Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Douglas Stone

Think about it: Do the people in your organization deal with conflicts directly, routinely, and well? Or does the e-mail and water-cooler chat continue to focus on all the ways the organization is dysfunctional, even as important conversations are avoided?

The “What Happened?” Conversation. Most difficult conversations involve disagreement about what has happened or what should happen. Who said what and who did what? Who’s right, who meant what, and who’s to blame?

The Feelings Conversation. Every difficult conversation also asks and answers questions about feelings. Are my feelings valid? Appropriate? Should I acknowledge or deny them, put them on the table or check them at the door? What do I do about the other person’s feelings? What if they are angry or hurt?

The Identity Conversation. This is the conversation we each have with ourselves about what this situation means to us. We conduct an internal debate over whether this means we are competent or incompetent, a good person or bad, worthy of love or unlovable.

As we argue vociferously for our view, we often fail to question one crucial assumption upon which our whole stance in the conversation is built: I am right, you are wrong. This simple assumption causes endless grief.

The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values. They are not about what a contract states, they are about what a contract means.

They are not about what is true, they are about what is important.

The second argument in the “What Happened?” Conversation is over intentions – yours and mine. Did you yell at me to hurt my feelings or merely to emphasize your point? Did you throw my cigarettes out because you’re trying to control my behavior or because you want to help me live up to my commitment to quit?

The error we make in the realm of intentions is simple but profound : we assume we know the intentions of others when we don’t. Worse still, when we are unsure about someone’s intentions, we too often decide they are bad.

The third error we make in the “What Happened?” Conversation has to do with blame. Most difficult conversations focus significant attention on who’s to blame for the mess we’re in. When the company loses its biggest client, for example, we know that there will shortly ensue a ruthless game of blame roulette. We don’t care where the ball lands, as long as it doesn’t land on us.

Talking about blame distracts us from exploring why things went wrong and how we might correct them going forward.

Feelings are not some noisy byproduct of engaging in difficult talk, they are an integral part of the conflict. Engaging in a difficult conversation without talking about feelings is like staging an opera without the music.

Instead of wanting to persuade and get your way, you want to understand what has happened from the other person’s point of view, explain your point of view, share and understand feelings, and work together to figure out a way to manage the problem going forward.

Changing our stance means inviting the other person into the conversation with us, to help us figure things out. If we’re going to achieve our purposes, we have lots we need to learn from them and lots they need to learn from us. We need to have a learning conversation.

In a charitable mood, you may think, “Well, everyone has their opinion,” or, “There are two sides to every story.” But most of us don’t really buy that. Deep down, we believe that the problem, put simply, is them.

But arguing is not only a result of our failure to see that we and the other person are in different stories – it is also part of the cause.

Sometimes people have honest disagreements, but even so, the most useful question is not “Who’s right?” but “Now that we really understand each other, what’s a good way to manage this problem?”

“And” helps you to be curious and clear.

When Lori says “You have this need to control me or put me down,” she is talking about Leo’s intentions. Her mistake is to assume she knows what Leo’s intentions are, when in fact she doesn’t. It’s an easy – and debilitating – mistake to make. And we do it all the time.

The First Mistake: Our Assumptions About Intentions Are Often Wrong

While we care deeply about other people’s intentions toward us, we don’t actually know what their intentions are. We can’t. Other people’s intentions exist only in their hearts and minds. They are invisible to us.

We Assume Intentions from the Impact on Us

We feel hurt; therefore they intended to hurt us. We feel slighted; therefore they intended to slight us. Our thinking is so automatic that we aren’t even aware that our conclusion is only an assumption.

We attribute intentions to others all the time. With business and even personal relationships increasingly conducted via e-mail, voice mail, faxes, and conference calls, we often have to read between the lines to figure out what people really mean.

We Assume Bad Intentions Mean Bad Character. Perhaps the biggest danger of assuming the other person had bad intentions is that we easily jump from “they had bad intentions” to “they are a bad person.”

We think we are sharing our hurt, frustration, anger, or confusion. We are trying to begin a conversation that will end in greater understanding, perhaps some improved behavior, and maybe an apology.

And given how frequently our assumptions are incomplete or wrong, the other person often feels not just accused, but falsely accused. Few things are more aggravating.

Working to understand what the other person is really saying is particularly important because when someone says “You intended to hurt me” that isn’t quite what they mean. A literal focus on intentions ends up clouding the conversation. Often we say “You intended to hurt me” when what we really mean is “You don’t care enough about me.”

If the father responds to his son’s complaint by saying “I didn’t intend to hurt you,” he’s not addressing his son’s real concern: “You may not have intended to hurt me, but you knew you were hurting me, and you did it anyway.”

Another problem with assuming that good intentions sanitize a negative impact is that intentions are often more complex than just “good” or “bad.”

The more you can relieve the other person of the need to defend themselves, the easier it becomes for them to take in what you are saying and to reflect on the complexity of their motivations. For example, you might say, “I was surprised that you made that comment. It seemed uncharacteristic of you. . . .” Assuming this is true (that it is uncharacteristic), you are giving some balance to the information you are bringing to their attention.

Avoiding the Second Mistake: Listen for Feelings, and Reflect on Your Intentions

As a rule, when things go wrong in human relationships, everyone has contributed in some important way.

By removing the person who made the bad decision and replacing him with someone “better,” it was assumed that the management issue was now fixed. But while the company had changed one “part” in the contribution system, it had failed to look at the system as a whole.

Unfortunately, instead of seeing his own contributions as part of the whole system, Joseph falls into the blame frame and begins to wonder whether the fault really lies with him rather than with headquarters.

Misconception #1: I Should Focus Only on My Contribution

Finding your contribution doesn’t in any way negate the other person’s contribution. It has taken both of you to get into this mess. It will probably take both of you to get out.

Misconception #2: Putting Aside Blame Means Putting Aside My Feelings

When you learn of your wife’s infidelity, you want to say, “You are responsible for ruining our marriage! How could you do something so stupid and hurtful?!” Here, you are focusing on blame as a proxy for your feelings. Speaking more directly about your strong feelings – “I feel devastated by what you did” or “My ability to trust you has been shattered” – actually reduces the impulse to blame.

Misconception #3: Exploring Contribution Means “Blaming the Victim”

When someone blames the victim, they are suggesting that the victim “brought it on themselves,” that they deserved or even wanted to be victimized. This is often terribly unfair and painful for both the victim and others.

1. Avoiding Until Now One of the most common contributions to a problem, and one of the easiest to overlook, is the simple act of avoiding. You have allowed the problem to continue unchecked by not having addressed it earlier.

particularly problematic form of avoiding is complaining to a third party instead of to the person with whom you’re upset. It makes you feel better, but puts the third party in the middle with no good way to help.

Being Unapproachable The flip side of not bringing something up is having an interpersonal style that keeps people at bay. You contribute by being uninterested, unpredictable, short-tempered, judgmental, punitive, hypersensitive, argumentative, or unfriendly.

Intersections Intersections result from a simple difference between two people in background, preferences, communication style, or assumptions about relationships.

Problematic Role Assumptions A fourth hard-to-spot contribution involves assumptions, often unconscious, about your role in a situation. When your assumptions differ from those of others you can have an intersection such as Toby and Eng-An’s. But role assumptions can be problematic even when they are shared.

Two Tools for Spotting Contribution

Role Reversal Ask yourself, “What would they say I’m contributing?” Pretend you are the other person and answer the question in the first person, using pronouns such as I, me, and my.

The Observer’s Insight Step back and look at the problem from the perspective of a disinterested observer. Imagine that you are a consultant called in to help the people in this situation better understand why they are getting stuck. How would you describe, in a neutral, nonjudgmental way, what each person is contributing?

Getting the other person to shift from blame to contribution can be more difficult. One of the best ways to signal that you want to leave behind the question of who’s to blame is to acknowledge your own contribution early in the conversation.