There is a conversation you have been meaning to have. You have known about it for a few weeks, you have come close to starting it twice, and both times something came up that made next month look like a better moment.
While you have been waiting, something has been building. Every week that passes adds to the case. The deadline that slipped goes in. The tone of that email goes in. A remark in Tuesday’s meeting that you would have let pass in March goes in now, because by August it fits the pattern.
So by the time you finally sit down, you are not going in to find out what is happening. You already know. He has stopped caring. She thinks the rules do not apply to her. They are managing upwards rather than doing the work. That conclusion did not arrive as an opinion, it accumulated, and after enough weeks it stops feeling like an interpretation at all.
They can tell that you have already decided
You may have prepared carefully, but the conclusion comes into the room with you and it shows up in small ways you are not tracking. Which examples spring to mind. How long you leave a silence before filling it. Whether their answer lands as information or as an excuse.
They pick it up almost immediately, and then they do the sensible thing. They stop explaining and start defending, because there is no advantage in telling you about the workload or the health problem or the thing they have been struggling with at home when the matter is evidently settled. You leave with your view confirmed by a conversation that was arranged to confirm it.
Research on how we account for other people’s behaviour found that the cause we assign decides what we feel and what we do next: read the conduct as within someone’s control and irritation follows, along with a reluctance to help, while reading it as outside their control produces patience and an offer of support (Weiner, 1985).
Whatever you concluded during the weeks you postponed the conversation is the thing they hear first, before any sentence you prepared.
Knowing you should think better of someone has never once been enough
You have read this advice before. Assume positive intent. Consider that there might be more going on. It is on the wall in the office and it changes nothing, which should tell us something about the nature of the problem.
The reason it fails is that this is not a thinking problem. Nobody needs convincing that other explanations exist in theory. What is missing is any willingness to entertain one, and willingness of that kind only appears when you care about the person concerned. That is why this behaviour lives inside Compassion, and why Compassion lives inside Warmth. There is no route to it that goes around caring.
So ask a different question. If this were somebody you genuinely cared about, would you have reached the same conclusion about them? Almost certainly not. For that person you would have assumed something was going on. You would have asked before deciding. You would have found the time.
That gap is worth sitting with, because it is not evidence that you are a hypocrite. It shows that your conclusion was never really built on the evidence. It was built on the relationship, and the relationship is the part you can do something about.
What makes it hard, and this deserves saying plainly, is that you are carrying something. Being let down in front of people who mattered. Having asked three times. Those feelings are fair, and they are also the reason the conclusion set hard. Being willing to move forward from here, rather than relitigating how you arrived, is the actual work of this behaviour.
None of which means softening the message. The difficult thing still needs saying, clearly, and a manager who cannot say it is not doing anyone a kindness. What changes is that you say it as someone who has not yet decided who they are dealing with, and that is an entirely different experience for the person listening.
THE EXECUTIVE PRESENCE MINDSET SHIFT
From: I should give this person the benefit of the doubt, because that is what a good manager does.
To: I care about this person, which is why I am willing to believe there is more here than I can see.
3 ways to practise this week
- Ask the friend question before you prepare anything. Take the person you are finding most difficult and ask how you would be thinking about this if you cared about them. Then ask what you would have been willing to do for that person that you have not been willing to do for this one.
- Name what you are still carrying. Write down the thing you have not let go of, in plain words rather than diplomatic ones, and then write what holding on to it has cost you over the past month. You cannot put down something you have not admitted you are holding.
- Open with a question you do not know the answer to. Something like “what is your read on how the last few months have gone” works, as long as you then stay quiet through the entire answer. A question asked to set up your own point is heard as a trap, and it is one.