The impact of avoiding
the difficult conversation (in the workplace).
Our mission at Rising Vibe is to support and challenge leadership to have the conversations that matter to enable a high-performance culture.
Why is this our mission? Because in our experience the biggest, most detrimental impact on (working) relationships and culture is avoiding the ‘difficult’ conversations. And if leaders aren’t role modeling this in your organisation, chances are no one else will be.
When I was younger, I had to break up with my boyfriend(s) face to face or on the telephone, otherwise they would have turned up on my doorstep. If I was going to be late for anything I had to ring ahead, or have a verbal interaction about my lateness once I arrived. There was no WhatsApp, no email available on my iPhone, no messenger, no texting. I pretty much had no choice but to have the conversation. It was unavoidable. It was unpleasant. But because I had to do it (and I broke up with quite a lot of boyfriends and was late quite a lot of the time!) the conversations became ‘easier’, albeit still very uncomfortable in the moment.
Nowadays there are too many excuses available to avoid the conversation, so they don’t get easier. Not enough time, working remotely (although you didn’t have the conversation before, did you?), don’t know them well enough, haven’t seen them recently, it’s not that serious/bad/detrimental, they are busy and I don’t want to bother them.
The list goes on and on and until we are open about our discomfort and continue to make excuses instead, the majority of us won’t know where we stand in our workplace.
Knowing where we stand is a basic human need that brings all of us a sense of safety. Safety breeds high performance; innovation, creativity, change, challenge.
Until we start having the conversations that matter, we will continue to talk about someone behind their back when they did something in a meeting that we didn’t appreciate, we will continue to have poor performance in our team (or on a project) because no one is being honest about someone or something being off track and we will continue to create a culture where high performance is therefore stifled.
Performance management, the ED&I agenda and mental health and wellbeing are the 3 areas of conversation avoided the most. At Rising Vibe we use simple and practical frameworks (including the Rising Vibrational Scale) to support having these conversations that matter within your organisation.
Lou Banks
Founder & CEO Rising Vibe Ltd
For more information visit
www.rising-vibe.com or come and visit us on Stand C150.
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