The last few days I’ve had to have some relatively difficult conversations. Of course, there are way more difficult pieces of news to deliver, but not in my universe. One was telling a recruiter that we no longer wanted to work with them. The other was performing an end of year review for an employee who reports into me, giving feedback which although overall was positive, had a few really constructive elements that I felt needed to be discussed. In my mind:

• The recruiter would be shocked at hearing the news, get annoyed, and start saying ‘how could you do this to me – you have to pay us a fee’, to which I wouldn’t know how to respond because I hadn’t really had oversight of any potential fee.
• The employee would be prickly, get annoyed, and start saying ‘I don’t agree, you’re wrong’. It could escalate considerably into an angry situation, with long-term ramifications. There is history of the employee not seeming to mind having antagonistic conversations. I was warned by my boss to be very careful with my wording beforehand on the constructive parts. They might want to quit afterwards if it went badly.

Both of the conversations played on my mind beforehand. I foresaw that they both had the potential of escalating into a challenging back and forth with raised emotions, with the overall theme of them perceiving that I was persecuting them. They were popping up in my meditation practice, and given I spent a lot of last weekend listening to Huberman and Conti discuss the unconscious mind (highly recommended), I realise that in some sense it’s beyond my control that they do keep popping up while they are unresolved.

Reflections

Look, both of them didn’t turn out badly. I would stretch to even say they turned out well given the content. Or to re-phrase, they went well enough that all the anxiety beforehand seems faintly ridiculous. The recruiter said ‘yeah I completely understand, no bad blood from this at all.’ and the employee, despite what must have been quite difficult hearing, said ‘thanks, I’ve never heard this feedback before so it’s good to hear.’ Also, the employee formed a view over the theme of the constructive elements of the feedback that I wanted them to take away from the meeting.

We’re a few days after, and yet I still I think about it, more so the employee meeting. Did I word it right? Do they now harbour bad feelings inside that have the potential to geyser up, hiding those feelings with fake smiles? Are there long-term impacts?

I can rationalise, of course, to try to make it easier for myself. I’m simply doing my part. I’m being direct and staying the course to truth as much as possible, which in the end is good for them. I’m being upfront and transparent, which is better for everyone. 

I do think I lived that, but no matter how much I rationalise, it’s still not easy. Simply put, telling someone something that they don’t want to hear, something that could be seen as an attack, is not easy. Knowing there’s a potential, however small, that one word said in a certain way could mean offense and escalation, is not easy. Some people don’t seem to mind as much, but I do. It maybe gets easier with experience, but surely the anticipation can never feel good?

Future situations

Tips for future self in these situations:

1. Certainty – The more certain you are of what you have to say, the easier it is. I should have made it clearer to myself, had conversations earlier with my boss to clarify things like the status with the recruiter. I would have reduced a lot of guesswork and overthinking.
2. Specificity – You related some feedback that wasn’t specific, which left it potentially hanging over the person. You should have gone back to the feedback providers where it wasn’t clear. This also goes to explaining ‘why’ this is the feedback, uses ‘because’.
3. Timeliness – Get it over with as soon as possible. You could have spoken to the recruiter earlier than you did, but you were putting it off. Funnily enough, the delay in getting peoples’ feedback for the employee meant that you had 3 days of actually knowing the feedback. Getting the feedback any earlier would have meant more time anyway playing with it in mind. 
4. Plan – Rehearse how you’re going to say it. You only semi-thought through how you would word the review, and could have spent more constructive time bullet pointing some notes. Winging it may work but you leave yourself open to risk. 

Further conversations

I have two further potentially difficult conversations to have in the immediate future. One is particularly difficult to stomach because I have to confess to a mistake I made. I have been toying with whether to own up to it or to hide it, because it’s an immaterial mistake in one sense, but I don’t know the full ramifications, so it may be very material in another sense. It is going to piss off my boss and will make me seem error-prone, which I suppose in a sense is the truth given I made the error! I can rationalise that there is this and that mitigating factor as to why I made the error, but at the end of the day I made the error and that’s what happened. Argh!

EDIT: I did own up, and it was literally fine. My boss didn’t care.

Does anyone else feel like they go through these rollercoasters? Let me know.