘you're the person that's created this situation’. So, what we're trying to do by getting people to speak from the ‘I’ is a natural accountability and responsibility for how you're feeling, but it's also about not directing it personally at somebody else, because you're perfectly entitled to feel the way that you do. If you want to share something, you need to take ownership of how you're feeling. I've done some really testy conversations between managers and union representatives at a quite senior level and it's quite interesting seeing how quickly people do regress back into blaming each other.

For more in-depth advice on How to Have Difficult Conversations, listen to the APM Podcast wherever you find your podcasts.