Episode 66 Podcast Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):

The last thing you want to do is jump into a conversation. You shoot from the hip and it’s all based off emotion. That’s the worst thing that you can do. Hi everyone, Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group and welcome back to another episode of The Trade. Dan, good to have you back. Dan, how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:22):

Hey Rob. Good to be back. Hi everyone. Yeah, really looking forward to this. Been a while since we’ve done a two parter and this one today is a big one. Difficult conversations, avoiding them is more difficult and then actually getting into the how’s of it as well. So plenty to pull apart here. So long time since we’ve done a two-parter, looking forward to ripping into this one.

Speaker 1 (00:41):

Absolutely. It’s one of those things that as you advance in your journey in running a business, developing those soft management skills is critical to your success in running a business. And today and in our next episode, this is really helping you hone those skills because the bigger your business becomes, the more team that you hire and create that leverage and structure and around you, you’re going to have to have more and more difficult conversations. It’s one of those things that just comes naturally with practise and so today, hopefully it’s a real skill development one, isn’t it?

Speaker 2 (01:14):

Yeah, you can’t avoid them. You can absolutely butcher them. So yeah, let’s jump in and start today’s conversation with probably the three reasons why we need to have difficult conversations. Why or what drives a difficult conversation when it springs up. The first one we’re going to talk about is performance.

Speaker 1 (01:30):

This one here is just performance of your employee. It doesn’t matter if it’s your ground crew or someone in your office, crew or operational team. They might be late for work. It could be a quality of workmanship or is this something that you’re constantly repeating yourself, asking them to do something or do something a specific way over and over and over again that they’re just not listening. So really they’re a great couple of examples of someone’s lack of performance or performance, not to a certain expectation in the business.

Speaker 2 (02:04):

Yeah, anytime someone’s not meeting the expected outcomes that you’ve set for them as part of their role or what’s expected. I think that’s the key element. Anytime there’s that, you’ve got a performance conversation that you have to have. The second one, which is a little bit different to performance becomes behaviour or attitude slightly different.

Speaker 1 (02:22):

This is where someone’s behaviour might not be meeting the cultural expectations of how we do things around here within the business could be they’re a little bit slow lethargic. They don’t get at a first year someone who’s a bit of a knuckle dragger on site or maybe they’re just putting the company into disrepute like they’re talking poorly about a customer or a supplier or a subcontract or worse yet the business in front of other people. So there’s a great couple of examples of just poor attitude or poor behaviours generally in speaking.

Speaker 2 (02:56):

And it’s not just what they say or what they’re doing, sometimes it’s how they show up as well. A behaviour attitude type conversation that comes up a lot that we hear about around the fringes is just being sloppy in appearance. You guys not following that stuff, wearing shitty looking shirts, ripped the shreds and showing up that way. So sloppy in appearance would be another one of those behavioural attitude type things where something’s off, we’ve got to address it, it’s never comfortable, but you need to have that conversation. The third one is probably a little bit more serious and this definitely is, but this is OH&S, WHS, sort of those incident type things that happen. Safety type, difficult conversations.

Speaker 1 (03:33):

This is where someone might be working under the influence of drug or alcohol for example. Maybe they’re not following safety policies and procedure for the business or maybe they’re just not adhering to site rules that you are working on someone else’s site. So there’s a great couple of examples of an OH&S or a safety type of conversation you might need to have.

Speaker 2 (03:59):

And on the incident side, it’s things that happened from time to time as well. Things like reckless or intentional, the misuse of equipment, sort of that sort of thing where you can see it, it’s not right. It’s going to either cause a safety issue or it already has motor vehicles, another one and being in breach of road rules, getting fined, speeding, parking tickets, all that sort of stuff where we’re going in that incident sort of space when those things come out and they arrive. So those are probably the three main things that will trigger a difficult conversation and being prepared for those, being good at them, being able to handle them, you’re not going to be able to avoid them like we keep saying, but you must get good at having them. You must get to a point where you’re not shying away from them because Rob, when you do avoid these conversations, it doesn’t help the situation.

Speaker 1 (04:48):

No, it doesn’t and it comes back to that thing where when something not great’s going on in their world, we try and sweep it under the carpet and hope the problem goes away, but inadvertently, we all know what happens in those situations. The problem actually doesn’t go away. They get bigger, they multiply, they can become a huge storm and a teacup, so sweeping them under the carpet is absolutely the wrong thing that you can do. Being on the front foot, addressing them there and then in the right way in that moment is critical to course correcting people’s behaviour because I’m a big believer that you don’t need to be doing formal performance reviews in a business if you’re managing people’s behaviours and bringing them back into line as they go, you eliminate the need for that and so not sweeping things under the carpet and addressing them there and then is critical to just keeping the team and the business on track.

Speaker 2 (05:46):

Yeah, I know in my previous lives in business I’m the same. I don’t like doing, there used to be all the rage, annual performance reviews, when do you do your performance reviews and what’s the process and all this sort of stuff. And yes, there’s a place for that from time to time, but I’ve found way more effective to have conversations difficult as they may be as they come up in the moment. Use them as coaching opportunities, manage your way and lead your way through them at the time rather than try and bundle it all up into this one big conversation that happens once, maybe twice a year.

Speaker 1 (06:17):

Correct. Because when you don’t deal with things, they get bigger and what it also does is it erodes your team morale because something’s happen, the morale are within your team environment erodes it’s that bad apple and the apple cart type of scenario and that happens a lot when the owner or the leader of the business fails to have the conversation there when they need to have it the most.

Speaker 2 (06:43):

Yeah, you normalise whatever behaviour it is you’re ignoring the whole, you mentioned cultural before, that whole culture sort of drops to the level at which you’re tolerating the behaviour, the sloppy incidents, the attitudes, those sort of things. And I think that’s the other thing people are watching all the time, people are seeing what’s there, so the morale erodes, your leadership gets undermined. People start to take shortcuts because oh well the boss isn’t watching this sort of stuff and then you end up with resentments and conflict because at some point you’re going to say enough’s enough and you’re going to get the same old argument of, Hey, what about when that happened with that guy? You end up getting those sort of conflicts happening.

Speaker 1 (07:21):

And I think the resentment comes in a different form. It comes in from you as the leader where you can be a little bit resentful for your team because they keep demonstrating the same behaviour and you get the shits, but you are the one creating that environment because you’re allowing it to happen. The resentment also comes in from other people within the team because they get resentful towards that employee or resentful towards you as the boss because you’re not doing anything about it and they’re resenting that employee who’s not pulling their weight or taking the piss on side or whatever it is, and then they become resentful for you for not dealing with it. So there becomes this culture of resentment, lower standards, subpar performance, and that’s when culture erodes and productivity and profitability drops in the end of the day.

Speaker 2 (08:11):

Yeah. Add to that, the stress, the frustration that you’re then feeling because nothing’s resolved. You’re just sitting there with all this crap sitting under the carpet that you’ve pushed aside for a while or too long. I think that the bottom line of all of it is that the business performance is going to suffer. You’re never going to get to where you want to be if you’re not having these conversations. Like we said, the difficult part of this I think is spotting it in the moment, spotting it quick enough, and if you sort of do skirt around these issues or maybe you think I’m doing a good job of it, maybe if we explored for a minute some of the excuses, the avoidance that comes out. We’ve talked about the issues and what happens, but how do we spot it in ourselves?

Speaker 1 (08:52):

It’s being wary of our language or the thoughts that we have. And I know the power of coaching is the ability to pick people up on their language that they use. And it’s difficult for you listening today because you don’t have us sitting on your shoulder saying, actually, what’d you say there? What’d you say, Aaron? So you’ve got the ability to coach yourself now and you might hear yourself thinking it or saying it going, well, I actually can’t afford to lose him. And if that thought pops into your mind, it’s like, well, I don’t want to have the conversation. I don’t want to piss him off and I don’t want to lose him. So there’s probably one big one, which is a trigger of where you might be avoiding a conversation that needs to be had.

Speaker 2 (09:33):

And then you start to catastrophize and go down that path and you think, well, the loss is going to be there. The other one is they may not like me if I sit there and have this chat. I’ve had many clients that have always hung on that idea for me to get what I want from my team. I’ve got to be a good bloke, big one.

Speaker 1 (09:51):

What about I don’t have time?

Speaker 2 (09:54):

Oh, you know how I feel about that one you’ve got all the time. There is, but it’s true. I haven’t got time to have this chat. That’s just a pure avoidance behaviour that’s just trying to shy away from it. I’ll deal with it later, meaning I won’t deal with it at all.

Speaker 1 (10:07):

I think the worst one is, well, his performance results outweigh that attitude or behaviour, and this is the worst one that can happen is because especially when you’ve got a senior tradesman or a leading hand who is very experienced and got high skills, but their behaviour and attitude stinks. What happens is you get the junior members of your team looking up to that senior person and it’s hard for you because you don’t want to have the conversation in the risk of losing them and you lose a senior member of your team. But what happens is the culture drops in, the standards erode because you’ve got all the junior people looking up to that person where they’ve got a shitty attitude or poor behaviour. So that’s actually the worst one where their performance is high, but their attitude and behaviour is low. That’s the riskiest one.

Speaker 2 (10:55):

Yeah. You end up with one person’s attitude stinking to everyone’s attitude stinking, and not only do you not get the results from the younger crew that are all watching that you get the shit results and you get the shit attitude and it starts to breed a real downward spiral. Then what about the last one I’ve got in my mind when I think about this is they’ll probably leave if I ignore it long enough, if I can just hold out, they’ll hopefully leave anyway because they’re crap or it’ll sort itself out.

Speaker 1 (11:23):

Yeah, this is a great one. And the reality is poor culture is a reflection of poor leadership and poor performers to stick around in businesses with poor culture because they get to hide and accept a low level of performance. And so ignoring the problem is not going to make it go away, to be honest. They’re just going to stick around. You are going to get shittier. You’re probably going to lose great people in your team because high performers don’t want to deal with low performers, and this is just classic leadership and management of what its behaviour, which has got no great ending to it.

Speaker 2 (11:58):

Yeah, absolutely. So hopefully going through those, if you’ve been triggered on any of them, you’ve probably got something to explore in this area. There’s probably something you can pull out of it, something you can stop doing in terms of your avoidance and start doing. What we’re about to do is how do you get into this and how do you deal with difficult conversation?

Speaker 1 (12:14):

This is the thing that you don’t get taught these soft skills as a tradesman, but you have to absolutely master these when you become a great business person because especially when you are growing your business, the biggest asset within your business is your team. When you’re growing your business, you grow your team, your team help you grow the business, and inadvertently what’s going to happen is the bigger your team gets, the more difficult conversations you have to embrace and have. And so this is why touching on those three areas were important and recognising the areas of avoidance is super important because what it helps you do is develop that self-awareness skills within yourself to be able to know when you might need to have a conversation and when you might be avoiding having to need one, have one of those conversations.

Speaker 2 (13:03):

And then I think having the structure in place, which is what we’re about to step in and teach you, having a structure that you can repeat, there’s a way to do this. It’s not like every conversation, every conversation, the content will be different. The context of the conversation will be different, be a whole lot of different stuff going on, but the way you handle it, the way you learn to navigate the conversation, that should be part of your routine, your skillset. That’s something that we can develop and teach, which is what we’re about to step into now. So let’s begin with before we even have the conversation next episode, we’ll deal in what to say, but even before then, before you have this conversation, there’s probably a few things we need to do. The first one is, and I can’t stretch this enough, is prepare. That’s got to be number one.

Speaker 1 (13:48):

Yeah. The last thing you want to do is jump into a conversation. You wind yourself up and it’s like, great, I’ve got to have this conversation and you shoot from the hip and it’s all based off emotion. That’s the worst thing that you can do when you’re preparing for a difficult conversation. You’ve got to have the ability to take the emotion out of the conversation and you’ve got to talk around the facts around what happened and when it happened and the key points that you want to be able to convey to illustrate a point and what was the behaviour they were demonstrating and what the impact was. And you need to be able to gather that information so that you can go into the conversation prepared. A, it gives you confidence to be able to have the right conversation, but B, it enables you to take the emotion out of it so you don’t just shoot from the hip and start attacking the person rather than attacking their behaviour.

Speaker 2 (14:42):

Yeah, absolutely. And then there’s a distinction with this I think that comes after that. You said you don’t want to attack the person and it’s not that you take the other person out of it. You’ve still got to consider that person. This is probably part two of the preparation, but considering how they’re likely to respond, it’s like you can go off and have a round at the start of the conversation, they might respond in a way you hadn’t even thought of and then you’re on the back foot again. You lose control of your conversation and the whole thing goes to shit. So I think the next thing about preparation, once you’ve got your key facts and your context and you’ve really got yourself centred is considering how someone’s likely to respond as a result of having this conversation because that lets you at least dance and have a few steps in before you start having to work out what comes next.

Speaker 1 (15:26):

Yeah, great leadership is the ability to not ask a question you don’t know somewhat the answer’s going to be, and you’re not going to always know what the answer’s always going to be or how the other person’s going to react to that question. But if you go in and consider it, that enables you to be prepared for what might come back to you. That’s what great leadership is when you have difficult conversations.

Speaker 2 (15:52):

And that’s what we mean. That’s really good. That’s what we mean by considering the person you want to take that into account. It is going to be a conversation, it’s got to be two way if it’s going to be a productive dialogue. So that’s really important. The other one which I want to touch on then is being really clear on the outcome and when we talk about being clear on the outcome, these questions are really important. What are your expectations for change? What would you like the person to do? How are you going to measure this? How would you measure success if it did change, what would that look like? When did the changes need to occur? What’s the timeliness around this? And that’ll come back to the severity of what you’re dealing with. When will you meet to assess the progress? So when are you going to get back together and actually give feedback on this?

(16:34):

There’s one thing to have the conversation, this has to pick up and you never touch on it again, that’s just not holding someone to account for what you’ve discussed, including yourself. So when will you meet to assess the progress? And then lastly, what will happen if they fail to change? There should be consequences attached to it, and it’s important that you have those at least in your mind about what comes next, as I said before, and where do you go to from here? If they do great, what does it look like if they don’t? What comes next? And being clear on the answers to those questions helps you prepare.

Speaker 1 (17:08):

Yeah, love it. That whole preparation point is key. And we haven’t even spoken around sitting down with the person to have the conversation. This is the prep work that goes on and getting almost you in the right head space and gathering the information and being armed with that information before you go into that conversation.

Speaker 2 (17:26):

Yeah, absolutely it is. And then I think the next one that comes after you’ve got all your ducks in a row then is you start to consider what we call place. And it’s enough for you to be centred within yourself, like I said, with all your facts, but then you’ve got to work out well, alright, how are we going to do this? And place is what we’ve chosen here, Rob, explain that a little bit more.

Speaker 1 (17:47):

Being sensitive to the location is essential when you’re having a difficult conversation. Now depending on the severity of the conversation that you need to have and the nature of the conversation almost dictates where you have this conversation. So it might be that you might need to be able to do it, you could do it on site, maybe it’s leaning up a bit against the back of a truck and you’re having just a bit of a conversation around someone’s performance. Maybe you need to have it not in front of their peers at a toolbox talking but toolbox talk, but you pull ’em aside and have a one-on-one with them. Just give them a nice little chip on the side around their performance or tardiness or depending if it’s a drug or alcohol related or a severe incidents around a genuine safety breach. Maybe you’ve got to genuinely pull ’em in the office, close the door, and they’ve got to have a witness there because it’s like a final performance conversation. So depending on the nature of the conversation you’ve got to have, choosing your environment is key to be able to know where and when and who needs to be present in those conversations depending on the severity of it.

Speaker 2 (19:06):

Yeah, I like it. And to tie that back to our preparation, what’s your outcome for this? Do you want the person to be engaged in the conversation? Is this something you want to get a joint sort of outcome from? Is it something that’s for team is or not? All of that determines place you think about if you’re going to have them sitting in your office, if you’ve got one, they’re probably going to feel a little bit intimidated If you are sitting eyeballing them across a table, you’re not sitting on the same side of the table. And this is the extent that I’ll go to when having these sort of conversations. Where am I going to sit? Where’s that person going to sit? How are they going to respond if I do that? Are they going to be in the right frame to hear the message the way I want them to and adjust accordingly?

(19:45):

Or is it going to drive them further apart and all they’re going to want to do is run for the door as quickly as possible? All that comes down to place, like you said. So it’s really important. And it’s amazing how many people almost ignore that point or they fail to think about it and all of a sudden they wonder why the conversation didn’t happen or it was like, well, I think that fell on deaf ears or it was a waste of time. That sort of thing comes up. Usually it’s because the place was totally inappropriate.

Speaker 1 (20:09):

And like you hear when you hear people, experts when they’re talking around mental health for example, is when someone’s got issues going on in their work. Sometimes it’s related to what’s going on in their personal life.

(20:24):

And when you hear talk experts in the mental health space talk, they say that when you want to broach a conversation around with someone around what’s going on in their world, sometimes having them sit in the passenger seat and you driving and you ask the question going, Hey Dan, I’ve noticed that your performance has been off of late. Is everything going okay? And not eyeballing them and having them sit next to you is a great way to bring down those barriers and open a dialogue. So there’s an example of a difficult conversation. Now, you don’t want to do that every time because when it needs to be serious, you need to eyeball someone to have an honest conversation around a performance issue. But if you sometimes doing it when you’re driving or leaning up against the back of the truck on site, or if it’s a real performance issue on site, actually go to site, stand with them, look at what’s happening there and then in that moment and say, Hey, look at what you’ve done here. This has created this, this, and this problem. You’ve got to choose those environments carefully to be able to have the most amount of impact depending on the situation.

Speaker 2 (21:29):

Yeah, couldn’t agree more. Couldn’t agree more. So Rob, as we talk through this, we’re talking through this coaching people on how to have these conversations and transfer skills and things like that. Can you talk for a minute about almost like the industrial relations side of this, the HR side of it? I don’t want to gloss over that because it’s such a big part of these conversations and the consequences that can happen. Your background ideally suited to this, but that aside, just talk to that industrial relations sort of side and how that fits in when you’re dealing with these conversations.

Speaker 1 (22:01):

This is really important in today’s environment where you’ve got to make sure that the decisions you’re making and the conversations you’re having with your team, especially around serious natured type of events, it’s always best to err on the side of caution and get the right industrial relations, HR, legal advice around certain topics. Because the worst thing you want to be able to do is have a difficult conversation or punt someone and then come back and bite you in the ass with unfair dismissal or seem of bullying or whatever it is. And so having the sensitivity to the industrial relations and the HR side of things is really important.

Speaker 2 (22:42):

And that can be taken from a few places. And just to mention them really quickly, things like Fair Work Australia, there’s hotlines for that where you can get some advice. Obviously you’ve got your employment lawyers and legal people, things like that. HR consultants, someone who’s qualified in that area that’s up to date with the laws and the legalities of what’s going on if you need to. Industry. Industry bodies as well. Absolutely. Industry bodies and even your own employment agreements, sometimes it’s been ages since you’ve read those, go back and read them before you start again, depending on the nature of what you’re dealing with. But all of those things should be considered as well. I think as part of that preparation phase. Important that we cover that.

Speaker 1 (23:21):

Yeah, those people may not necessarily give you the right advice on how to have the conversation. We’ll have that in our next episode in part two, but they’ll be able to give you where you stand on that position and advice around what the next steps might be, depending on the nature of the situation you’re having to deal with.

Speaker 2 (23:41):

Nice. Yeah, for sure. This week’s challenge is all about clarity and preparation. We’re not getting into confrontation. We want clarity and preparation, and this is all about building the foundation. Okay, so next week we’ll give you the framework on what to say or how to have the conversation. But today, clarity, preparation is the key. Step one, I want you to think about who have you not spoken to yet? And that’s someone that you know should, there’s probably someone, there’s something under the carpet, there’s something you’ve tolerated, there’s a conversation to be had. I almost guarantee it. Who is that person that you know you’re going to need to talk to? That’s step one. Step two is categorise the conversation you need to have. Give yourself a home base, at least take the emotion out of it by categorising it to the three buckets that we talked about.

(24:29):

Okay, is it a performance conversation? Is it an attitude conversation? Is it an OH&S or an incident that you’re having? What bucket are you in when you go to prepare for this conversation? Step three, get your facts together. What facts do you need? What actually happened? What are you actually dealing with? Not the feelings, the emotions don’t stack three months into one conversation. What are we specifically going to target? What are your facts? Get them in order. Step four, clarify your outcome. What’s the outcome you’re after? What would you like to ideally happen as a result of having this conversation? And as we said after that, consider the person that you’re going to be talking to as step five. How are they likely to react? What’s likely to come back at you when you’ve started this conversation and you’re having it? Once you know that you can do step six and move on to that which is your place, choosing the place and all those things we just spoke about.

(25:26):

Starting to consider based on all the stuff that you’ve put in place, steps one through five, what’s the best environment to have the conversation? And for bonus, not just think about this as we talk it through, but write it down. Writing it down and having a written plan for this is going to help, it takes it out of your mind for starters, they can be quite overwhelming some of these conversations. So being able to have it written down, come back to it when you need to get on with your day, not have your whole day hijacked for one difficult conversation when you’re not used to having it, that can weigh you down. So being able to write it down before you start with those six steps is also going to be pretty important as well.

Speaker 1 (26:05):

Love it. What I love about this challenge is what it’s doing is giving you a framework to get prepared for a conversation that need to be had. And it reminds me of that time when we were working through this with one of our clients, Zach and Zach’s a young guy and never really, he went pretty much straight from his apprenticeship into his trade into running a business he’d never been as a supervisor or managing people, and he never developed the soft skills.

(26:37):

And as his business grew, it was way outgrowing his management capability. And what he was doing was avoiding having these conversations because he wasn’t confident to be able to have them. And the moment we taught this through coaching in our lifestyle programme, what it did was this framework gave him the confidence to be able to prepare well, to have a difficult conversation. And the moment he got this framework and practise and did what you just went through, then on those six steps, it gave him confidence. He jotted it all down and bang, went in there and had some difficult conversations and he immediately started eradicating some of the issues, cultural issues that were going on in his business and he hasn’t looked back since. And so I love that challenge. So don’t avoid it, it’s your ability to get in and prepare and then tune into part two of this little series we’re doing around difficult conversations. But we’ll take it to the next step. But at least if you can get stuck into what we’ve spoken around today, it’s going to give you a great framework to confidently have these conversations

Speaker 2 (27:47):

For sure. Absolutely. It’s a conversation draught, so we’ll walk through the, what you’re actually going to say on the next episode. We hope to see you there. If you know that this is an area of weakness and you’re looking to take your management to the next level, as we always say, book in your strategy call @strategysession.com.au and have a chat to Rob about that and we’ll start to put in place some of this stuff where you can pick up some of these soft skills that you need to take your management, your leadership, and your business to the next level.

Speaker 1 (28:14):

Thanks for tuning in today. Looking forward to coming back to you with part two around Difficult Conversation series. Speak to you next week.

Speaker 2 (28:21):

See you soon.