Stressful conversations are unavoidable in life. In business they can run the gamut from firing a subordinate to, curiously enough, receiving praise. Whatever the context, stressful conversations differ from other conversations because of the emotional loads they carry. These conversations call up embarrassment, confusion, anxiety, anger, pain or fear – if not in us, then in our listener. Indeed, stressful conversations cause such anxiety that most people simply avoid them. This strategy is not necessarily wrong. However sometimes it can be extremely costly to dodge issues, appease difficult people and smooth over antagonisms because the fact is that avoidance usually makes a problem or relationship worse.
Stressful conversations are painful because our feelings are so enmeshed. When we are not emotionally entangled in an issue, we know that conflict is normal and that it can be resolved – or at least managed. But when feelings get stirred up, most of us are thrown off balance. However it need not be this way. Managers can improve difficult conversations unilaterally if they approach them with greater self-awareness, rehearse them in advance and apply three proven communication techniques.
Preparing for a Stressful Conversation
A good start is to become aware of your own weaknesses to people and situations. For example, if you are vulnerable to hostility, know how you react to it. Do you withdraw or escalate? Do you clam up or retaliate? While one reaction is not better than the other, knowing how you react in a stressful situation will teach you a lot about your vulnerabilities and it can help you master stressful situations.
Building awareness is not about endless self analysis. Much of it simply involves making our tacit knowledge about ourselves more explicit. For instance we all know from past experience, what kinds of conversations and people we handle badly. When you find yourself in a difficult conversation ask yourself whether this is one of those situations or whether it involves one of those people. Do you bare your teeth when faced with an overbearing colleague? Do you shut down when you feel excluded? Once you know what your danger zones are, you can anticipate your vulnerability and improve your response.
Explicit self awareness will often help save you from engaging in a conversation that panders to your feelings rather than serves your needs. All too often the approach we use is dictated by our own aversion to conflict.
An excellent way to anticipate specific problems that you may encounter in a stressful conversation is to rehearse with a neutral friend. Start with the content and just get it out there. Be vicious, be timid, be sarcastic, be illogical but get it out. Now go over it again and think about what you would say if the situation was not emotionally loaded. As your friend is not emotionally attached to the situation, they can be of great assistance. Write down what you come up with together. If you don’t, you will forget it later.
Fine tune the phrasing. When you imagine yourself in a stressful conversation, your phrasing tends to be highly charged. You can think of only one way to say something. When you step back from the emotion, your phrasing is often much better, more temperate and usable. Remember you can say what you want to say; you just can’t say it like that. Refine your phrasing until it expresses your message in an honest but non-threatening way.
Then work on your body language and eliminate emotional charged behaviours. Try and lose the eyebrows skittering up and down, legs wrapped around each other like liquorice twists and the nervous snickers that will almost certainly be mis-interpreted.
Managing the conversation
There are three deceptively simple ingredients that are needed to make stressful conversations succeed. These are clarity, neutrality and temperance. They are the building blocks of all good communication and mastering them will multiply your chances of responding well to even the most strained conversations.
Clarity means letting words do the work for us. Avoid euphemisms or talking in circles. Tell people clearly what you mean. Unfortunately delivering clear content when the news is bad is particularly hard to do. Under strained circumstances we all tend to shy away from clarity because we equate it with brutality. We often say things like “Well David, we are not sure what is going to happen with this job but in the future we will keep our eyes open for you.” This is a roundabout and terribly misleading way to tell him that he didn’t get the promotion he was seeking. Yet there is nothing inherently brutal about honesty. It is not the content but the delivery of the news that makes it brutal or humane. Ask a surgeon, a priest or a policeman. If a message is given skilfully, even though the news is bad, the content may still be tolerable. When a senior executive directly tells a subordinate that “the promotion has gone to someone else”, the news is likely to be highly unpleasant and the appropriate reaction is sadness, anger and anxiety. However if the content is clear, the listener can better begin to process the information.
Tone is the non verbal part of delivery in stressful conversations. It is intonation, facial expressions, conscious and unconscious body language. Although it is hard to have a neutral tone when overcome by strong feelings, neutrality is the desired norm in crisis communications, including stressful conversations. Consider the classic neutrality of the space programme’s “Houston, we have a problem.” It takes practice to acquire such neutrality but a neutral tone is the best place to start when a conversation turns stressful.
Temperate phrasing is the final element. English is a huge language and there are lots of different ways to say what you need to say. Some phrases are temperate while others provoke your listener to dismiss your words and your content. The cardinal rule to remember is that we are not in stressful conversations to score points or create enemies. The goal is to advance the conversation, to hear and be heard accurately and to have functional exchange between two people. So next time you want to snap at someone –“Stop interrupting me!” - try “Can you hold on a minute? I want to finish this before I lose my train of thought.” Temperate phrasing will help you take the strain out of a stressful conversation.
