Younger people often avoid direct confrontation, ghosting or texting instead of talking face-to-face. This avoidance costs them at work: they'll send angry emails rather than ask for a raise. Leaders who teach difficult conversation skills help employees advocate for themselves and improve both workplace and personal relationships.
Chapters
I think one of the things that if we do not address it now, it'll only create problems for both the team member and the employer and the company, which is it's a generation that's actually very uncomfortable with confrontation. Right. And, you know, disproportionately high number of young people who break up with somebody who they've been dating for four or five months by ghosting them, you know, or they'd rather. They'd rather have difficult conversations over text rather than in person. If you're in a relationship and you're fighting, right. And. Or leaving alternative voice memos at each other rather than having a conversation. And so one of the things that we're seeing is like, I'll give you real life example that I've heard of a few times, you know, somebody quits in sometimes dramatic fashion and sends an angry email that you, you don't appreciate me, you don't pay me enough. Never occurred to them to simply call up their boss and say, hey, I'd like a raise, please. You know, and that the choice between having an uncomfortable conversation or making that request in a constructive way is so uncomfortable that they choose quitting.
And I've seen this happen a lot.
And so I think it becomes important to us that if we aren't teaching these skills of how to have uncomfortable conversations, how to speak up for yourself, how to talk about, you know, creating an arrangement that may be different from what my boss is used to, from the 20 years that they've been working and how we can work together to fashion the future of work if we don't actually start teaching those skills and having those conversations, that what we're gonna end up with is people just quitting because. Not because it's a bad corporate environment, it's because they don't know how to have a conversation, to talk about something that's uncomfortable, difficult, or make a request. It's really funny if you go back to like the 50s or 60s, you never asked for a raise, but you didn't quit either. You just remained unhappy, right? And then we reach a time period where, no, no, no, no, no, I'm asking for the raise. You know, I refuse to remain unhappy, but we're now in a period where.
I'm not going to ask for the raise and I'm not going to remain unhappy. I'm just going to leave. Which again, it's an employee market right now. And so in the short term, yeah, you'll probably land another job and you'll be okay. That again, it's going to find a balance. Everything we're living in is short term, even if short term is the next few years. And I think if we're talking about helping people grow and become better versions of themselves forever, then I think the skills that we teach won't only benefit them at work, it benefits them at home. In other words, that young person that we teach how to have a difficult conversation and how to have an effective confrontation so they can ask for a raise and probably get it if they're good, that skill set comes home, too, where I learn how to have a conversation with my partner in something uncomfortable.
That skill set goes to the way I treat my children and treat my friends. So we're making better human beings here. It just so happens that it benefits the company as well.
But we got to teach the skills. We got to teach the skills.
