How to Turn Difficult Conversations Into Growth Opportunities
Have you been having rich, deep, grace-filled conversations with your team members?
You’ve heard a lot about firing people on this podcast lately. But sometimes you don’t need to terminate someone’s employment when you think you do.
So let’s turn the tide a little bit. Let’s talk about how to develop your team through conversations that possibly prevent the need for handing out a pink slip.
In this episode of Pleasurable Profits, you’ll learn how to turn difficult conversations into growth opportunities for you and your employees. I’ll also teach you about an embodiment tool that you can use to help you correct your “stinking thinking” about an employee and become a better leader.
2:02 - Why sometimes it’s on you and not the employee you think needs to be fired
5:29 - Things to keep in mind when you feel you’re at the point of no return with an employee
8:18 - Another obstacle that can get in the way of resolving the situation without a termination
11:47 - The perception triangle and how it helps with perspective and improving your conversation with your team
16:52 - The difference between a boss and a leader (and why it particularly helps specialized boutique businesses)
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In How to Turn Difficult Conversations Into Growth Opportunities
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Transcript for How to Turn Difficult Conversations Into Growth Opportunities
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
Hey, party people. It's Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. How are y'all doing? I'm doing amazing. Thank you for asking. Today I want to talk about a mindset, I don't really say it's a mindset shift because it's really not a mindset shift, it's really just the reality that a lot of leaders who I work with come to how do you approach difficult conversations with your team.
It's one of these things that you need to get a handle on before you go into any type of tense conversation or it's going to be a sensitive conversation with a team member. One of the things that I know is super important, especially when you're trying to coach your team to be better leaders, I talk a lot about how to fire people and those sorts of things, I want to turn the tide a little bit and talk about how to develop your team through conversations.
What's really interesting about this is sometimes it's not that an employee needs to be fired, sometimes it gets to the point where a person needs to be fired because we, as leaders, didn't take the time to have really rich, deep, grace-filled conversations with our team members. It's almost like you get so frustrated with a team member that you just lash out, I guess it's the best way to say it, you lash out at them.
Once you're at that point, I call it the point of no return, it's inevitable that the employee is going to quit and you're going to fire them. It reminds me of when I was a little girl and I would get punished by my parents. My mother was notorious for this. My mother would let us get away with things that clearly irritated her, clearly bothered her but she would let it build up. I don't know what that was about, I really don't.
It would be one of those things where we would be doing stuff as kids, just irritating, being bad, mischievous children, and my mother would let us get away with it a few times. But hell have no fury when she got tired. Hell have no fury when she decided that enough was enough. It was usually that the offense at the current moment that got the wrath wasn't even that big of a deal, but when she was punishing us, she would reference all the other sh*t we had done the last month that she let slide.
It was like it was building up the way that she felt had built up. I remember thinking as a kid how unfair that was because I'm like, “Man, I'm getting put on punishment for three months when it could have been just punishment for two weeks if you would have addressed it a month ago.”
As a little kid, I knew how unfair that felt for my mother to address stuff later, not behind the scenes, but just to address things later than addressing it in the moment and letting wrath store up is the best way to say it. Your team can feel the same way. You've let certain things go just because you didn't have the energetic capacity to deal with it or you were hoping that it would work itself out.
Oh, my gosh, if I could just give you the times when I was an emerging leader where I just thought, “Okay, people have common sense. Eventually, they're going to figure out they're wrong about this or they're going to figure out that the way they're doing things is not fruitful, is not productive, or is not working. They'll figure it out and they'll course correct themselves.”
Child, if that ain't a rookie leader mistake, I don't know what it is. We've got to get in the habit of being able to address people before our feelings get out of whack. There are a couple of things that I think we need to clear up or I need to shine some light on that might be going on in your mind when you feel like you're at the point of no return with an employee.
Oftentimes, as leaders, we only see or we best see how this situation with this employee is impacting us, and best case scenario, impacting us and our team. But a lot of times, we leave out a key component, which is how is this impacting the employee who you're frustrated with. We can come up in our minds with some things, some truths about situations that we're observing from observation only because we haven't had a dialogue with an employee.
One of those thinkings or stumbling blocks to progress, I should say, is that we could think something's true about a situation just because we believe it. It's like you've looked at a situation, you think you know the employee's motives, you think you know exactly what went on with a specific client file or a specific project when a deadline was missed, and you think you have the full truth when you may not have the entire story.
I always say when I'm going into situations like this, I have to fight that bias of believing that I have all the facts or everything is true in the situation just because I believe it. Another thing that gets in the way of progress from a thought process is that, again, we think we have all the information, but now it's not just because I believe it but because we believe it.
Who is we? We could be other people on the team who work closely with this employee, it could be a client who has a complaint or some type of dissatisfaction with this particular employee, and you and this other party or you and these other parties, so whether it's you and other team members, you and the client, you come up with something that you guys believe is true. There's a dominant belief within that group, and again, you haven't stopped to question “Is what we're believing true?”
Also, I think another thing, so point number three that could get in your way of being able to see all sides of a situation so that you can come in calm and relaxed, is that you might have a belief about an employee that you've never let them overcome. It's like the old attitude, you forgave but you didn't forget kind of a thing and now you have this dominant thought about how this employee is.
For example, I'll never forget I had a very sensitive front desk employee who worked for me. She always, in our one-on-one calls and meetings with each other, was whining about how unfair something was to her. I'm not just talking about at work. It could be something she didn't like how a client spoke to her or if I'm just asking her about how her weekend went, it would be like she didn't like how her boyfriend said something to her.
I came up with this narrative based off of conversations with her now, I didn't just pull this out the air and make it up, I'm like, “This girl is always a victim. She's super sensitive about what people say and she always takes those things to heart.” That became, unknowingly, my narrative about her so when she would bring concerns to me, it was always filtered through what I believed about her. It was like I've always believed that to be true about this person.
Even though I haven't even considered whether is she really that way in all situations, is this feeling that I have about her justified, it's that type of stinking thinking that's going on in your mind as a leader that could prohibit you from making inroads with this employee. Those are just three things that you can say yourself.
Am I having clouded thinking about this employee because I believe something about them just because I believe it? Am I having fuzzy thinking around this employee because I believe something about them because we believe it, we being the team or us and the clients, we've built this narrative about this employee? Or am I having fuzzy thinking because I've always believed this about a person based off of past interactions, whether that's the case or not now?
If you could just take a moment to sit with those things before you even think about approaching an employee about a situation, that'll give you space for empathy. It'll create more space in you for grace in the conversation because it's forcing you to evaluate your own beliefs and get rid of your own baggage so that you can come into the conversation with clear energy.
Another tool that I love to use with clients, and it's an embodiment tool, is called the perception triangle. What's super cool about this tool is it forces you as the leader to look at different perspectives—hence, the reason why it's called a perception triangle—different perspectives that could impact your conversation with your team.
I believe that there's wisdom in your body and sometimes your logical thinking, your head knowledge, can get out in the way of you doing what's best but your body never lies, your body keeps the score, your body is the guide, you know when sh*t feels right and when it doesn't.
What I try to do that's different than other business coaches is make sure that I don't just engage you in mental pursuits but then I help you strengthen your confidence in your body, strengthen your confidence in your intuition, and this is one of the tools that will help you do that.
I always start with basically making sure that you, as my client, are in a space where you can move around. If you've got a yoga room, a boom boom room, a space in your office where you can be alone but have some room to move around, we want to make sure the atmosphere is set.
Then I ask you to bring three pillows and set them up in the shape of a triangle. Each point on that triangle represents a different perspective. We always start, the first perspective is your perspective. I love starting with what you think because this is when we uncover some of this fuzzy thinking stuff that might be going on.
I always say I want you to be unfiltered. I want you to go ham. I want you to say the meanest things, the most insensitive things, the lack of grace things, all the things that you would be too embarrassed to say, I want to give you permission to be raw with your emotions. This is why it works really good, this tool, in a one-on-one container because it's just you and I. No one knows, we're not filming this. I'm not going to put it on the Internet later.
I feel like leaders don't have enough safe spaces to just be honest and we're left trying to process these emotions ourselves, or worse yet, we lash out and say things that we never would have said to the employee. But because we thought it, because we felt it, and because we never got it out, we just vomited out on employees and then you say something that could irreparably harm the relationship with that team member.
By having this space, this brave space, this courageous space for you just to get everything out, that in and of itself typically gives leaders this big exhale, this like, “Man, I feel better because I just got it all out.” Then we have you jump into the role of the employee and we do the same thing.
I say take on the persona of your employee, and we know our team, y'all, you know the things they say, you know what they're thinking, and a lot of times, we've just pushed it down because we've elevated our frustration over the facts of the situation. But by forcing yourself to be in the shoes of your employee and letting your employee have an unfiltered conversation about how they feel about your policy, how our project went, or whatever the situation is, speaking as them gives you the opportunity to engage with a different viewpoint than your own.
Then the final station on the triangle is the role of an observer. I love to say this is a person who is just listening to the two of you talk. They don't have a dog in this fight. They literally don't know you, don't know them, all they're engaging with, they have no context, they have no backstory. The only thing that this role is engaging with is what was said.
It's so powerful when you can just objectively look at what you said versus what the employee might say and what learnings were there when it's not emotionally charged. By looking at this perspective, by going through this perception triangle, by playing these different stations, what it allows you to do is expand your perspective.
The worst thing to do is to have a conversation with an employee when you're emotionally charged. It's like with a parent. The worst time to discipline a child is when you are angry. It’s the same with leadership. You've got to give yourself the gift of space and then that will turn into giving your employee the respect they deserve.
Everybody wants to be respected. That's the difference between being someone's boss and actually being a leader. Leaders have learned to pull people along with their vision where bosses learn to push people or try to run them over, push them down, push them over, and that is how you lose good people.
I really want you to be thinking about, “This is an opportunity for me to expand my leadership and possibly call my employee hired,” because here's the deal, employees are harder and harder to come by and when you work in these specialized boutique industries like the clients who I work with, it's even more difficult to get employees because they need a specialized skill set that's not readily available in the market.
Not everybody can do tattoos, not everyone can pole dance, not everybody understands marijuana strands and the different types of flowers. These are people who have specialized knowledge. Losing one of them, whether you fire them or they quit, can really put your business behind the eight ball.
We want to get in the habit of looking at these difficult conversations as opportunities to save our employees, to retain our employees, to grow our employees, and having tools like this perception triangle will give you the opportunity to do that because one of the things I left out was when you're in the observer role, a lot of times what comes up is you come up with a solution that maybe you hadn't considered before.
You come up with a win-win; one that meets the goals of you as the leader, goals of you as the company, and also helps the employee reach their goals and maintains respect, empathy, grace, and conversations. My loves, I hope this is helpful to you as you are thinking about why you might have some tension around having developmental conversations with employees.
I want to give you tools so that you can learn to respond as opposed to react where communication is just a regular cadence in your business. Because if you're going to find yourself, fire yourself, not find yourself, but I guess find yourself too, but really what I want to say is if you're going to fire yourself from the day-to-day of your business and find someone who could take your place or build a self-managing team, this is something you have to manage. You have to step away from things and get space so you can make great decisions.
If this was helpful to you, I really want you to pass this podcast on to a leader you know needs to hear this. If you hear this and there's something that really resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. It always warms my heart when someone just sends me a quick little note on Instagram that just basically says, “That podcast helped me, and here's how.” It encourages me to keep doing this work.
Thank you as always for your time, it's your most important commodity, and I don't take it for granted when you spend that time with me. Alright, my loves, until next week, have a great week. I've given you the play. Let's run it. I'll talk to you soon. Grace and peace.