655: How to Help Difficult Conversations Go Better, with Sheila Heen

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
When our intentions are good, it’s hard to appreciate how we could have had such a negative impact on someone else. It’s equally challenging to navigate a tough conversation when someone else’s words or actions have wronged us even if that’s not what they intended. In this episode, how we can all shift just a bit to help our difficult conversations go better. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 655. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:38]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Oh, conversations are so critical to leaders and the work that we do and being able to help make the world a bit better place to help to develop people and move our organizations forward. And, of course, they also come with their challenges. Difficult conversations are the place where leaders land often in their work.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:16]:
And so important for us to be able to get better at having the most difficult conversations. So those go just a bit better, just a bit easier, and help us hopefully to get to a place where both parties are doing better and help us all move forward. I’m so glad today to welcome back a guest who’s absolutely an expert at helping all of us navigate difficult conversations. I’m so pleased to have Sheila Heen back on the show. She’s the Thaddeus R. Beal professor of practice at Harvard Law School, a deputy director for the Harvard Negotiation Project, and the founder of Triad Consulting Group. She often works with executive teams to engage conflict productively, repair working relationships, and implement change in complex organizations. She has published articles in the New York Times and Harvard Business Review and appeared on Oprah, CNBC’s Power Lunch, and NPR. She is coauthor along with Douglas Stone of the New York Times bestseller, Thanks for the Feedback.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:11]:
And also now, in its 3rd edition, coauthor with Douglas Stone and Bruce Patten of the iconic bestseller, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. Sheila, welcome back to the show.

Sheila Heen [00:02:23]:
I am so delighted to be here. Thanks for having me back.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:26]:
I picked up Difficult Conversations. I think- I know it was at least 20 years ago. Maybe it was right after it published. And I read it, and the message that I still remember all these years later and now coming back to is that intent does not equal impact. And how often we struggle with that in our difficult conversations, don’t we?

Sheila Heen [00:02:51]:
Oh my gosh. It is so central to the stories that we tell about the conflicts that we’re in with other people. Because as human beings, we care a lot, not only about our own point of view, but especially about how in the world could this other person disagree with us and why are they being so difficult? It’s like we need to understand other people in order to understand the conflict and in order to understand ourselves.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:19]:
Yeah. And there’s so many aspects and variables involved in navigating difficult conversations a bit better for everyone. But I thought today we’d look in in 0 in on one area, and it really does come down to intention and how we tend to leap to intention so often. And there’s a couple of key mistakes that you and Doug and Bruce point out in the book that we tend to make both either side, like, either the person who’s on the receiving end or perhaps the person who someone else is challenging a bit more with a difficult conversation. And one of the mistakes that we make is we assume that we know the other party’s intentions. You write, much of the first mistake can be traced to one basic error. We make an attribution about another person’s intentions based on the impact of their actions on us. We feel hurt.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:19]:
Therefore, they intended to hurt us. We feel slighted. Therefore, they meant to slight us. Our thinking is so automatic that we aren’t even aware that our interpretation is only an assumption or put another way, a guess. We are so taken in by our story that we can’t imagine how the other person could have intended anything else. Sometimes our guesses are right. Often, they aren’t. And I read that and I think, like, so true.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:43]:
I catch myself doing this all the time as much as I should know better. 20 years ago, I’ve even read this book and thought about it. And we just tend to assume the worst a lot of the times, don’t we?

Sheila Heen [00:04:53]:
I think we do. And particularly as a relationship phrase, right, as we over time are more and more hurt or frustrated by each other, will leap quicker. Right? We’ll start to assume the worst about the other person because we’re so hurt. Right? Or because we’re so frustrated. And I mean, that’s the rub, right? Other people’s intentions are invisible to us. And so we’re left to guess. And sometimes when people come to me to talk about, oh, you know, let me tell you about this conflict. I mean, I really could use some help with it.

Sheila Heen [00:05:31]:
What leads the story is, first of all, let me just tell you what kind of person this is. Because once they establish that, that explains everything else in the story. And even when I say, okay, so I guess we don’t really know their intentions, you know, and they’re like, oh, no. No. No. I can tell. Because I have lots of confirming evidence about their intentions. And and by the way, you could be right.

Sheila Heen [00:05:57]:
And often if we push ourselves to think, well, what’s the worst story I could tell about why they’re doing what they’re doing? And then I ask myself, is there a positive story I could tell that they’re trying to accomplish something positive? I can sometimes come up with that. And certainly, then if I ask the third question is, what would be a neutral story? Meaning, they’re not really being strategic or purposive. We would use the word the made up word purposive. They don’t have a particular purpose, they’re just preoccupied with other things. So they’re not paying attention to the fact that they left us off the meeting invite or they once again, interrupted us in a meeting. So often, we can come up with a neutral story that we’re just not as big a fixture on in their awareness as we think we should be.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:44]:
Yeah. And so often, we just feel like the world should revolve around us, and we think every action is a commentary on us, good or bad. And sometimes it is. Right? But more often than not, it’s we have made up a story in our minds that often shines us in a positive light and the other person not so much. And then it becomes self fulfilling too. All of a sudden, we start telling ourselves the stories, then we change our actions, and it’s just a it’s a downward spiral.

Sheila Heen [00:07:11]:
I think that that’s right. And in addition to that, even if you’re right about their intentions, the fastest way to make a conversation even more difficult is to tell someone else that you know why they’re doing what they’re doing. So if you assert that you know what their intentions, motivations or character is, they’re going to be quick to defend themselves. And so it’s actually not helping. So we should just name the reality, which is look, I don’t know whether you were aware of this, or even my guess is you probably didn’t intend it. And I wanna describe a little bit the impact it had on me or the impact I worry that it had on the team or the project, because it’s really the impact that is the topic that is most important to raise. It’s the impact that’s motivating you to feel like there’s a conversation to be had. And so in a lot of ways, when we get sucked into asserting other people’s intentions, that’s what they’re gonna jump to talk about.

Sheila Heen [00:08:09]:
And it’s not the real topic that is most important to us. It’s a distraction. So you can make them more open to hearing what you have to say by just acknowledging that you don’t know and maybe they didn’t mean it at all. And here’s what I want to raise with you because that’s what we’re trying to actually address and understand and hopefully improve.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:29]:
Which leads a bit to the second mistake around intentions, and you say “it’s assuming good intentions erase bad impact.” And the the warning in the book is protesting are good intentions as costly. And you point out that it’s often challenging because we change the topic of the conversation when we do that. How does it change the topic?

Sheila Heen [00:08:59]:
Yeah. So you’re raising that, of course, when we reverse the roles. And we’ve done something that has frustrated or upset someone else. Oh, we are so quick to explain that we had the best of intentions because…

Sheila Heen [00:09:14]:
You know, talking about the world revolving around us, we are the heroes in our own stories. Our experience of the world is that it revolves around us because we don’t know what anybody else is doing. We’re preoccupied with the world that we’re in. So I think that what’s funny is that when someone else is raising, oh, you said this thing in the meeting that I really felt put me on the spot or or undermined what I was saying. Where our brain goes is straight to, oh, no. No. What I’m aware of were the reasons why I did that. I wasn’t trying to put you on the spot at all.

Sheila Heen [00:09:47]:
I was actually trying to underline the importance of the work that you were doing. And now that I have explained my good intentions for that behavior, or that joke that I told that really wasn’t, I wasn’t intending to be offensive. I was just trying to put everyone at ease. Well, now that I’ve explained my good intentions, it should erase or sanitize the bad impact. Like now you don’t have to be upset anymore. And that’s just not the way the person on the receiving end experiences it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:15]:
Yeah. And you’ve changed the topic of the conversation to be about what I intended, what I meant, and you’ve missed the point. Right? The point of the conversation is that it had this impact on this person regardless of the intent. And I really appreciate one of the examples you mentioned in the book is employees at an organization who feel like senior leadership is not very representative of diversity, in their organization. And the tendency for a lot of senior leaders when they hear a complaint like that is to say, oh, well, we have good intentions, and often, they do have good intentions. Right? But it doesn’t change the fact that there’s not diversity in senior leadership. Right? The impact is the same regardless of the intention. Yes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:06]:
Intention matters, but the impact’s still there, and that’s really the point.

Sheila Heen [00:11:10]:
Right. That’s the point that the person is trying to raise, which is the impact. And so that was really well described that these two things, intention and impact, often get conflated when actually they are 2 different topics. We can talk about why we did what we did and what efforts we’ve made to recruit and promote inclusion, etcetera. And or we can talk about a separate topic, which is where do we stand and what is the actual impact of what we’ve been trying to do. And I think that’s the thing that, really helped me the most was just crystallizing in my own head that people with good intentions, well intended people have bad impacts all the time. And we have to talk about both sides of that, but they actually need to be held as separate and equally important. And we need to talk about them so that we’re each talking about the same thing rather than jumping back and forth between them and wrestling over which one is more important.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:10]:
Yeah. And there’s a part of the invitation I’m hearing here is to be whether the other party is or not really conscious in yourself of what are we talking about? Are we having a conversation right now about impact? Are we having a conversation about intention and being more mindful of that at least on our side? Because if you don’t and you’re changing the topic, people feel really dismissed and unheard.

Sheila Heen [00:12:35]:
Totally dismissed and unheard. And I think that move to explain our efforts and good intentions, that move itself is well intended. And yet the impact of it is that it makes the person who raised something important to them feel completely ignored and dismissed. Because now we’re no longer talking about the concern that you raised, we’re talking about why I’m a good person still or why leadership is really doing a good job, which is not what they wanted this conversation to be about. And so there’s been a little bit of a tip towards, look, intentions don’t matter at all. The point is the impact, and that’s what we need to be talking about. And I think that comes from the frustration of people feeling like they’re raising things in organizations and not being heard. I’ll make a case that I think that intentions do still matter.

Sheila Heen [00:13:27]:
They certainly matter to the people who want to explain themselves, which is okay. You can share your intentions as long as you’re also taking full responsibility for the impact and not using your own intentions to knock the topic of the impact off the table in a frustrating way, the way that we’re just describing. But the other reason that intentions are at some stage important to talk about is that it helps me understand what kind of problem we have. In other words, if you interrupted in the meeting because you wanted everybody to have good information or because you didn’t know that saying that at that point would be dismissive or had implications because of the history here. If you didn’t know, that’s just a different problem than if you knew, but actually did want to shut someone down. Right? And so it just understanding someone else’s intentions, which you can never prove their intentions. You have to decide whether they’re in touch with their own intentions. And it at least helps me understand which kind of problem do we have and that might guide us to, alright, so what do we wanna do next?

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:34]:
Yeah. And the good news is we can do better. I I appreciate the definition at the very beginning of the book of difficult what is a difficult conversation? And it’s a conversation we don’t wanna have. Right?

Sheila Heen [00:14:49]:
Yes. Yes. And it’s keeping us up at night. Yes. And we feel stuck.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:53]:
Totally. Which we all have, like, especially folks in leadership roles. I was just talking with one of our members yesterday. She’s like, I know I need to have this conversation. I’m going to have it. But, boy, I am not looking forward to it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:05]:
And she told me about it, and I was like, oh. And I felt bad for it because it’s gonna be a hard conversation. It’s not gonna be fun. And I think what were what I’m hearing from from you in the book and all your work is difficult conversations are still going to be hard. It’s not like we’re gonna utilize a different tactic and a skill and say the right thing and somehow it’s gonna make it easy. But if we do a bit better on some of these things, it’s more likely to go better for both parties, and we’re more likely to a place where we have some shared understanding and we have a more productive conversation, but it’s still hard. And and that’s where I think one of the antidotes, if I can use that word, to the second mistake we were talking about of the tendency we have to assume good intentions erase bad impact is to listen for feelings first. And, yes, be conscious of our intentions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:05]:
But if we’re listening for feelings that are coming from the other person, that gets us in a place where we’re a little bit more focused on the impact.

Sheila Heen [00:16:14]:
Yeah. I think that that’s right. And I think what’s easy to forget when we’re facing a difficult conversation is that if we’re going to talk about what matters most, if we’re going to talk about the real issues going on between us, then probably we’ve got at least a couple of layers of issues going on. So we’ve got at least 2 problems. 1 is a surface problem, like we have to decide what’s a realistic deadline for this project, which we disagree about. But often if it’s by the time it becomes a difficult conversation, you’ve got a second problem that’s sitting deeper than that under the surface, which is how we each feel treated by the other. And that involves both feelings and identity issues. Am I competent? Am I respected? Am I appreciated? Am I trusted? Did I mess this up? And that has everything to do with feelings.

Sheila Heen [00:17:07]:
And so sometimes we wanna stick to business as leaders and be task oriented and professional and leave the messy feelings part out of it. And we might solve the deadline question. But that frustration at feeling dismissed or unheard in terms of how we feel treated is just gonna manifest in some other way next week. So if we’re not talking about the deeper feelings issues, we’re also not getting at the real underlying problems in the relationship that could be explored and improved and make all of our conversations a little bit easier.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:42]:
Yeah. Indeed. You know, I was thinking about that situation where, as you said earlier, like, we tend to think about ourselves in a positive light. We have good intentions. Right? And when it’s us that have said something or done something that maybe the impact hasn’t landed the way we want, the tendency to jump in quickly and to explain ourselves. And you write, “they may not even be aware that they’re suggesting bad intentions on your part. Instead of saying, you didn’t include me, they say, you excluded me. Just the verb they choose reveals an assumption that it was deliberate.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:14]:
They may not notice their own assumption but we surely do. Don’t take the bait. Notice the assumption, set it aside, and first work to hear the hurt or anger and the importance of their topic.” I think about that paragraph, and I think that it’s so natural for us when we hear someone else make an assumption about our intentions that we wanna jump in and defend ourselves immediately. And the thing we can do, I’m hearing that’s helpful is, yes, we may get to that. But first, to stop and be curious and to listen for what they’re feeling and how this landed with them. If we can do a little bit of that at the start, the conversation often goes better.

Sheila Heen [00:19:00]:
That’s right. And in the feedback, the thanks for the feedback book, we talk about the phenomenon of switch tracking, which is where your the train is going along a track and then the track diverges. And what’s happening is one person is talking about one topic. I’m talking about my good intentions and how I will I did not mean to exclude you. Let me just correct that right away. While the other person is still on their own track of what they’re trying to raise is the most important topic, which is the impact. The other thing that I think it might be useful just to name is the extent to which in any conversation, it’s almost like we’re in a little play. And the other person in raising something with us, something we’ve done that has had a bad impact or that they’re concerned about in the business, When they describe the bad impact that we had and especially if they imply that we had bad intentions, we’re basically being cast as the villain in this play.

Sheila Heen [00:19:56]:
And so they’re basically saying, hi, let’s have a conversation in this little conversational play. I am the hero who is raising an important issue, or I am the victim who you victimized. But either way, you are the villain. Would you like to have that conversation? And we’re like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, you have miscast me. Let me explain how I am actually the hero here. And you are either not victimized or it’s your own fault and you’re the villain by implication because those are the 3 roles available to us. Yeah. And it’s almost like we can’t wait to recast ourselves.

Sheila Heen [00:20:30]:
When in fact, as you point out, part of having difficult conversations is having the patience to note something and to be able to stick with what’s important to them and to understand their perspective, even as we disagree with it or we are having reactions to it, but to really work to stay curious and to hear it, knowing that maybe it doesn’t come up in act 1, but sometime in act 2, we’ll have a chance to say, by the way, it’s real I’m really glad you raised this. I guess it was much more upsetting than I thought it was. And so I’m so glad that you came to talk to me about it. This is a bigger problem than I understood. But since you’re customer facing, this is really helpful for me to know. And by the way, let me say, I I actually didn’t exclude you on purpose. I’m sort of horrified by the fact that you were excluded. So I just wanted to clarify that so that you know that it’s not that I was trying to do that.

Sheila Heen [00:21:22]:
And it becomes kind of a footnote that they’re more open to hearing because they first feel heard by you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:29]:
I love the way you just said that. And I think, like, how hard it is to get in that space if you’ve not done a lot of that before. When you are working with people, Sheila, and coaching leaders on this, what do you find is helpful just to for people to have a little bit of that pause, just to take that moment to, like, be a little more curious to be able to like you said, like, yes, the point still may come up about the intention, but it’s act 2 or act 3. Do you find something that works?

Sheila Heen [00:21:57]:
Yeah. The people who are best at this who tend to be the best leaders, one of the characteristics is that they’re quite good listeners. I think that part of it is a shift in stance from assuming that a conversation is about figuring out who’s right, and I better get my points in early because we’re in an advocacy system and who whoever talks more or louder is the one who’s quote unquote, controlling the conversation, and is likely to quote unquote, win the conversation. And that’s not their stance, although it’s a natural feeling, especially if you have grown up with siblings, right? Yeah. Competition feeling and we learn to debate and school and etcetera. But those leaders have made a shift in their head, where it’s not about explaining why I’m right. It’s about first I need to understand why we see it differently. Or first I need to understand what can you see that I can’t see? Because as a leader, I need to understand that.

Sheila Heen [00:22:57]:
I may or may not agree with it at the end of the Dave, and I’ll share with you sort of where I come out on it or or my perspective and information I have that you often don’t have access to. But there’s time for that. We’ll get there so I don’t need to assert it right away. I can instead stay in a place of curiosity because I actually shouldn’t know what I think at the end of the day until I this person’s trying to give me more information that I need to then metabolize and then figure out what to integrate into my view. And my view may or may not change. That’s okay. But we have to have the conversation before I know whether my view changes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:40]:
Yeah. Oh, so well said. You know, as you were saying that I was thinking about the other side of this too, we talked about that first mistake that when someone has wronged us, assuming we know the other party’s intentions. And there there are some ways to do better with that too when it’s us feeling like we’re wronged. And I was thinking about a situation that I was thinking, like, when did this happen to me? And, this is years ago now, Sheila, which is helpful because I can look at it much more objectively than I would have at the time. But I worked for Dale Carnegie for many, many years. And at one point, our office moved locations, and everyone was getting assigned new offices and in the new location. And the culture of our office, we were a sales organization.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:34]:
So a lot of us were charged with sales and numbers and everything around the culture of the office office was built around. Your title, your piss you know, office, all of that was built around kind of, like, how much money you brought in for the business, which is not good or bad. It’s just what what it was. And so we all got to make requests for what offices we wanted at this new facility, and we got the tour and the whole bed. And and and there was, like, this perfect office. I was, like, oh, I want this one. And at the time, I was the top person, and so it didn’t even occur to me that I wouldn’t have gotten that office. And then I found out later on, I didn’t get the office, and someone else got it.

Sheila Heen [00:25:17]:
That’s outrageous. I just wanna say on your side.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:22]:
I’m sort of embarrassed even bringing this up because of all the things I care about in the world today, this is so like, if it was happening today, wouldn’t you’ve even given it a second thought. But at the time, and when we get an organization where, like, hierarchy and numbers and position and title become really important as far as what that signifies. I was so angry. I was so I remember being more upset about that than I think I was ever about any professional situation that happened. And it seems so silly, but I attributed the intent of all the other parties to I’m not- and comes back to my identity. I’m not valued anymore. No one cares about my contributions. All those things.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:04]:
And I look back now, and I realized, like, none of that was true. Actually, it had nothing to do with me me at at the end. And I ended up having a conversation with my boss about it at the time because I was really mad. And it totally took him off guard. And so I was thinking it might be fun to look at through that through the lens of, like, because you invite us to ask ourselves 3 questions. What are 3 questions that if we spend a little bit of time with can actually help us to understand a little bit more and to separate some of the intent and and impact. And it might be maybe that’s useful to do with this situation.

Sheila Heen [00:26:39]:
Did you learn why they had made the office assignments that they had?

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:45]:
Yeah. What happened is one of my colleagues was just really, really passionate about wanting a certain office, and no one else said anything. And so our boss at the time was, like, okay. Whatever.

Sheila Heen [00:27:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Who cares?

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:02]:
Yeah.

Sheila Heen [00:27:03]:
So the intent was just to make this person happy, and it sounds like it wasn’t visible to him, but it would make anybody else unhappy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:12]:
Well and why would it have been? You know, I think about the first question that you invite us to ask is what did the other person actually say or do? And in this case, nothing.

Sheila Heen [00:27:23]:
Well, you’re also raising that you had unintentionally contributed to the outcome by not sharing how strongly you felt about it. It sounds like.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:37]:
Is that true? Oh, for sure. And one, it didn’t occur to me that it would ever be an issue. But secondly is I didn’t wanna admit that it mattered to me. Like, now I can see that all these years later. Like, I didn’t wanna admit or say to anyone that it really mattered to me, And I had a colleague who would also really matter to and was much more vocal about it. But it’s funny now looking back and thinking about this question, what did the other person say or do? It wasn’t about me at all. There wasn’t even a thought about me in the process, and yet the impact was like, it makes me feel angry just thinking about it. It’s been, like, 15 years.

Sheila Heen [00:28:12]:
Oh, my goodness. Oh, I so relate to that. I so relate to that. Well, and the other thing that I am really appreciating about this example is that your boss also, like the status that came with the office or whatever meaning, right it had for you, was just not on his radar screen at all. It wasn’t the meaning he made out of it. Yeah. And so I think that the question of what do we each care about and what meaning do we make out of particular decisions and outcomes are so different that without a conversation, you would have just gone on to continue to resent it and feel under underappreciated, and he would be completely clueless as to why you were suddenly checked out.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:53]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And which goes to the second question, what’s the impact on me? So no one would have even known and but it would had a huge impact on me of just my thoughts and feelings about it. And then I think about the third question. Based on this impact, what assumption am I making about what the other person intended? And I made all kinds of assumptions. I was like, what they were thinking, why they excluded me, the whole thing. And it turned out none of that was true.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:19]:
And it just was one of those things like, yeah, whatever. No one really ever even thought about it as a thing.

Sheila Heen [00:29:26]:
And so once you realize that there was no intent behind it, did it change your feelings? Did it change the impact on you?

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. It still hurt.

Sheila Heen [00:29:37]:
Yes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:29:38]:
I remember have I remember exactly where I was. I ended up having a phone conversation with my boss because we couldn’t be in the same location for whatever reason. And I remember exactly where I was. I remember having the phone conversation, and he was so gracious looking back. Oh my gosh. Like, this is he’s like, I am so sorry. He’s like, I am gonna feel so bad every time I look at you in that office.

Sheila Heen [00:29:58]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:00]:
I don’t know if he did or not, but it was just funny. Like, we ended up sort of laughing about it at the end, and it still hurt. But just having ended up opening up the conversation and realizing that there actually wasn’t any there wasn’t any intent behind it at all, It changed then going forward, and I was able to move past it much quicker. And, you know, a couple weeks later, it was, like, whatever. It wasn’t a thing anymore.

Sheila Heen [00:30:23]:
Well, so two things about the way that your boss handled it. 1 is it sounds like your boss did such a great job of really hearing and explicitly appreciating the impact on you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:34]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Sheila Heen [00:30:35]:
Like your boss didn’t jump to be like, oh, well, you should have just told me so it wasn’t intentional. Your boss really heard, Oh, golly, I had no idea. And now I feel terrible. And that empathy and appreciation for the impact on you is part of what helped you turn the corner a little bit to be able to laugh about it and to heal it a little bit.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:57]:
Right.

Sheila Heen [00:30:58]:
And the other part that I think is so interesting is that one of the reasons that we assume once I explained my good intentions, then that’ll erase the impact like you won’t feel bad anymore, Is that it is true that if we think that the other person is intentionally doing something to us, we feel worse about it. Right? Are you sending me a message about how I’m valued here? Or was it just that you didn’t know that I cared about the office? You know, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we automatically assume that they’re just a jerk. But if it’s an ambulance, we might give it a little bit more grace, because we assume, oh, there’s a reason that they need to get where they’re going. Right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:38]:
Right.

Sheila Heen [00:31:39]:
And we assume better intentions. And so other people’s intentions do actually change the impact on us to some extent. And that’s actually important as well when it comes to remembering that you don’t know. Sometimes people will say just everybody should assume good intentions. And I think that’s not bad advice, but it doesn’t resonate when you’re really frustrated and feel like, yeah, but come on, not this person. I think instead the more fundamental assumption is assume you just don’t know. And also that what you’re trying to raise is the impact, which is a different topic. And that’s what’s important to you to put on the table.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:16]:
Yeah. That’s where these three questions like, if I had thought through the lens at the time of these of what did they say or do, what was the impact on me, and then based on the impact, what’s the assumption I’m making about them? It it still would Dave heard. It still would but it would have gotten me there much faster, and I think that it would have ultimately made that conversation go easier in that situation at the time. And so I think that’s it’s a great starting point, and I I really appreciate what you said of, like, it’s nice to think, okay, everyone always intends well and, yes, a lot of time people do. But it does sometimes oversimplify it. But, actually, kind of walking through some of those points, I think, helps us to, like, okay. If I can speak to the impact and then inquire about the other person’s intentions, like, that’s a really good place to land.

Sheila Heen [00:33:01]:
Yeah. And I think that also that move is a really powerful move. It is an easier move to make earlier in a relationship. In relationships that have a lot of history, it gets harder. People are like, yeah, but with my neighbor.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:19]:
Yeah.

Sheila Heen [00:33:19]:
Forget it because there’s a lot of history here. And so I do think that it’s a deliberate choice. And it’s a courageous choice to extend an invitation to a different kind of conversation where you’re actually receptive to hearing what’s going on, and you’re requesting that they’d be receptive to hearing the impact on you as well.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:40]:
Sheila Heen is coauthor of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most now in the 3rd edition. Sheila, thank you so much to you and your colleagues for your work.

Sheila Heen [00:33:50]:
Thank you for your work, and thank you for also the work that you’re doing, helping leaders have conversations with each other and with experts and with themselves about how we’re navigating that and what we’re learning along the way.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:03]:
Oh, it’s a pleasure and a joy. Thank you. If this conversation was helpful to you, a few related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is the previous time Sheila was on the show way back on episode 143, how to get way better at accepting feedback. We featured her wisdom from her book. Thanks for the feedback. It is a conversation we don’t have enough of in the circles of leadership development because oftentimes, we’re talking about how to give feedback, maybe how to solicit feedback. But we don’t often have a conversation about once you’ve heard feedback, what do you do with it? That episode is a deep dive into how do you actually process what you’ve heard, what’s useful, what’s not, what are the things you do with it once you’ve heard it? Episode 143.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:55]:
A lot more on that from Sheila. I think a great compliment to this conversation. Also, a great compliment is episode 594. How to begin difficult conversations about Dave? Kwame Christian was my guest on that episode. We talked about his book on handling difficult situations, especially related to Dave. And Kwame and I talked about how do you start those conversations. Now really helpful to you if you’re specifically thinking about starting a conversation about race that needs to be addressed in your organization. That’s a great model for it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:27]:
But even more broadly, we talked about the key principles for starting any difficult conversation. And oftentimes, I find at least the hardest part is the getting started. And Kwame and I in that conversation really went into detail on what is the first 15 to 30 seconds of a difficult conversation sound like? How do you actually get it started? Whether it’s about race or something else that’s challenging to discuss, that is a really useful starting point. Episode 594 for that. And then finally, of course, I’d recommend also the work of Amy Gallo on episode 595. How to deal with passive aggressive people. Amy’s book called Getting Along super helpful to parse out so many difficult situations that many of us run into in working with people that are we may label as difficult but in reality are just often very different from how we approach things. In episode 595, we look specifically at those who are more passive aggressive and show up that way in the workplace.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:29]:
How do you handle those situations? The episode will help you on that. But more broadly, Amy’s book getting along so helpful on so many of these situations. So if you find yourself getting into difficult conversations of a certain type or with a certain demographic of person, I think that it’s a wonderful starting point for you. Episode 595 again for that. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. If you haven’t set up your free membership yet, I’m inviting you to do so at coachingforleaders.com. It’s gonna give you access to the entire library of episodes since 2011, searchable by topic and many other benefits inside of the free membership. One of those benefits, in fact, someone just emailed me today and said, I’ve been getting the weekly update on email because one of my colleagues has been sending it along.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:18]:
How do I get that weekly update from you on email? You can actually just set up your free membership. You’ll start getting the weekly update each week. That is a great place to be able to dive in further on the episode because all the links, the resources, each week’s episode are there. In addition, I am constantly finding articles, resources, other podcast episodes, Ted Talks, videos, things that I think will be helpful to you in your leadership development. I’m including those each week in the weekly guide. It’s one message with a concise place to you for you to continue to dive in on some more resources. All of that’s included inside the free membership. And if you’ve already been receiving that for a bit, you may wanna learn about Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:03]:
One of the benefits of Coaching for Leaders Plus is each month, we have a recording come out of our monthly expert chats. Our expert chats are where a group of our academy and pro members sit down with a past expert who’s been here on the podcast, and they ask them questions directly. And I love those events because it’s not me asking the questions. It’s actually our members asking questions directly of the guest experts. And I’m thinking about that today because Kwame Christian and Amy Gallo are both past guests in our expert chats. Those recordings are included inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus All of the years now of those recordings, in addition, you also receive the new recording each month every time we host another expert chat event. It’s one of the key benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. If you’d like to find out more and get full access, just go over to coachingforleaders.plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:55]:
All the details are there. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. I will be back next Monday for a very next conversation on leadership. Have a great day, and see you next week.