In fact they are getting harderer and the more you keep ignoring them, the more you keep brushing them under the rug, the more you keep pushing them to the side, the harder it gets to have the conversation.
When everyone was on-site (that sounds better than on-premise) you could linger in the conference room and have that side chat to discuss the outcome of the meeting and next steps. But that rarely happens in the remote world, everyone is in a hurry to jump off the call and head to their next one.
For this reason, this is why the hard conversations have become that much harder to have because many leaders are having to focus on being clear, setting expectations, setting follow-ups and looking at the problem not from a project or product perspective but from a people perspective.
And let’s be honest, for many of us, that is a tough adjustment that doesn’t come easy.
Where it Starts?
You can no longer just “show-up” for a meeting, you need to come prepared and if you’re having that hard conversation, you need to come with talking points in hand and clarity in what you are trying to accomplish.
- What’s the problem we are trying to solve?
- Are we on the same page?
- What actions should we take?
- Where are we going from here?
- When should we come back to discuss progress?
There are other questions to be asked here as well, but you get the idea, all of them are hard and not easy to ask, but the outcome from asking them, could be what your team needs to start getting better.
