MBA1203 Guest Teacher: Martin Moore- How To Handle Tough Conversations with Your Team

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Hey guys, I'm Martin Moore. Thanks for joining me today. Today I'll be teaching you how to handle tough conversations with your team. So let's get down to business. I'm used to running large teams with multiple layers of leaders. What I'm going to share today is equally relevant. Whether you're the CEO of a multi billion dollar business or the founder of a startup with a single employee, let's be clear. You're a leader if you have another human that relies on you for guidance and support. Now, for business owners and entrepreneurs, learning the basics now will future proof your business for later. You're listening to the $100 MBA show because you want to pick up the business skills that are going to help you grow. The startup that hits a ceiling as the company outgrows its founders capabilities is virtually a cliche in business. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, leaders need to have tough conversations with their people from time to time. But you'd be surprised how many leaders avoid these conversations like the plague and the number of rationalisations they can come up with to justify this. Avoidance is just crazy. When you first start out as a leader, having tough conversations is 90% will and 10% skill in my experience. If you can discipline yourself to have the tough conversations when they're needed, the skill will come over time. Today's conversation is all about mastering the will so that you can learn from your experiences and then go on to improve the quality of your tough conversations with each one that you hold. Quote Mark Albertson, who's one of the best operational leaders I've ever worked with. Hard things are hard. We don't call them tough conversations because they're easy. And if they were easy, everyone would be doing them competently. But many leaders don't. What you need to know is that if it's hard, it's also worthwhile no matter where you are right now in terms of your confidence and competence with tough conversations. There's hope for you all. I've got to tell you, when I first started my leadership career, almost 30 years ago, I sucked. I was terrible at this stuff. You can't imagine anyone being more terrible than I was. But I was smart enough to realise that this is one of the core competencies of leadership. And if I couldn't get good at this, then I'd never be a great leader. So I just did more and more and more of this until my competence grew. I like to use the analogy of learning to ski in deep powder snow. I could tell you all the things you need to do with your technique to do that well. I can tell you about how to balance your weight. I can tell you how to use your edges. I can tell you how to push through the back of a turn. I can tell you how to get that floating sensation. But guess what? It doesn't matter. You've just got to do enough of it until it starts to feel comfortable. It's just about miles under the skis and this is exactly the same thing. Don't worry about the technique. You need to do more and more and more of it until it starts to feel comfortable. That's the bottom line. Let's move on to why tough conversations are so important. When your people turn up to work each day, they want to know three things from their leader. When you boil it all down, they want to know, firstly, what are your expectations of me? Secondly, how am I going against those expectations? And thirdly, what does my future hold now? How would it be even remotely possible that people would get this understanding? If you, as a leader, aren't completely comfortable with giving your people the accurate and timely feedback they need under any circumstances. To bring out the best in your people, you need to be able to challenge, coach and confront them in an empathetic, honest and compassionate way. And that's what I'm going to help you with in the next few minutes. Let's talk about the psychology of avoidance. Why do we avoid tough conversations? The first thing is we all want to be liked. It's human nature. As a leader, trust. The mantra you have to have firmly in your head is respect before popularity. Being a leader isn't about being liked. And one of my favourite quotes is from Casey Stengel, the famous baseball player and manager in the us and what he said was the secret of leading is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are still undecided. Another reason we avoid tough conversations is because we focus too much on ourselves. How we feel what might happen to us. We don't consider the person on the other side of the table from us and the and we worry about all sorts of things like what if this escalates into a conflict? What if they disagree with my assessment of the situation? What if I haven't set them up for success? Maybe it's my fault. The dread and fear is self reinforcing. See, when you're fearful of a conversation, you're going to handle it poorly and it's not going to go well. And what happens is you've just reinforced yourself that having tough conversations is really, really hard and that you don't like doing it. You avoid those situations like the plague, but both consciously and subconsciously, all the while rationalising why you don't need to have the conversation in the first place or fooling yourself that it's not a priority compared to your other busy work. When I use the expression busy work, I'm talking about all those things that you can easily fill your day with but aren't the highest value and take you away from the work that you really need to be doing, but you're avoiding or you're procrastinating on. So we find ways to trick ourselves through rationalisation and and we convince ourselves that we don't need to hold the tough conversations we should be holding. Let's see if any of these rationalisations ring a bell. I shouldn't criticise as I don't want to be negative or demotivate my people. Maybe I don't really have enough evidence or examples to be able to point to why I'm having this tough conversation. Maybe I'm asking too much of them. Am I too demanding as a manager? Maybe if I give them more time they'll improve. Or my favourite they should already know what they're doing. I shouldn't need to babysit them. All of these are ways of rationalizing to take us away from doing the work that we need to do, but making us feel as though we're justified in doing so. Why is it so important that we conquer this and get on top of it? Mastering the psychology of tough conversations will absolutely change your life. If you have the mindset to hold tough conversations when they're needed, you'll stop fearing, dreading and avoiding them. Your confidence as a leader is going to skyrocket and your people will begin to perform at their peak. It liberates you to do your job and not spend time on propping up weak performers. The results you'll be able to achieve With a winning team that is confident, driven and kicking goals will simply amaze you. So here's the money ball. I'm going to give you five frames to look through to help you conquer the psychological barriers to holding tough conversations. Number one, you have a duty of care to your people. Now put yourself in your team's position. Wouldn't you want your boss to have the courage and selflessness to help you develop to be your best? We whereas most bosses actually mean well, I found very few who are prepared to do the hard yards by having the tough conversations that would help me to improve my performance. Without strong leadership, your people will be at risk mentally, emotionally and even physically. When we think about things like personal safety in an industrial business, if you don't set the appropriate standards through challenging coaching and confronting, you allow poor behaviours to grow. And the standard you walk past is the standard you set. Having difficult conversations sets the necessary boundaries and expectations. And this avoids the dissonance that comes at the annual performance review, where you have to choose to either give the person an unexpected poor rating or paper over the top of the cracks with an inappropriately high rating that is more in line with your expectations. Given you haven't set expectations appropriately. The second frame is pretty simple. You can't get results from a subpar team. And as a leader, your job is to create value first and foremost. Having the tough conversations will pay itself back in spades over time, as the superior performance of your team will make your job easier, your team better and your life as a leader much happier. But if you don't face into difficult conversations, your team will never lift to be its best and your results will be relatively poor. And that's not their fault, it's yours. The third frame is that your people deserve the opportunity to improve. And if you care at all about your people, you need to take this to heart. Because you're short changing your people if you don't help them to improve. If you can see performance or behavioural issues, wouldn't you want to give someone the best chance possible to change? It could absolutely impact their career. But to do this, you've got to let go of the focus on yourself and think about them. This is what being an invested leader who elicits loyalty from their people actually looks like. The fourth frame everyone knows the strong and weak performers. Those rationalizations we spoke about earlier. Well, guess what? You're not fooling anyone. If you don't deal with poor performers directly, your people will see you as a weak leader. The good ones will Become resentful and the bad ones will take advantage of you. Once your leadership credibility is lost, you have no chance of building a high performing team. The fifth and final frame for getting your head around having the tough conversations if you do need to let someone go, you want to know that you've done everything possible to help them. So if worst comes to worst, you need to be confident that you did absolutely everything you could for them as a leader to help them to be successful. If you don't face into tough conversations with poor performers, then you can't possibly have done that adequately. You you'll never find it easy to let someone go, unless of course you're a psychopath. However, knowing that you did everything you could will help you to sleep at night. Let's face it, at the end of the day, every individual makes choices about how they behave and perform. As a leader, you just need to be confident you've done the best you could for them to support that choice. So just to recap, in this lesson we've covered the fact that tough conversations are 90% will and 10% skill. We briefly covered off on what your people need from you as a leader. We we spoke about the psychology of avoidance and why it's so important to you as a leader to conquer this. And I gave you five frames to help you overcome your avoidance of tough conversations. Alright guys, this was Martin Moore from youm CEO Mentor. If you want to learn more about practical leadership and organisational performance, head to our website yourceomentor.com and check out my weekly podcast no Bullshit Leadership. Also, if you'd like to pick up a free Download of the 5 frames to help you with tough conversations, just go to www.yourceomentor.com 100mba thanks again for joining me today. Back to Omar.

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What a great lesson by Martin Moore. What a critical topic that needed to be covered.

You.

If you love Martin Moore's leadership tips, check out his podcast, the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. And check out his website, yourceomentor.com a quick story to kind of wrap up today's lesson. Back when I was 25 years old, I was the head of department at the school. I was teaching, I was in education, and I was managing 33 teachers. So part of my job was having tough conversations with teachers that needed some advice and needed some course correction. Now, at first I was intimidated. I avoided these conversations. I just praised them to death, right? But then I started to realize that they were getting the wrong message. People that were doing the wrong things, showing up late, not doing their share of work with marking papers, they were getting away with a lot of things. And my best teachers, the teachers that did their job were starting to get disgruntled, like, hey, this is not fair. We're doing all the work and these people are slacking off. And it's all because I was avoiding those tough conversations. I was about to lose my best employees, my best teachers, because I was avoiding the conversations with the ones that needed, you know, some improvement. That was a wake up call. I realized, wow, that's a huge mistake I was making. So I took it in baby steps. I said to myself, I'm going to have one conversation a week with somebody that needs to have that kind of conversation, that tough conversation so they can improve, give them feedback and give them some praise as well. And within a few weeks, there was a huge improvement in the morale of the team as well as the fact that those people that were slacking off got the message, hey, we can't take advantage of the system or Omar or the other teammates. So learn from my mistakes in the past when it comes to leadership and don't delay and have those tough conversations to correct course, to give them just in time feedback to improve their performance. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat by hitting subscribe. You get our episodes on your device automatically and that way it's ready for you when you're ready to listen. We're on Spotify, Overcast, Stitcher Radio, Apple Podcast, Castbox, everything you can imagine. Just hit that subscribe button right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Leadership is tough and you never stop improving. There's always room to improve. There's always room to get better. And you just can't use the same techniques on every single person. People are different. People react to advice in different ways. So you're constantly having to sharpen your skills. So don't be so down on yourself. If you feel like, man, I'm not as good a leader as I should be, you're never going to be perfect. You just need to be on that pursuit of trying to improve all the time. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.