Savvy Conversations: A practical framework for effective workplace relationships

By Sarah Harvey

This book brings together the most compelling human psychology and communications research into a no-nonsense, practical framework and easy-to-understand model you can apply immediately. It shows you exactly how to have the right conversations, in the right way, at the right time.

Yet Savvy Conversations is so much more than how t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Librotas
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781916084681

Sarah Harvey

In September 2017 Sarah Harvey packed up her London life and moved to Tokyo, where she worked as a freelance book scout and publishing consultant for two Japanese literary agencies, Tuttle Mori Agency and The English Agency. Sarah now lives in London, selling book translation rights for over a decade, in all types of genres. She has worked on many bestselling non-fiction authors and brands, as diverse as Joe Wicks, The School of Life, BKS Iyengar, Deliciously Ella, The Dalai Lama, Tony Buzan, Cathy Rentzenbrink and Russell Brand.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It was 2001. It was my last day of work and my director was giving a leaving speech for me in front of a huge sea of faces. Although it’s all a bit of an emotional blur, the one thing that really stands out is that he said,

Sarah has made a positive contribution and has achieved much in her time with us, but anyone who knows her will know that it’s not so much what she does, it’s the way she does it that really makes the difference.

Cue claps and cheers all round and much blushing on my part.

I’d left my job after 14 years to take up a new and exciting leadership role in south east London. I’d originally landed the job of Administrative Assistant in the Personnel Department at just 18 years of age and since then had had the opportunity to work with some fabulous people who taught me all about the world of work, the HR profession and how to lead and manage teams.

During this time I learnt about the challenges of organisational change and reorganisations, TUPE, redundancy, recruitment, workforce planning, contracts of employment, staff handbooks, ill health retirement, engagement and internal communications, serious and minor conduct and capability issues, employment law, managing sickness absence, appraisals, training, project management, graduate training schemes, Investors in People, staff motivation and a wide range of other management issues. The list goes on and on.

Over those 14 years I’d continued my studies, and went on to manage a number of teams and work with some incredible people. Don’t get me wrong, some colleagues and customers were challenging, demanding, unreasonable, difficult, hard to predict and tricky to get along with.

I hadn’t always got things right and I had made mistakes: both in terms of my HR approach and in some of my working relationships. Sometimes I learnt the hard way from getting things horribly wrong and having to work hard to rebuild my credibility.

When I started planning this book some 17 years later I was reminded of that leaving speech. I’m so pleased that when I came up with the Savvy Conversations® concept back in 2013, it was the lyrics from the Bananarama and Fun Boy Three song It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it that I chose to feature on the front page of my website. It’s become my mantra!

As a people manager and having since gone on to work with, coach, mentor and train several thousands of managers and leaders in companies large and small, I’ve learnt that the way we build and maintain relationships and the way we get results is largely determined by the way we conduct our workplace conversations.

Since October 2013, through extensive research and real-life practice, I’ve been fascinated to find out what it takes to turn difficult discussions into highly effective conversations. My observations, working with business leaders, managers, individuals and teams, have led me to investigate this subject in more and more detail and I’ve experimented with different approaches.

Having assessed the feedback from this work with around 2000 individuals, I’ve now identified the six main considerations for creating an effective conversational culture as well as the five conversational cogs that I am convinced must be present for every conversation to be a success.

Your personal success at home, at work and in every relationship relies on you getting critical conversations just right. Success is only possible through the conversations you and the people you work with have with one another and the conversations you all have with your existing and potential customers.

To succeed, you need to be equipped to tackle these situations with confidence, to manage tensions and conflict effectively, and to avoid unnecessary conflict in the first place. I’ve come to believe this wholeheartedly and I want to share with you in this book what I’ve discovered through trial and error, success and failure, research and practice.

I want this book to help you become a better manager through improving each and every conversation you have. I want to provide you with a helpful framework as you seek to lead and inspire others through the conversations you have with them.

And why is this driving me?

Because when it comes down to it, effective conversations really are the key to our personal and business success. At the heart of everything we do to change our lives and work for the better, conversations are the smallest unit of change.

You may develop employee engagement and communications strategies and you may implement culture change programmes, but the starting point for all of that great work is your day-to-day conversations.

It’s your day-to-day conversations that create positive employee engagement.

It’s your day-to-day conversations that make great communication strategies happen.

And it’s your day-to-day conversations that create and embed culture change.

So you’ll be able to apply what you learn in this book to the conversations you have on a day-to-day basis. And each of these small units of change combined has the power to transform individual relationships, team performance and organisational success.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a new manager with one direct report, or an experienced senior leader or business owner with a wide area of responsibility and large teams of people to lead.

It’s not important whether you’ve been on numerous interpersonal skills courses and management development programmes or you’re just starting out and finding your way.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hotel general manager, a charity chief executive or a manager in the public sector. You could be a small business owner with just a few people in your team.

Wherever you are and whatever your profession, with an open mind and a willingness to develop, you’ll be able to take what you learn here, combine it with what you already know and do, and use it in your workplace straight away.

I firmly believe that if everyone in the workplace communicated with more savvy, we’d have minimal conflict, optimum performance and positive working relationships all round.

That’s why I’m so passionate about getting entire organisations to adopt the Savvy Conversations® approach.

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

I’ve got something I wanna talk about to you,

Just another communication, it could help the situation.

Communication

Bobby Womack

It’s often said that one of the most challenging aspects of a manager’s job is having difficult conversations at work.

According to one report, Employees fear crucial conversations, 34% of managers admitted to putting off having a difficult conversation for at least a month and 25% had put it off for over a year! In fact it’s extremely common for managers to cite difficult conversations as the biggest challenge they face in their roles. It may be surprising then to find that UK managers often rate their ability to handle a difficult conversation more highly than others rate them.

According to the Learning Consulting Partnership (2012), 68% of managers rated themselves as extremely or very confident in their ability to handle difficult conversations. However when HR managers rated the managers in their organisation, they rated only 21% as being confident to address difficult conversations, with 47% of those surveyed saying they felt managers were either extremely or very unconfident. Overall the results suggested that sensitive conversations are often being delayed, risking a detrimental effect on staff morale.

Managers tend to rate themselves more highly than others. Do you?

I often start workshops on this topic by asking the managers I work with to rate their workplace conversational ability on a scale of 1–10, with 1 being terrible and 10 being fantastic. I then ask them to rate the organisation as a whole in terms of conversational ability by also giving that a score from 1–10 for how good collectively they are at having the conversations they need to have.

What I tend to find is that far more people rate the organisation lower down the scale than they rate themselves. It’s more rarely the other way round. This superiority bias where a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities in relation to the same qualities and abilities of others is common, certainly throughout the Western world.

So when it comes to having conversations that don’t go well our tendency is to think It’s not me, it’s them. It would have been OK if they were more understanding, if they listened, if they said what they really thought. Of course there are at least two people in the conversation and both will have key strengths and skills as well as biases, blind spots and behaviours that all have an impact.

As a manager, what would your staff say about your communication skills?

According to another poll of 2100 people carried out by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in June 2019, 32% of workers feel uncomfortable approaching their manager with problems at work.

A 2019 Health and Wellbeing at Work report published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found 43% of workers said management style was a direct cause of stress at work.

Being good at having conversations with a wide range of people has always seemed to me to be a rather underrated skill.

We start talking around the age of 12 months old so it’s rather taken for granted that we can all do it, we all feel confident doing it and we are naturally able to learn how to speak to people with ease and build positive connections.

I now realise that’s simply not a wise assumption. Many people struggle to find the right words at the right time. Many can be awkward in social situations where conversational skills are so important. And whilst many of us are perfectly comfortable with friends and family we can find it anxiety-inducing to talk to new people at work, to have to network as part of our jobs or, worse still, to have to have a difficult conversation! Most of us would like to be more self-assured when talking to others, particularly in the workplace, and wish we could be better prepared for any conversation we may find ourselves in.

Holding a conversation requires quite a complex set of cognitive functions.

This book isn’t about neuroscience or complex psychological theories. But it is useful to draw on some of the basic principles that can help make sense of things and help us better understand why we behave and respond in the ways we do.

For instance, cognitive psychology is interested in perception, thinking and learning and it tells us that there are two key things happening in our brains when we have a conversation.

Firstly, the part of our brain responsible for attention kicks into action and makes sure we pay attention to what is being said. Then the part of the brain responsible for our working memory holds the information briefly whilst we set about preparing a response. To understand each other properly whilst having a conversation our working memory temporarily stores the information we’ve heard and processes it.

The ability to have a conversation requires that we understand what the other person is saying. This processing and storage continues throughout the conversation. Both elements need to be kept in good balance within our working memory in order for the conversation to flow. So if you ever find yourself forgetting what someone just said it means that the two elements have temporarily become out of balance.

So there’s actually rather a lot going on in our brains even when we’re having straightforward conversations. However, some conversations can be complex, they’re contextual and can be more or less difficult depending on who we’re talking to, what we’re talking about, our moods etc. It’s no wonder we need to work at this and that things can sometimes go wrong!

Those who master the art of having all manner of conversations with confidence, skill and emotional intelligence find it truly transformational. It makes it easier for us to avoid conflict or at least to spot when conflict may be rising, so we can change our approach, defuse tensions earlier and break through any communication barriers. When handled well such conversations build trusting relationships with the people around us and allow us to achieve what we need to.

What do you think about the workplace conversations you have?

DO ANY OF THE FOLLOWING RESONATE WITH YOU?

They’re just hard.

I don’t like telling people what to do.

People should just know what’s right and what’s wrong.

I don’t like telling people off.

People won’t like me.

It will have a negative effect on morale.

Perhaps someone else will deal with it.

It’s OK if you can relate to some or all of these statements.

Some conversations are hard.

Some people are difficult.

Having the right knowledge and practical understanding to have the conversations you want or need to have, even when that may be a difficult discussion, is a vital skill.

Conversations are how we connect with others, how we learn, how we share information, how we inspire others and how we deliver results.

Let’s look at why some of these workplace conversations can be difficult.

PEOPLE GET INTO CONFLICT AT WORK

Often it’s put down to a ‘personality clash’ but usually what we really mean by this is:

I don’t agree with them.

They don’t understand me.

I don’t like the way they speak to me.

They’re being unreasonable.

They won’t listen to my point of view.

Their tone of voice winds me up.

We’ve got nothing in common.

They just don’t like me.

Is that about a personality clash or does it point to a failure to build a professional relationship? Either way it makes constructive conversations more difficult and you may need some strategies to help you.

MANAGERS OFTEN GIVE VAGUE, UNHELPFUL FEEDBACK THAT FAILS TO ADDRESS IMPORTANT ISSUES

Why does this happen?

Perhaps it’s because they don’t know how to bring the subject up.

Or they don’t want to upset or demotivate the receiver of the feedback.

Or they fear the reaction of the other person and whether they will have the skills and ability to cope with the reaction without causing a fallout or awkward atmosphere.

Learning how to approach such feedback discussions in a fair, honest and worthwhile way is crucial to any manager’s success.

REGULAR ONE-TO-ONES ARE NOT VALUED BY BOTH MANAGERS AND STAFF

Often these meetings are enforced by organisations and no one really sees the point in them. The emphasis can be on filling out a paper or online form to evidence that the meeting took place, rather than embracing the time for open and honest dialogue.

And often the focus of one-to-ones is about working through a long task list, updating the manager on what’s been done and what hasn’t. It can become more about getting through things as quickly as possible so you can both get back to work. No wonder these exchanges are not valued!

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS AND APPRAISALS ARE OFTEN SEEN AS A WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME

Whilst management and leadership thinking has evolved significantly in recent years, unfortunately performance management approaches have largely remained unchanged since the 1950s.

Look at the technological and organisational pace of change we have seen over the last 30 years or so – it’s unprecedented. And the pace of change is increasing year on year. We already have up to five generations from around the world working together in co-located, virtual or flexible teams.

This all produces huge opportunities as well as challenges and it requires different types of conversations if performance discussions are to be meaningful and actually lead to an improvement in performance.

A BUNCH OF TALENTED INDIVIDUALS DON’T ALWAYS PERFORM WELL AS A TEAM

You only have to look at some sporting teams to see that it’s not enough to get together a group of talented individuals, call them a team and expect them to succeed.

Egos, motivation, skills, preferences, personalities, behaviours, priorities, relationships, group dynamics, pressure to succeed, fear of failure, leadership style and of course communications all play a role in whether team performance is greater than the sum of the individual talented parts.

I WANT TO CHANGE ALL