The Conversation You're Avoiding Is Costing Someone Else

Hey Leader,

Imagine getting a call from a department head and she says she needs you to hear something. Then she hits play…

You hear a recording of your number one sales director on a call with one of her IT people. He is screaming. He is cussing at her. He is threatening her job, because she had a queue of tickets ahead of his and could not fix his laptop that second.

In my recent episode of Not Like Me, I share how this happened to me. How I had to listen to someone who reported to me chewing out someone in another department. I share in the episode about the hard conversation that followed…and the hard conversations that didn’t happen soon enough.

In Our Most Recent Episode of Not Like Me...

What I Had Been Telling Myself

He was my top producer. Every quarter, no drama about the number, he just delivered.

I had been having conversations with him for months. “You need to do better.” “This is not how we treat people.” He would nod, adjust for a couple of weeks, then some pressure would hit and he would go right back to running people over to get what he wanted.

I called those conversations addressing the issue. What they actually were was me doing the bare minimum to address the issue, while avoiding the conversation that would have ended it.

Because the real conversation had consequences attached. Thirty days to change. Written documentation. A clear line and what happens when he crossed it. That version might cost me my best number.

So I kept doing the soft version, and I told myself I was managing him.

The Cost Never Lands Where You Think

Here is what I could not get past after hearing that recording.

The woman in IT had done nothing wrong. She had a job, a queue, and a person losing his mind at her about a laptop. She absorbed all of it. Then she presumably went home and carried it around for a while, the way people do.

She was in that call because of a decision I made months earlier, in a much quieter room, with much lower stakes.

That is the thing about a delayed conversation. You think you are the one absorbing the discomfort by putting it off. The actual bill goes to whoever is standing in that person’s path while you wait. Your quietest team member. The new hire who does not know this is not normal. The peer who stopped raising issues because nothing changed the last three times.

I called him into my office, played the recording for him, and wrote him up that day. Eventually I had to let him go. My number one.

Every bit of that was fixable six months earlier, in a conversation that would have taken forty minutes and made me uncomfortable for one afternoon.

The Excuse Has Creative Vocabulary

Leaders rarely say “I am avoiding this.”

We say we are giving it some time. We say we want to see how it plays out. We say we do not want to make a big thing out of it. We say the timing is bad, quarter close, big client, new hire ramping.

Sometimes those are genuinely good calls. And sometimes they are fear of a harder conversation.

Here is the question that sorts it, and you have to answer it honestly or it does not work: am I waiting because waiting serves the situation, or because waiting serves me?

If the answer is the second one, you already know what to do with it.

Why You Can’t Have the Conversation While You’re at an 8

There is a reason we postpone these, and it has less to do with courage than with what happens to us in the room.

I know this one personally. Executive meeting, entire leadership team present, and I was the only woman there. The CEO said something about women that was beneath him and beneath the room. I felt it land. And instead of pausing, I clapped back. He clapped back. Within about ninety seconds the two of us were going at each other like nobody else was in the building.

Everyone else sat there watching the two most senior people in the room have a playground fight.

To his credit, he apologized afterward, to me and to every person in that room. I apologized too, because I met his energy instead of managing it, and that was mine to own.

Here is what I would do differently now. I felt myself climbing. I was at a 3, then a 4, and I know exactly what a 4 feels like in my body. Instead of waiting until I hit an 8 and then opening my mouth, I would stop at the 4. Not to swallow it. To ask a question instead of firing a comment, which does two things at once: it settles my nervous system and it settles the room.

You cannot lead a hard conversation from an 8. By then you are just defending yourself in a nicer conference room.

Running This Through ALLY

ALLY is Ask, Listen, Learn, You Take Action. Here is what it looks like pointed at the conversation you have been carrying around.

Ask. Who is currently paying for the conversation I have not had yet? Name the actual person, not the situation.

Listen. When I have raised this before, what did I actually hear back, and did anything change after? If the answer is no, I have been having the wrong conversation.

Learn. What is my number, the point where I stop thinking clearly? Learn what a 4 feels like in your body, because that is the only place you still have a choice.

You Take Action. Put it on the calendar today. Not next week, when things calm down. Things will not calm down.

Three Things to Do This Week

1. Have the one you have been avoiding. You thought of it in the first paragraph of this article. Today, not Friday. Before you walk in, take three slow breaths and make the exhale longer than the inhale, because your nervous system listens to that more than it listens to your pep talk.
   

2. Catch yourself at a 4. One meeting this week, watch for the climb. When you feel it, stop and ask a question instead of making a statement. You will settle yourself and the room at the same time.
   

3. Ask your team what they are avoiding with you. One on one, not as a group, because nobody says the true thing in a group. “Is there something you have been wanting to bring up with me that you have not?” Then be quiet long enough for them to actually answer.

The Bottom Line

One of my favorite lines is from Brian Tracy:

“It is not important what you hope, wish, or intend. It is only important what you do.”

You already know which conversation this article was about. You knew by the second paragraph. The only question left is whether somebody else keeps paying for it while you decide you are not quite ready.

Go have it. Today.

Then come tell me how it went. I want to hear it.

Listen to the full episode here →

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