Scripts for navigating difficult conversations

Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here, and so I want to continue to help you find opportunities to build your skills and to advance.

Alisa is discussing her approach to giving feedback by focusing on observable behaviors rather than judgments or personal opinions.

Observable facts. The idea that this is not a judgment. This is not... Sort of as less judgy as possible is also very helpful. It makes it neutral. It's observable facts and it's also sort of based on expectations.

When you keep taking action, action, action, win or lose, win or lose, you'll get where you need to go. And that turned out to be true. But in those moments, I was not thinking that was going to turn out to be true.

If you don't give them the opportunity to hear what you have to say, if you don't bring this up, then you're never going to have the opportunity to help them see something differently or help them improve or help you improve the relationship or whatever it is you're trying to do.

The advice "that" refers to constructive performance feedback a manager had been avoiding giving to an employee who was underperforming.

The next day she came in and she said, 'Thank you so much for telling me that. I wish someone had told me that 15 years ago. I think I could have had a different career.'

They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves, but what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results. This employee continuing to not really do a great job at their job, you don't want to push them because you don't want to upset them. You don't want to give them difficult feedback, so you're just going to keep hoping it works out. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company.

My three questions to end the meeting are, what did we decide here? Who needs to do what by when? And who else needs to know?

If you really go around the room at the end of a meeting or six people in the meeting, let's say, and you say to everybody, 'What did we decide here?' And they all write it down, you will get six different answers, even though we're in the same meeting.