"I Left It Too Long" - On Hard Conversations. Shaping Chaos 7

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"I Left It Too Long"

We’ve all done it. At some point, we’ve all left it far to long to say, and do, the hard thing.

It starts with a feeling of discomfort, a suspicion, and then an increasingly queazy sense of certainty: Person X is not going to be able to do their job. You litigate it in your mind. On the one hand they have a good resume, they are a nice person, they’re really trying hard. On the other: oh no you had to step in again, or, you took a look at a project they were responsible for and, yikes, it’s off the rails.

You tried giving feedback, and you thought you’d been really clear. (You were pretty sure about this). They agreed that things should change! Then they had a good week, or a good month and you thought — maybe, possibly, this is all going to work out fine.

But then – no. It wasn’t.

You wondered if they could be coached to improve their work, so you tried that. It took a lot of time and considerable effort (coaching is hard), maybe org changes were involved, mentoring, a 360. The back and forth between your desire to somehow make it work, and your deeper, at times barely acknowledged understanding that it wouldn’t, went on for quite a while (weeks, months, years sometimes).

Finally, your rational, operational voice kept bringing the receipts. Maybe there was a sign you couldn't ignore: somebody quit, or a customer spoke up. Or an outside voice (your boss, the Board, a trusted peer) said what you couldn't. Something broke the dam. No. It wasn’t working.

So you geared yourself up, prepped for the conversation (more delay, more worry!), put it on the calendar and finally, finally said the Difficult Thing: a demotion, or a leveling, or, yes, you fired them.

And then it was done. There were things to adjust, clean up. Roles had to be reassigned, the decision had to be explained. It was a disruption needing to be managed.

But pretty soon you realized you were feeling relief. The job was suddenly getting done. There were results where there had previously been confusion. Some piece of psychic space that had been given over to anxiety about this decision was freed up.

And you thought “I left it too long. I should have done it sooner”.

Yes. As I said. We’ve all done it (I certainly have). It comes up in coaching more often than I can count.

Here’s the thing: the truth is, at times, hurtful, no matter how careful we are about expressing it with basic human decency. We can read Radical Candor, Crucial Conversations, scan the blogs and watch the videos and convince ourselves that being direct is a gift. But being told “you are not good enough at your job to be able to continue” just hurts. It challenges us at the basic levels of identity, status and survival. Common sense (and experience, and all the books) tells us that not being told is worse in the long run. But the hard conversation you need to have is not the long run.

Humans need connection at a very fundamental level. We are wired to understand that our relationships are existential. Some deep, deep part of us knows that we cannot survive alone. So we are deeply reluctant to damage a relationship, to hurt another person who is known to us. When we contemplate sitting across from another and saying “this is at an end”, we hit a psychic set of brakes that exists far below thoughts like “feedback is a gift” or “in the end this if for the best”.

This part of our humanity does us credit. Putting a heavy psychic drag on our abilities to hurt each other holds us together. At its best, it makes us wonder about forgiveness, pushes us to notice how we all are imperfectly making our way in the world, how we all screw up and are at times inadequate.

(We do, of course, have much less concern about hurting people who are “not us”, or people who we have decided are not quite human. A subject for another day).

Unfortunately, it turns out that being human just inherently involves telling truths which may be hurtful to hear. We see things in another person that they are unable to see in themselves, and it is best that we speak it — for them, and us. We need each other to connect, to build, or live, and then we separate, because that time is gone.

So you left it too long. We all do. Every time is a lesson, a practice, in understanding the balance between necessity and empathy. Every time (and it will happen many times) you can be more conscious of the depths of your humanity begging you to slow down, and every time you can hear it and decide to make your own skillful decision about balancing truth and connection.

Notes

"Nobody Works for the Process"

Kind of loved this comment from a client: for me it captures the dryness of "process" and puts a finger on why so many early stage companies regard "process" with such suspicion. "We'll lose our essence, our juice, our energy".

No, you won't, as long as you remember what people do work for: connection, success, vision, growth and regard process as a necessary mechanism for providing all those good things.

"“If I could walk around the office I’d probably feel fine…”

This felt like a cry from the heart (was related to trying to figure out the "temperature" of a team). It seems like the results are in and, yes, humans need to get together in person to make some things work. Which things, and how often - well, we get to choose.

The Cry of the Middle Manager, Part 1: “I’m Just a Traffic Cop”

Maybe. Probably not. Look at your team culture, hiring, successes. Your contribution is all of that and more. Weirdly this particular cry tends to come up when a manager/leader is doing a great job: no fires, no crises, happy people.

Links

On "folding up your sh*t umbrella" - in other words, not varnishing the truth when communicating state of company/org.

Advice for new Directors. Solid.

On "Wartime CEO" and other violent metaphors. There's quite a bit of it about right now - the whole "wartime CEO" thing. And I get it — it's necessary to raise the intensity in times of change. But it's a violent metaphor (yes, it's a metaphor - you're not at war — you're sitting in an office). Are there others?