A short advisory video from Fractional CFO GPT (June 21, 2024) urging viewers not to avoid difficult conversations about expectations and scope of work. The speaker warns that delaying these talks breeds resentment and animosity, gives examples (underperforming employees, late vendors, scope-creeping clients), and recommends open, honest, respectful conversations early to prevent escalation.
Second lesson that I learned this year was to not avoid difficult conversations. Don't put off the hard conversations, particularly those that center around expectations in scope of work. This is one of those things where it's awkward, it's uncomfortable, you don't really want to get into it, you're worried about how the other person might respond. And then what ends up happening is you start building up all of this. This resentment in this animosity around the other person or the vendor. So if you're sitting there right now and you know that there's an employee that isn't meeting expectations, if you know that there's a vendor that's kind of sending you their work a little bit too late, or if you've got the client that continues to push the boundaries on the scope of work, then I would encourage you to just have an open and honest but respectful conversation with them and just let them know where your head's at so that you don't get two, three, four, five, six months down the road and then end up blowing the whole thing out of the water.
