The HardTalk Handbook: The definitive guide to having the difficult conversations that make a difference

By Dawn Metcalfe

The HardTalk Handbook is an interactive guide to mastering the science and art of difficult conversations we keep avoiding. Using extensive research and neuroscience techniques, it explores the reasons behind the way we behave when communicating and how to combat those behaviours that hold us back. It demonstrates how to resolve conflict and affect change, even in the most diverse organisations, no matter your culture, background or experience. Discover why we'd rather 'put up' instead of 'turn up' and how our natural instinct to 'speak louder' is far less important than 'listening hard'. Whether you need to tell a colleague they smell, that your boss's approach is ineffective or any other type of HardTalk you have experienced, this Handbook will show you the skills you need to succeed at the conversations that make all the difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Powerful Developing Services Institute
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912643912

Book preview

Toolbox

FOREWORD

I first met Dawn Metcalfe, Founder of PDSi, on the professional networking platform, LinkedIn, on February 24, 2017. I remember our first conversation – it was about building trust. In that brief discussion I immediately recognized a unique trait in Dawn. She is a direct communicator. Not the blunt kind, but the rare kind that combines candor with compassion and curiosity.

From that day, until the present, I have enjoyed observing Dawn practice what she preaches in how she communicates with others. When she asked me to write the foreword for The HardTalk Handbook, I was both honored and elated as I share a passion for the work that has become Dawn’s mission: helping people overcome both the fear and lack of skill in having difficult conversations.

As a leadership and career management coach, the number one problem I continue to see in business is unhealthy conflict. What's worse, 70 per cent of people when faced with conflict choose to avoid it.

We all know ignored problems become bigger problems that require more time and resources to solve. Your career, your team, and your organization simply cannot reach its full potential without developing the critical business and life skill of effectively engaging in difficult conversations.

Filled with engaging stories, case studies, and practical exercises, The HardTalk HandBook is the cure for the unproductive conflict ailing you, your team, and your organization's culture. Absent the straightforward and honest communication HardTalk promotes, we are left with destructive alternatives to the truth: miscommunication, misinterpretation, and assumptions – what the HardTalk program refers to as Potentials. Potentials are the termites of relationships and, ultimately, results.

As a former Learning & Development and Operations leader within a Fortune 20 company, I understand the importance of both developing and executing training programs that will bring a return on investment. One of the biggest drivers of ROI is learning transfer – successfully applying the behavior, knowledge, and skills acquired to the job, with a resulting improvement in performance.

Dawn’s practical 4-step model is engaging, simple, and most importantly, effective. Unlike many training programs, HardTalk sticks – transferring your newly acquired knowledge and skills to the real world, where it will make all the difference for you and your teams’ success.

All my best,

Kristin Sherry

Founder, Virtus Career Consulting

Author, Follow Your Star: Career Lessons I Learned from Mom &

5 Surprising Steps to Land the Job NOW!

Charlotte, N.C., U.S.A.

December 2017

Contents

NOW YOU’RE TALKING

TESTIMONIALS

FOREWORD

Preface

Introduction

1. Learn to respond, not react

2. Control your emotions

3. Beware the Pattern

4. Consider the other

5. Remember your Purpose

6. Be Heard

7. LISTEN

ADDENDUM: A NOTE OF CAUTION 

8. Sum it up 

9. What if? 

10. Make it stick 

THE HANDBOOK IN SUMMARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

REFERENCES

PREFACE

The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of good people. — Unknown

In some ways this book and the accompanying HardTalk programme are the results of more than 20 years of thinking about what it takes to communicate effectively. It is the result of my life experiences since leaving home at the age of 17.

The Ireland I grew up in was pre-Celtic Tiger, conservative and poor and so, unsurprisingly, our immigration problem was about how to get expatriates who left Ireland to come back home, rather than worrying about managing the intake of people from other countries. This changed over time and Ireland now seems more diverse and multicultural, more open and welcoming than I could ever have imagined growing up.

I grew up in an Ireland where it was obligatory to pass exams in Irish (sometimes wrongly referred to as Gaelic) to succeed at school or obtain many government jobs. Students who studied and sat exams in Irish received extra points when applying to universities and I grew up surrounded by people who only exclusively spoke one language or the other. In other words, it’s no surprise that I’ve always been fascinated by language and the way it both brings people together and keeps them apart.

By the time I left home at 17 to move to the UK, I had lived in 19 different houses and attended four schools, albeit all in my native country, as well as spending a month doing a home-stay in Germany. At university I studied French and Spanish and was able to work in both countries for six months, negotiating my first grown up workplace in a third language. This also meant working out how to live with people from different cultures, with different understandings of what it meant to be clean or respectful or hospitable. I worked with people from different generations, religions and cultures who saw the world differently and had had completely different experiences from me. I was hooked.

Living alone and working in Europe gave me the confidence to apply for the JET programme - a Japanese government-backed scheme designed to bring native English speakers into the state school system. And so, the trend continued when, on leaving University, I went to Japan, where for three years I worked in the capital city of the second most rural prefecture or state, Matsue-shi in Shimane-ken.

I arrived in Japan not speaking Japanese and having never tasted sushi or tofu (I was brought up in Ireland in the 70s and 80s!) so I pretty much fell in love right away. Even getting my dry-cleaning done or buying cockroach repellent in the supermarket became an adventure involving laughter, crying and, on occasion, a desire to commit murder or hide away in shame at my mistakes.

It all seemed very exotic (this sentiment was reciprocated it seemed, as I was regularly asked to sign autographs simply for being foreign) - nobody looked like me and the languages we didn’t share were many. Not only did I lack basic words like tomorrow and go, I couldn’t even look them up because of the nature of the Japanese alphabets. I also couldn’t understand the gestures.

It was frustrating to be surrounded by a number of clearly annoyed middle-aged Japanese ladies (arms held in front of their bodies in a cross, repeating the syllables da me) and not be able to help them. But it was great practice to realise that I needed to behave in a way that helped them to realise that my offence was caused by ignorance and not a desire to upset even if, as I worked out eventually, I had just walked on tatami (Japanese floor covering that shouldn’t be walked on) in slippers designed only to be worn in the bathroom. This is a serious offence in Japan and was one of thousands of incidents where a presumtion of innocence has helped me get out of a tricky situation. It’s an attitude I try to bring to HardTalk situations, as you’ll see.

Even colours in Japan meant different things. Mustard for example, was inexplicably packaged in red and not the yellow or brown it should be. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know - I entirely lacked context and so couldn’t even ask questions designed to help me avoid problems. This was made clear on my second week at work when I was late - again a serious offence in Japan. I’m a punctual person, believing five minutes early to be verging on late, and so I was truly upset when I realised I had kept my colleagues waiting and upset their plans. It took me another three days to work out that my school had a two-week timetable, with different times each week. Nobody told me because, of course, that’s how schools work in Japan, and I didn’t ask, because how could I have known what question would work?

To be honest it was exhausting. This was before the internet really got going and phone calls and air travel were very expensive, so it was a much more immersive experience than travelling is now.

Immersion is great for learning a language and understanding a culture but not good for rest and relaxation - I vividly remember going back to London and checking into a hotel with a feeling of absolute elation at the certainty that, no matter what was said I would understand it and be able to respond to it coherently and appropriately - the luxury of communicating in one’s first language.

Despite it being exhausting, it was an amazing experience and I stayed three years, becoming proficient in Japanese before deciding to move to China to an even more remote place. In Matsue there had been only five (obvious) foreigners in a town of less than 200,000. In China, I would be the only Westerner in a town more than twice that size, and one of a handful in an enormous province of 26 million people. I was also the first female foreigner ever to live in the town, and only the third ever foreigner. I had got used to being different and unusual, and I wasn’t scared of learning another language, but China was a different level.

Before, I had been asked for my autograph and been given awards simply for being foreign.

I had been asked to stand in front of a class and be touched by a group of schoolchildren, but the Japanese were part of the first world.

Where I lived in China, people still lived in caves - the older generation had lived through Mao and all that came after that. The only way to see anything I recognised was an overnight bus to the nearest city, many hours away. What could we possibly have in common? How could we communicate? The opportunities to mess up were immense and I did. Often.

But I learned a lot about how to get better at communicating.

I’ve learned to focus on what I want to achieve and what the other person needs to see and hear to perceive me and the world that way.

I’ve learned how our filters affect the judgements we make about what we see and hear. How they do this so quickly that we often don’t even notice, making real communication very difficult, and reducing the curiosity that is at the heart of all communication.

I’ve learned that curiosity is key to the skill given most lip-service and yet least focus, despite it being fundamental to building knowledge and changing minds; the skill of listening.

ListeningHard is key to understanding not just the text, but also the sub-text, and can be the difference between building relationships and creating an international incident.

I’ve learned that you can build empathy (quickly) with just about any other human in the world and that, if you want to stay safe as a young woman travelling and living alone in remote places without friends or family nearby, you better do so. I’ve learned that you can make this your life’s work and still get it wrong. I’ve made some awful mistakes along the way - upsetting others and putting my own objectives at risk by not taking the time to think but the most important thing I’ve learned is this:

I’ve now lived in the UAE for almost 10 years and I’m privileged to live and work with people from every part of the planet. It is one of the most multi-cultural places in the world. The statistics vary but, according to the UAE government there are 200 nationalities living and working in Dubai alone, representing more than 80 per cent of the city’s population. It’s amazing and it should be a huge resource for the country.

I work across a lot of different industries. I can see that the filters that make effective communication difficult are more than just culture, gender or generation. They also include education and training, and every kind of experience that goes into making us who we are.

Diversity is a wonderful thing. Every piece of research tells us so, and we’ll hear more about it later in the book, but diversity alone isn’t enough: we need inclusion. In other words we need everyone to hear and be heard.

But, ironically, diversity can make inclusion difficult, as it can make us cautious.

Often too cautious. Too cautious to speak up. This is dangerous because there are consequences of not speaking up just as there are to speaking up.

Diversity stops us speaking up because the more your filters differ from others, the more difficult it is to communicate effectively. But not speaking up means bad things for individuals and teams.

In 2016 we carried out some research around a particular kind of HardTalk - bad behaviour in the workplace. Despite 90 per cent of respondents saying they had experienced this, only 30 per cent spoke up. This is not good news for things organisations care about like morale, quality and turnover, because human beings don’t just see bad behaviour and then carry on.

No, the issue either gets resolved through a HardTalk or it festers. Instead of dealing with the subject, our research suggests people instead indulge in all kinds of behaviour that has dreadful results for them, others, and their organisation.

They avoid the topic or the person, or gossip, or even leave their job.

Clearly this has horrible consequences for morale, then quality and turnover, and ultimately the bottom line. All because people are afraid or don’t want to have a difficult conversation!

We need people to speak up if they are to perform well in teams.

Google’s Project Aristotle¹, conducted in 2017, identified each team member speaking more or less the same amount as being crucial to high performance. The fact that it’s difficult to make that happen when working with a diversified team just makes it more likely that those who achieve it will be successful.

Of course, some people, because of their filters, will find it harder than others to either hear or be heard. But everyone can get better at it if they are convinced of the need and given the tools to do so.

Everybody needs to have difficult conversations, whether it’s

• telling somebody they smell bad

• asking for more money

• convincing your colleagues to support a proposal

• getting your child to open up about a problem

• confronting a direct report about underperformance

• dealing with sexist or racist behaviour

It doesn’t matter where you come from, how old you are, what gender or educational background you come from, these are difficult topics. No sane person looks forward to them. But if we can master the skills of HardTalk, we can get better at being able to achieve the purpose of having these difficult conversations - to be heard and to hear - so that we make better decisions and get better results.

We asked people why they didn’t speak up when they saw bad behaviour. They told us they were afraid of retribution, or causing offence and didn’t know how to speak up.

These kind of conversations - done well, badly, or not done at all - make a difference to relationships, to results, to happiness, to culture, to morale and to people’s careers.

And we’re not wired well for them.

We often seem to behave badly, just when we need to behave well! It’s not that we don’t know what to do. It’s that we know but don’t seem to be able to manage our behaviour in the moment - to learn to respond, not react, for our own sake and that of the people around us.

I wrote this book because the people I work with every day care about the following things, and HardTalk is a key skill in all of them:

It is possible to speak up - always. There may be consequences if you do, particularly if you do it badly, but you can always do it. If you don’t speak up, nothing changes.

1. DECISION MAKING

Simply put, if you’re a knowledge worker (and you probably are if you’re reading this), then it’s at least part of your job to (help) make good decisions. It doesn’t matter where you’re working or what you’re doing, we agree with the work done by Milkman, Chugh and Bazermann at Harvard² who say: In a knowledge-based economy, we propose that a knowledge worker’s primary deliverable is a good decision.

In other words, you have to speak up and be heard for the sake of your organisation, and your career. Not to mention it’s what you’re paid for. You’ve also got to get other people involved and get them to speak up, because that’s how good decisions get made.

2. EXECUTION

We’d go even further than our academic friends and say that making a good decision isn’t enough. It’s relatively easy to make a decision. Good decisions where everyone is heard are harder. Getting those decisions executed effectively and efficiently is the real test. And HardTalk is key to that. If people don’t speak up, then you don’t get to hear the potential problems in execution. If they don’t feel listened to, and respected, how likely are they to have truly bought-in?

3. LEARNING

No matter who you are or where you are in an organisation, you don’t know everything - you can’t. And even if you did, as the highly regarded engineer Temple Grandin (who has autism) remarked, you need to have different kinds of minds working together to solve complex problems.

Being able to get others, particularly those different from you, to speak up and tell you how they see the world is a great leadership skill. You might be thinking but shouldn’t they just speak up? Well, yes, maybe, but if you care about the result you’ll help them, because the best ideas won’t always come from the people who find it easiest to speak up.

I’m sorry to say, you also have to find a way to work with the people you don’t enjoy working with, because they have strengths you don’t.

4. CREATIVITY

The world is complicated and coming up with creative solutions to tough problems is key to success.

The more exposure to difference you have, the more likely you are to be creative.

It can be surprisingly difficult to get this exposure, particularly as you become more senior (and so more foreboding), or if you are different in some other way e.g. being the only man on an otherwise all-female team or the only millennial in a Gen Y office.

Think of it as a spectrum: the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which re-affirm what you already believe. The further left you go toward an open network, the more you’re exposed to new ideas. If you can improve your HardTalk skills you will be, at the very least, exposed to a hugely different level of ideas compared to a person who is unable to have HardTalk.

5. INTEGRITY

Speaking up is usually the right thing to do. For everyone’s sake.

If you're like most people, you know you should address issues, but you don't want to be the bad guy, upset your colleagues or make them angry. Too often this means we don’t give people the feedback they need in the way they need it - so they can improve.

We worry too much about the negative implications for us, and not enough about all the other positive outcomes. As we’ll see in a later chapter, this human tendency to care more about potential loss than potential gain is one of the BrainDrain