Difficult Conversations

Pete Mockaitis
Justin, welcome!

Justin Hale
Thanks, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting about crucial accountability. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and accountability from all your research?

Justin Hale
What was actually surprising is how much we haven’t changed. We haven’t learned our lesson. The first version of this book was published in 2005. It had another revision around 2014. And now as my partner Joseph and I began researching and rethinking this revision, and to your point, sort of getting a sense of what the world is like today, there are some places where we’ve improved in terms of our frequency of speaking up around accountability issues and being honest and candid.

You’ll see some of that a little bit in healthcare and some areas, but we’re alarmingly still the same in terms of, you know, allowing situations to grow and build and to choose silence over honesty when we should be holding people accountable to, you know, mistakes, things like that.

So it is sort of scary to think about the fact that we’ve allowed certain disasters or other things that have happened in our world as a result of silence, and yet, those kinds of things continue to happen. So that was actually one big alarming discovery we had as we dove into this new revision.

Pete Mockaitis
So accountability, speaking up, how are we thinking about these things, definitionally?

Justin Hale
Yeah, so when you think about crucial accountability, it’s really about one key moment, which is those moments where there’s a gap between what you expect someone will do or deliver or how they’ll perform between that and how they’re actually performing, what they’re actually delivering, what they’re actually bringing to the table.

It’s that gap between expectations and actual performance that brings about this really high-stakes moment, this high-stakes conversation that’s incredibly difficult and, sadly, mostly avoided.

And so when we talk about these gap moments, what we’re really asking is, “How do you handle them in your family, in your team, in your community, in your society? What’s the norm? Is it to step up to these gaps and to address them candidly and respectfully? Or is it to let them simmer and to hope they just go away or resolve themselves or to sit and gossip behind people’s backs rather than addressing those gaps head on?”

And that norm really predicts so many of the results that you experience and how you handle or mishandle or don’t handle at all these gap moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Justin, now I’m thinking about one of my favorite comedians, Nathan Fielder, and his latest season of “The Rehearsal” in which he explores this very concept in terms of, like, co-pilots feeling nervous about speaking up and the dangers. And so it’s fairly trippy because, like, “Wait, this is a comedy, but it’s a reality, but this is a serious issue and you’re bringing awareness. But is it a joke?” And that’s kind of where he likes to play?

It’s like, “I’m bending genres and thoughts as you observe.” But it was quite intriguing. Could you share with us, what are your thoughts on this series and this dynamic with co-pilots?

Justin Hale
Yeah, this has been something that’s been an issue for over 50 years in the airlines. Actually, my father was an airline pilot for decades. And so I’m pretty familiar with the culture that exists there.

But you can even look at examples, like Florida Flight 90, which is about 30 years ago, right, where there’s a situation where we’ve got the captain who’s got a perspective about the weather and whether they should take off, and the co pilot sitting there saying things like, “I could see the ice building on the wings and I was seeing certain numbers in our mechanics that made me kind of wonder.”

And the co-pilot, feeling concerned about speaking truth to power, about being honest to authority, deferred and would maybe throw hints out and say things like, “Man, that’s a lot of ice. Does that seem right?”

And rather than being honest and speaking up about a potential miss or a mistake or a risk, this co-pilot, in some ways, just couched the truth. That airplane ended up crashing right into the river and a number of people died. And that’s one of many examples.

There was an Air Korea flight. There was a number of examples similar to that where there’s this culture of deference to authority, fear of being honest, and that exists. We see that on oil rigs. We see that in executive boardrooms. And, sadly, you often see it inside of airline cockpits.

And yet, about 20 years ago, many of the airlines, because of a few key mistakes and fatal crashes, they really tried to take this more seriously, created this whole CRM program that was all about addressing the conversational culture within the cockpit. And yet, what still permeates is this sense of, “Is it okay for me to question someone who’s more senior than me?”

And so it really is interesting. It is a tragic comedy to really think about how that same dynamic is true in so many areas of life. And it’s interesting because I also think we tend to look at those stories and we put a lot of the onus on the junior person, we’re like, “Why didn’t you say something? Why don’t you speak up? How could you let that happen?”

And yet, the culture of candor or culture of silence, whichever you’re getting, is more determined by how the senior person is behaving than really how the junior person is behaving, right? Does the senior person create an atmosphere where they invite that junior person to speak up, to disagree, to hold them accountable, to call out a mistake, to notice an error?

And we like to say that the health of any relationship, team, or culture is a function of the average time lag between someone seeing an issue and saying something about it. And if you’re talking about airlines, you can’t let that time lag go on too long because now you’re talking about fatal mistakes.

It’s the same thing. We see this, actually, in hospitals. We did a massive study called “Silence Kills.” We interviewed hundreds of people, surveyed thousands of people in hospitals, looking at the prevalence of silence within hospitals, especially relative to mistakes.

And it was scary how often junior people, on a clinical team, whether that be a nurse being faced with seeing an error that a doctor was making, or a more junior nurse speaking up to a nurse manager. And the prevalence of silence was, at least anecdotally, we could connect to a number of different mistakes that were made, which is scary.

Because if you’re talking about airlines, you’re talking about hospitals, mistakes aren’t just things where a project goes poorly, or there’s a bug in the software. We’re talking about human lives. I remember one, we were doing this large study in this hospital and there was this nurse manager who said, “You know, I have a nurse who works for me, who works under me who is…” these are her words, “…dangerously incompetent.”

And so you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. Talk about a gap,” right? And so we said, “What do you do about it?” She said, “Well, after this nurse leaves the patient’s room, I send in other nurses after her to double check all of her work.” And you’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” hand-to-face moment, like, “Are you serious?”

And yet, if you were to ask this nurse manager why and other people like her, in our study, they would say things like, “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” “I didn’t want to get into a confrontation,” right? The risks of speaking up were greater than anything else, the feeling of being uncomfortable, the argument, the hurting feelings.

And yet, think of all the risks of not speaking up in that moment. It’s expensive because now you’re paying people to double check work. It’s inefficient. This nurse isn’t getting any better. Most importantly, it’s dangerous. You’re putting a patient at risk.

And so a lot of what we tried to double down on in the new version of the book and gave some examples that were relevant that have happened over the last decade or two is examples where people made this sort of boneheaded calculation where they were trying to, they looked at a gap and they said, “Should I say something? Should I speak up?”

And in their calculation, they start focusing on and emphasizing all the short-term costs of being honest, “Oh, it’s going to be painful. It’s not going to go well. They’re going to get defensive. I’m going to…you know, they’re going to question me. I’m going to be labeled as a troublemaker.” All these issues of speaking up.

And in those calculations, they almost completely ignore all the long-term costs of not saying something, all the risks of silence. And so it’s this terrible mental calculation that we do that results in this ongoing silence, even when it matters most, is really alarming.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah, I hear that. Mercy. And what’s intriguing here is, you know, these scenarios are among the most intense and thrilling emotionally, “Junior person sees life-threatening situation. Will they speak up in the cockpit or in the emergency room, the operating theater?” And yet, this also shows up in more mundane areas, I might venture to say, nearly every day in workplaces that have teams who are regularly communicating with each other.

Justin Hale
Oh, constantly. Think about a simple example as you and a coworker rely on each other for work. And so you’ve got this coworker who maybe is a copy editor and helps you out a lot. And that’s part of their job, right?

And so you say, “Hey, will you review this proposal that I wrote up for the executive team?” And they say, “Great. I’ll take care of it.” And you say, “Hey, can you get it to me by Friday at noon?” And they say, “Absolutely.” Friday at 4:00 p.m. rolls around, no proposal back to you. Monday morning, 8:00 a.m. rolls around, no proposal back to you. So here you go, you’ve got a gap.

Or how about, you’re a sales manager and you manage a group of 10 reps and, “Here we go again, it’s the third quarter in a row that one of my reps is missing his quota.” So, to your point, the gaps are not only incredibly consequential, they’re just common. It happens in our daily life.

I mean, I was having a conversation just last night, my wife and I, with my son, about the fact that, you know, hey, he’s 12, he wants to play with his friends, he wants to go to a sports, he wants to have a good time, he wants to loiter here and there, you know, like classic teenagers.

And yet, what we asked from him is, “Hey, you got to keep up on your homework. You got to get good grades. Everyday you need to come home, look at your missing assignments or assignments that have a poor grade and go back and make adjustments, make fixes,” and he wasn’t doing that. And he has a massive pattern of doing it.

We have a situation with a neighbor who maybe is parking her car on your side of the driveway or on your grass. All of these are gaps. And so, to your point, we face them every single day, some small, some big, some medium size. And yet, if you’re a human being that has any relationships with other human beings, you’re going to have gaps.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, it’s funny when you mentioned neighbors, I’m just thinking about homeowners associations, HOAs, and it’s amazing to me because, and this plays a larger topic that neighbors tend to not know each other.

And it’s sort of a social norm such that I even feel weird, like, I’d like to meet my neighbors, but it almost seems odd for me to knock on the door, and say, “Hello, I am your neighbor. Welcome. I would like to meet you and know you and be familiar with you. And if you need a cup of sugar or whatever, come on down.”

That seems like a very natural human wholesome instinct. And yet, I myself, I say, “Oh, no, that’s kind of weird. People don’t really do that. I don’t know how they’re going to like that. And then are they going to get into my business?” So, yeah.

Justin Hale
Yeah, that’s an important insight, though. I love what you’re saying, because we don’t do that in the same way that we probably used to in terms of building some relationship with the people in our community – small c – right, in our neighborhood.

And yet, you will face moments of accountability or gaps or mistakes or things that bug you that they will do, or you will do to them, right? It just naturally happens. If you’re in a family, it happens. Like, if you’re in a relationship, people will let each other down.

But because we don’t build relationships, it makes having those conversations very difficult and, in some ways, almost impossible. We have no basis of trust or understanding or anything. And so what you see instead, and it’s hilarious, you bring up community, you know, communities and HOAs.

In my community, what you see all the time is just people post their gripes on the community Facebook group. And they just lay into people. And the other day, and it’s hilarious, because they’ll weave it into politics in the most cutting ways.

The other day, someone was complaining about the local school, “It’s the last straw with the school. Let me tell you my story.” And I’m thinking to myself, “You know who you should probably address that with? The school.”

And so we’ve become accustomed to this very indirect complaining, gossiping, shouting our frustrations to the social media world, and rarely do we go in person, face-to-face, to the person we have real concerns with who can actually do something about it and have the honest conversation.

And maybe we end up getting there, but we start with complaining and shouting into social media. And the problem becomes is we build up this emotional distance between us and the person in which we need to have the conversation with.

Same issue you’re talking about with neighbors. When I don’t know you, I have no relationship with you, we haven’t connected on something common, we haven’t talked about our kids and shared a little story, “Oh, you’re a fan of this team. I’m a fan of this team. You grew up there? So did I.”

That commonality builds relationships. And why does that matter? Because if you ever want to talk with someone about issues, having a relationship of trust allows that very crucial conversation to go much more effectively when you believe certain things about each other’s intent.

I mean, this is sort of a principle that is weaved throughout the entire book. That if people can feel psychologically safe, you can talk with them about almost anything. But when they don’t feel that way, it doesn’t matter how flowery or how well spoken you are, they don’t want to hear it. No matter if what you’re saying is true about their mistake or not, if they don’t feel psychologically safe with you, they don’t want to hear it.

And that doesn’t mean always comfortable, but it means safety is a function of intent, not content. Meaning, whether someone, a neighbor or someone in your community, is willing to hear you speak up about your concerns or hold them accountable, is all about their belief in your intent.

If they believe your intent is good and you’re trying to help or you’re trying to address some common interest or that you respect them, and so you respect them enough to share this feedback with them, they’ll be much more likely to hear you.

But if they believe that your intent is malicious, or you’re trying to hurt them, or you’re a threat to their goals, or that you don’t respect them, it doesn’t matter how nice you say it, they will shut down, they’ll go into self preservation mode, right?

And so it really is, I think you make a great point around safety, around building a relationship. In the book, we state it this way, we say when people feel safe, they’re more likely to embrace uncomfortable truth. And when they embrace uncomfortable truth, they’re much more likely to take responsibility.

And that’s really what we’re after, is that we want people to just own up to their mistake. And, honestly, that’s so rare that when we see it, we’re like, “Oh, thank you. I’m good.” And our respect for them goes up immediately.

And so that idea of, when people feel safe, they’re more likely to embrace uncomfortable truth. And when they embrace uncomfortable truth, they’re more likely to take responsibility.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, these are good solid principles and they resonate in terms of being true, that widespread complaining indirectly on the HOA Facebook or to the HOA presidents, often, I think folks hear revelations in an exit interview. It’s like, “Oh, I had no idea that was the thing that you wanted, or that was troublesome for your work experience this whole time.”

So that’s sort of the lay of the land, the core principles, and the problem. So what are some of the best practices you suggest for folks who want to shrink gaps between expectations and performance so that we’re getting great performance and rocking these conversations, no problem?

Justin Hale
There’s two views we can look at this through. Let’s start with the leader and then we’ll go to the employee. And if you want to be, you’re talking about being awesome at your job, if you want to be an awesome leader, like a great manager, someone who is rare out there, you need to focus on clarity. I mean, that is just such an underrated skill when it comes to leadership.

And what I mean by that is so many of the gaps that leaders find themselves dealing with started at the moment where the expectation was set. And it wasn’t the employee’s fault, it was the leader’s fault. Meaning, maybe they say something, maybe you and I are meeting in a quarterly review or something and I say, “Hey, look, Pete, you’re doing a great job in general.”

“And I know you want to grow to this next role, you’re looking for that promotion, I want to help you get there. What I’d like to see you do more in the next quarter as you’re in these project meetings and working with the marketing department and all these kinds of things, I want you to be more collaborative, okay? If you can do that, I see great things for you.”

And you shake your head and go, “That sounds really nice,” and you walk away. Right away, we probably have a gap. Why? Because what in the world does collaborative mean? “Do you mean you want me to be friends with these people? Do you mean you want me to attend certain meetings I’m not attending? Do want me to, you know, go visit and meet one on one with certain people I’m not visiting with and meeting with one on one right now? What in the world do you mean by collaborative?”

Or maybe I say, “Hey, listen, you’re really technically solid in your job, but the part of your job I want you to get better at is I want you to be, I don’t know, I want you to be just take more initiative, right? Like, I really want to see you be a go-getter this year, and then that’s really where I want you to improve.” And, like, boom, right off the bat, we’ve got a gap. Why?

Because leaders use these vague terms, you know. “Take initiative and be more responsible and be a team player and be more collaborative.” And in their mind, they have a picture of what that looks like, but they don’t spell it out. They use these vague sort of, you know, business school terminology that sounds nice.

Pete Mockaitis
“You should be more synergistic, Justin.”

Justin Hale
Yeah, exactly, right? “Let’s take this offline and be more synergistic,” right? It’s those kinds of things. And the employee walks away from the conversation with their own understanding of what they think that means. And there’s a high likelihood that those two understandings are different.

And so right off the bat, we have a gap from the beginning, which grows wider and wider as time goes on between what the leader wanted and what the employee thought they wanted. So first big tip here is, if you’re a leader, get crystal clear about what you want, get behavioral. “You can’t be too specific,” is what I tell people in terms of your expectation.

Another tip that I found helpful, one leader that I worked with was excellent at this. We have a meeting, she’d talk about expectations, and then she would just send an email to me within a few hours, like sometime that day, and she would just simply say, “Hey, I’m not sending you this to micromanage you. I’m just sending this because I don’t want you to feel unclear, and I don’t want you and I to ever be on different pages. So my understanding is, from the chat we just had a couple hours ago, is that we’re going to do X, Y, and Z by this date. Is that how you see it?”

And it just gave me a chance to review her understanding of the expectation and for me to either say, “Oh, I actually saw that a little differently.” And then to come back with my understanding, or to say, “Yep, that’s how I understood who was going to do what by when and how we were going to follow up and all that stuff.” And then, boom, it’s locked in. And it’s also documented.

And if you do it in a very, like, simple, informal way, it doesn’t have to feel weird. And, by the way, you’re doing it for them, for the employee. You’re doing it for both of you to be on the same page. So that’s a huge first tip is, as a leader, you’ve got to create a ton of clarity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I love that in terms of getting super specific and behavioral, like, “What does it mean to be collaborative, to have initiative, to be proactive, to be strategic, to have ‘executive presence’?” There’s dozens of things that any of those could mean. Could you share a few examples of going from vague adjective to specific behaviors that paint the picture?

Justin Hale
Yeah, a really common one is take initiative. And it’s because what leaders really want is their people, they say, “I want you to be proactive.” What they’re really looking for is, “Hey, when you’re asked to do something, get clear on what the action is, and I want you to take it, right?” That’s essentially what they’re saying.

So one way to be proactive, say something like, “Hey, I’d you to be more proactive.” The employee might say, “What do you mean by that?” And the leader could say, “Hey, when we’re at the end of a meeting, and you’re unsure if you’re supposed to do anything relative to the meeting, I just want you to ask a question which is, ‘Hey, group, just double checking. Do I have any next actions? And if so, when do I need to finish them by?’”

“I want you to just ask those two questions. And then if you’re given assignments, I want you to make sure you capture those somewhere not in your mind. And I want you to focus on completing that next action by the due date. And when you show up to the next meeting, just give a quick 30-second report back on where you’re at with that. That’s it.”

“If you do that one small thing, to me, that is a great representation of being proactive relative to our team and our projects and all these kinds of things. I want to see you do that more often.” Or it might be an example of saying, “I want you to be more proactive,” and the employee says, “What do you mean?”

And they say, “Well, you’re leading these meetings. And so what I want you to do is I want you to create an outline for the meeting in terms of how you’re going to spend your time. And I want you to put that in the meeting invite to the rest of the team so that everyone knows why they’re coming, and what we’ll be talking about during that meeting. So I’d like you to be more proactive around meetings and discussions and conversations by doing that action.”

So it’s really about taking any vague, you know, trope that leaders are used to giving, and really saying, “Okay, what would that look like? What would you see people do behaviorally that would be a manifestation of that attribute that you’re looking for?”

“I want you to be more collaborative. Okay, what I mean by that is, you know, I want to see you work more closely with the sales team. So I want you to set up an ongoing once a month meeting with the sales director, Tim, and I want you guys to meet once a month to talk about gaps he may be seeing and how you guys are providing resources for them and any feedback you might have for the sales team in terms of using the resources you’re creating for them. That’s how I want you to be more collaborative moving forward with the sales team.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s intriguing. In some ways, as you spell out these actions, it almost feels as though this is a conversation with a more junior employee, but I suppose it could also very well apply to folks who are deep into their careers.

Justin Hale
Absolutely. The thing that we continue to see over and over again in this work that we do is that people that are senior will often say, “Yeah, this is common sense,” or, “I need to be holding these conversations.”

But common sense is not common practice, right? And you don’t just automatically become better at these as you become more senior in your career. Actually, often the opposite is true, which is sad. People become, they start to really get good at being bad at these kinds of conversations, right?

They develop early in their career poor habits and they think those work because maybe they’re technically successful, and so they’ve been successful in spite of the fact that they’re poor at these conversations. They think they’re good at them because, hey, they’ve risen in their career.

And so, yes, it is essential for you to be crystal clear. Actually, one of my colleagues, David Allen, who’s the author of Getting Things Done, he talked about, you know, one of the zeros and ones of that methodology, that productivity methodology that he would say is outcome and action thinking.

And it actually came from years and years of working with executives, where you’d be sitting with, you know, he and his colleagues would be sitting with executives in meetings, and they’d say, “What are you dealing with?” And they’d say, “Well, we have the same problems this year as we had last year.”

And they’d say, “Let’s do a simple exercise.” And these are with high powered executives of Fortune 50 companies, that kind of stuff. And he’d say, “Okay, I want each of you to take a second and grab a piece of paper and I want you to take your biggest concern and write it down on a piece of paper.”

And they’d all write it down, their own individual large concern, the thing that’s keeping them up at night. And he’d say, “Okay. What’s your desired outcome? What would have to be true for you to say that this concern was resolved or solved or completed or taken care of? Paint that picture for me. Write it down on the paper. What would have to be true?”

And they would, essentially, be spelling out their desired outcome in more clear terms. And then he’d say, “Okay, if we ended the meeting right now, this executive offsite, and you had nothing else to do in your world, except for start moving on closure on this thing, what would I watch you do? What would be your next action?”

“Would it be to pick up your phone and make a phone call? Would it be to schedule a meeting? Would it be to draft an email? Would it be to open up a PowerPoint and begin creating a proposal? What would I watch you do?”

And these experienced, decades of experienced executives, would finally get dislodged from months and sometimes years of procrastination, putting things off, spinning their wheels on large problems that were the same problems as they had last year, simply because they couldn’t get beyond.

I mean, these are people who, you know, leaders are often very good at being strategic. But what they’re often not good at is getting into the minutia of, “Okay, what’s the next action? What’s the next step? What are you going to do? What would that look like? Tell me more about what your next step is, right? Don’t just tell me about your goals.”

They obsess over goals. They meet over goals. They fly all over the world and go to these resorts to talk about, “What are our goals? What are our goals? What are our goals?” And yet, they often stay stuck because they can’t get down to the specifics of, “What’s the next action?”

And so, to your point, these are conversations, when it comes to gap moments and accountability, where you can’t be too specific no matter the level of the person you’re talking to. I mean, this is something we see all the time, by the way.

We talk in the book about examples where employees should use these skills to hold their leaders accountable. Do leaders ever make mistakes? Does your boss ever let you down? I’m sure he or she does all the time. And you should be able to use these skills as well.

And that specificity becomes even more important when you say to your boss, “Hey, look, I’ve been noticing some of the ways that the meetings have been going. I just feel like we’re not getting a lot accomplished.” And they say, “Okay, I’ll get better at that.”

And you say, “Well, let me give you some more specifics. What I mean by that is I’ve often found there’s a pattern. We spend the last 20 minutes just talking about processes rather than talking about action. And I feel like we’re having meetings because we didn’t actually establish clear action. And so we’re having more meetings than we need to. And I want to talk about how we can get better at that.”

This is employee initiating that conversation. So I think you’re right. This principle goes from the first-time intern to the senior executive.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. And David Allen has been on the show a couple of times, and “What’s the next action?” is such a power question to cut right through things and get them moving. So great principles there in terms of super clear on what the expectation is, down to the next action, the specific behaviors. What are some other core principles here?

Justin Hale
Yeah, so there’s a few. I don’t know if your listeners have ever seen the movie “Groundhog Day,” classic Bill Murray, I mean, it just never goes out of style. But there’s this phenomenon we like to call living Groundhog Day in your accountability conversations.

Meaning, so often, we are holding the same conversation over and over again, we’re living Groundhog Day. And people come to me and complain about this all the time, like, “I’m hitting my head up against a wall, Justin, because I keep having the same conversation over and over again. It’s not getting better. The gap is not closing.”

And I’ll often be honest with people, and say, “That’s on you. That’s actually your fault. If you’re having the same conversation over and over again, the problem isn’t them, it’s you.” Like, “Oh, what do you mean?” “What I mean is you’re having the wrong conversation. So before you even open your mouth, you’ve got to get really clear about what the real gap is, what the issue is.”

We have this really powerful skill called CPR. It’s an acronym that stands for content, pattern, relationship. It’s a great diagnostic tool. So, essentially, you look at a situation, say, “Oh, I’ve got a gap.” And I would say, “Okay. Well, is it a one-time issue? Meaning this mistake has happened only once.”

That would be a content conversation, “Hey, I noticed you missed this one deadline today,” one time. Most of the time, though, people are frustrated, not because something has happened once, but because it’s a pattern, P, right, because it’s happened three or four or five times.

The issue isn’t today’s episode of the mistake. The issue is the last four episodes of the mistake. And the problem that we run into, one of the reasons we live out Groundhog Day, is because we go to hold the accountability discussion, we go to address the gap, and we talk about the most recent episode, and the person has a good reason for why they made the mistake or they had that miss.

And so we say, “Oh, that excuse, makes mistakes” and we walk away and we feel initially resolved. But then two or three days later, we’re back in the same conversation again, and we’re, like, flabbergasted. Why? It’s because in that moment, you were holding the wrong conversation. The issue wasn’t yesterday’s episode. The issue was the fact that it’s happened four or five times.

So let’s say I’ve got an issue with someone who shows up late to work, and we work in an environment where they need to be on time because we’ve got patients coming in or customers coming in or something like that. And this person has shown up late five times in the last month.

And I go to them and say, “Hey, I noticed yesterday you were late.” And you go, “Oh, my gosh, you wouldn’t believe what happened to my son. We had to take him to the hospital.” And you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I feel so bad.” And you’re like, “I’m so glad your son’s okay.” And you’re good and you walk away.

You haven’t really resolved the real issue. The real issue isn’t yesterday’s episode. The real issue is it’s happened five times. And so it would be the equivalent of having like a dandelion weed in your front yard, your beautifully manicured grass.

And you walk out of your front door and you say, “Oh, what an ugly weed,” and you walk over and you rip the top off and throw it away and you tell yourself, “I took care of it,” which we know is a lie. It’s going to grow back because of the roots. That’s a great metaphor for thinking about conversations.

If a situation has persisted, if a gap has gone on for a while and your frustration is growing, unless and until you address that pattern, or you address the deepest level, which is the R, or relationship, how the relationship’s being impacted or trust is being broken, or respect is being strained, until you address a deeper level of the conversation, the ongoing issue and how it’s affecting your relationship, until you address the root, that gap will not go away. That gap will not close.

So the first skill we really teach people is choose the right conversation. Is it a content issue, one time? Is it a pattern? Or is it a relationship-level issue where trust is an issue or competence is coming into question or there’s a respect concern?

And so many of us would benefit from holding the right conversation, even if we hold it awkwardly or imperfectly. If we’re talking about the right issue, we’re much more likely to get unstuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And it really does seem quite easy to get sidetracked, distracted by the one-off, the exceptional, and then you’re kind of lost.

Justin Hale
That’s the 200 level of this skill, right? That’s where that comes in. If you’re a leader and you come up and say, “Hey, I want to talk to you about something that I’ve noticed, there’s this pattern,” and you start talking about the pattern.

And what often happens is that person wants to suck you back into content. You can’t fall for that. To your point, you’ve got to stay focused on the real issue. If someone says, “Oh, but…” Say, “Look, I understand that there may have been an extenuating circumstance, but that’s not my real concern. My real concern is that this has happened five or six times. My issue is the pattern.”

And so, to your point, that’s where the advanced portion of this comes in is you’ve got to both notice what the right conversation is and have some fidelity to that as the conversation progresses.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us some best practices for actually doing the conversation?

Justin Hale
Yeah. So once you know what you need to talk about, you’re in a really great place. One quick tip for when it’s time to start the conversation, which is a skill we teach called describe the gap, which is simply state the facts related to what you expect and what you’d observed. Most people begin these conversations with emotion, with conclusions.

Pete Mockaitis
“I was really worried when I noticed this. I felt disappointed, sad, angry, frustrated.”

Justin Hale
Hurt. Yeah, frustrated, right? And so, because that’s what’s front of mind to us is the impact of their behavior. And so we want it to be front of word, meaning it’s the first thing out of our mouths. And that is the last thing you should do.

These conversations will inevitably go poorly when you start with emotion, assumptions, conclusions, judgments. Don’t do that. Now, I’m not Pollyanna. I get that you’re frustrated. I get frustrated. I’m not saying you’re not going to be frustrated about gaps, about mistakes that people make. You will be. But if you lead with that frustration, they will get defensive.

So even before you open your mouth, there’s a little bit of a pre-skill here, which is, it’s actually funny because I’ll have people come to me and say, “You know, I’m really frustrated about this. I need you to help me. Give me some coaching and some training on my body language. I want to make sure I don’t come off as frustrated.”

And I’ll laugh and say, “You want me to teach you how to lie, essentially? You want to be bubbling underneath the surface and angry and frustrated, but you want me to teach you how to pretend that you’re not? No, I’m not doing that, right? What you need to do is get at the source, right?”

Your emotions and frustrations are actually not a function of what the other person has done. You think they are because you say things like, “He pushed my buttons,” “She makes me so mad.” What we know from the science is that your emotions are a function of the story you tell yourself about what other people are doing.

So if you look at the brain, the way it works is, is it’s kind of an interesting four-step process when you go from observing something to acting. First, you see, hear, and observe something. Maybe you’re sitting in a meeting and you hear someone say something, right? There’s the observation, there’s the fact.

Then what your brain does is your brain makes a judgment. It wants to make sense of what you just saw. It comes to conclusions, it makes judgments, it makes assumptions, it fills in blanks. It essentially adds color to the situation you just saw. And much of that story, we would call it, is based on previous experiences, your own paradigms, your own mental models, right?

That story then drives your emotion, “Is what I just saw and heard good or bad? Is it negative or positive? Do I like it? Not like it? How do I feel about this?” And then how you feel, that emotion then drives your action.

So this is what we call the path to action. You see something or observe it, you tell a story, you feel a certain way, and then you act. And yet, your brain does that four-step process like that. I mean, it’s like lightning, right?

Now, why should people care about this when it comes to starting conversations? That was your question. If your story about why someone has done what they’ve done is something like this, “They don’t care. They’re lazy. This is not a priority to them. They’re just out to get me.” If that’s your story, can you guess what your emotion’s going to be?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, you’ll be angry and resentful and frustrated, all the things.

Justin Hale
All that stuff. You will come in with this judgment which will show on your face, your tone, all that stuff. You are screwed from the beginning. I mean, period, right? No matter how much you try to say it in the most refined words, your emotions will show in all the nonverbals, and they’ll get defensive, right?

And so what you’re trying to do here, the biggest threat to progress before a conversation happens is disgusted certainty. This judgment that the other person is this certain way or their intent is this. And then you latch onto that with this certainty that you’re right, that your story is correct. We tend to believe that our stories are facts.

And so, but when you can challenge that with determined curiosity, when you can challenge your story, I’m not saying be Pollyanna and say, “Well, I’m sure that they made this mistake for a good reason. I’m going to let it go,” nope. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is challenge your story by asking questions like, “I wonder, you know, why would a reasonable, rational, decent person do what they just did?” or, “I wonder if there’s some circumstances I’m not totally aware of that might be contributing to the situation?” or, “I wonder if I did anything to contribute to this. What’s my part in this?”

When you start asking some of those questions, what you are doing, essentially, is you are interrogating your own story because our stories tend to be pretty self-serving. They tend to be pretty one-sided. And when you ask questions, you start to make your story consider other options, “Maybe I’m not 100 % certain what’s going on. Maybe there is something more to this. I’m not sure.”

You see what I’ve done here? I haven’t become more certain about some Pollyanna positive outcome. I’ve just become less certain about my initial disgusted belief. And so now I’m more curious and my story is like, “Hmm, I wonder what’s going on here? I ought to go ask. I’m going to go have a conversation.” You’ve now replaced a disgusted certainty with determined curiosity.

So back to your initial question, “How do I start a conversation?” You begin the conversation with an attitude of determined curiosity, “I’m going to go find out. I know here’s what I’ve seen. I’m going to go find out why. I’m not 100% sure. Sure, I have a little bit of my beliefs in my back of my mind but I’m not sure that those are factual. I’m going to go ask some questions.”

And when you’re ready to start, now it leaves you space to be a human being. It leaves you a space to fumble a little bit. You don’t have to say things perfectly. Why? Because it shows on your face that you are legitimately curious. You’re like, “Hey, I want to check something out with you here,” versus, “I can’t believe you did this.” Can you feel the difference, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Justin Hale
So once you’re ready to start, then you can describe the gap. You can say, “Hey, here’s the facts. Hey, you and I discussed last week that you would, you know, finish this report analysis for me and send it to me by Monday. It’s Tuesday afternoon, I haven’t gotten the report yet. What’s up?” That’s it.

Because the beginning of these accountability discussions is an initiation of a longer dialogue. It is not holding court, giving out the judgment all in one statement. It is simply stating the facts related to the expectation, the facts related to the observation in terms of the actual performance, and it’s just asking a question. That’s it, open-ended. And we’re trying to just initiate the beginning of a dialogue.

And when you open like that, you are much more likely to get honesty rather than hiding or skirting or lying about the truth about what’s going on.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Okay, so we’ve done some pre-work, got the curiosity going, we simply describe what’s up instead of leading with emotions. Any other pro tips for the actual conversation?

Justin Hale
In that situation, if you do those things, here’s our experience, 95% of the time, you will get to a dialogue, they’ll be honest with you about what’s going on, and then you can just talk. You can talk about, “Oh, here’s what got in the way, and here’s why I missed it.”

And, “Okay, let me help you solve for that. And in the future, can you please speak up to me a little earlier when you run into that kind of barrier. And, great, and we’re moving on towards solutions.” Sometimes, though, maybe we don’t do a great job of starting, we don’t get our emotions right, and the person gets defensive.

And so now you’re talking about restoring safety, “What do I do in the middle of the conversation? What do I do in the middle of the conversation when the other person doesn’t jump into the dialogue? They start shutting down. They start blowing up. They start getting frustrated. How do I address that issue?”

And we teach the skill called “Make it safe.” Now, what does that mean? That does not mean make it comfortable. That doesn’t mean that giving feedback and talking about gaps is always touchy-feely and it’s always so comfortable.

I have gotten some of the toughest feedback in my career that I was willing to hear that was incredibly uncomfortable. And yet, I wanted to hear it. Why? Because it goes back to something we talked about earlier. Safety is not a function of the content or the topic. It’s a function of people’s belief about your intent.

So when I see someone, and to your point, in the middle of a conversation getting defensive, I have to ask myself the question, “Okay, whoa! What are they believing about my intent that’s making them get defensive here?”

It’s one of two things. Either they believe that I don’t have mutual purpose, which is what I want, is a threat to what they want, that I don’t share their goals, their struggles, that I don’t care about what they care about. Or it’s a lack of mutual respect. I don’t respect them or care about them as a person. And if there is a lack of mutual purpose and or mutual respect, safety is gone out of the room, right?

It gets sucked out of the room completely and people go into self-preservation mode. They want to protect themselves, right? Because they feel threatened. Their belief about your intent is, “Hey, she’s out to get me,” “He’s out to get me,” “He doesn’t care about me,” “He doesn’t respect me.”

And so your job in that moment is to put a little bookmark in the topic. Let’s say we’re talking about a gap around deadlines or sales quota or parking your car on my driveway, and take a quick sidestep to address the conditions in that moment, “Let me address your belief about my intent, because I have no hope of you hearing about the actual problem if you are stuck in self-preservation mode, if you’re feeling defensive and unsafe.”

So a great skill that I find helpful is called contrasting, is that if I’m noticing that my intent is good, but that you believe my intent isn’t, I simply contrast what I don’t intend with what I do intend. So if you and I are having a conversation about you parking on my driveway, and I say, “Hey, you know, you and I talked about this before about my grass and it’s important to me. And we talked about where we park our cars.”

“I noticed that over the last couple of weeks that your car has been parked on my grass and it’s left these marks that I now have to fix. I just wanted to find out what’s happened based on our initial conversation?” And you go, “I can’t believe you. You don’t care about the fact that I’ve got five kids in here. I’ve got two adult kids that are struggling, and we’re just trying to make ends meet.”

And it’s that moment you go, “Whoa!” right? They think that I don’t respect the fact that they got a busy life. And in that moment, they’re perceiving that my intent is that I don’t share their concerns. That’s actually not true.

Like, I got a lot of kids myself and I can respect that they’re trying to juggle a lot of balls all at once. Before I keep talking about the parking issue, I got to address the fact that they’re questioning my intent.

So I might say something like, “Oh, I apologize. My intent, I’m not trying to say that I don’t recognize that you’ve got a lot going on, and I know that feeling of having lots of kids and trying to make space for their cars, and you got kids running around and I totally get that and I can empathize with that. I’m not trying to question that that’s a lot to balance.”

“My concern is that you and I have talked before about this, and just like you, I’m trying to take care of my own house and my grass is important to me, and I just want to find a way to be sensitive to the fact that we’re both juggling a lot and keep my grass in good shape.”

So it’s just a simple way to say, “Here’s what I don’t intend. Here’s what I do intend. I’m going to address what I think is your misunderstanding, your belief about my intent. I’m going to go right at that. And then I’m going to clarify for you what my real intent is, right, smoothing out that psychological safety by helping you understand that.”

And like we said before, when people feel safe, they’re more likely, it’s not guaranteed, they’re more likely to embrace the truth that you’re trying to share. And when they embrace that truth, they’re more likely to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m wondering about, even if they don’t think that, “This person is out to get me,” do you believe, or is there psychological research data on this, that a subset of people may simply have a high level of defensiveness, feeling threatened-ness, unable to receive criticism of any sort, no matter how delightfully and positively you’re intending it? Like, what do those percentages look like?

Justin Hale
I think that’s great. I think, absolutely, that is true. But I don’t know, our experience has not been that that is necessarily always consistent across every relationship and every part of someone’s life. So if we were to put it on a scale of zero, which is never defensive, to 10 of always defensive, that someone who’s a nine at work doesn’t mean they’re always a nine at home. They might be.

But I think that previous life experiences drive people who might be a three up to a five. I see this all the time with people I work with in organizations where they have a boss who’s pretty tyrannical and hard on them.

Maybe they were a three when they started that job in terms of their own mindset of other people’s intent and how often they get defensive, and their belief about other people’s intent being malicious. And by the time they leave that job, they’re at a five. They’re a little more leery of people’s intent, especially leaders. They’ve become more skeptical, more cynical, okay?

And so, yes, I do believe that our life experiences, and our experience has been working with hundreds of thousands of people doing this training and consulting and coaching with these conversations, is that you can have, especially when it goes on for long enough, you could have the kinds of experiences that prime you to have a little bit quicker of a negative belief about other people’s intent.

But here’s the good news. We’ve also found that that can be retrained. And someone who may be, because of life experiences, maybe because of an upbringing, and their family, or an environment they’ve worked in, that they’ve become an eight.

That doesn’t mean you’re an eight for the rest of your life, that you can learn and skillfully move yourself down to a three, back down to a two, that that mindset or that belief system about other people’s intent can be retrained, which is great news, right? It’s great news.

And so with any of these things around conversations, we have found that it’s not one of these things that you’re either born with or not, that it’s a skill that you can develop and you can become world-class at it if you weren’t born in a family that was great at talking about issues, or that your first job was an organization where candor was the norm, but that you can become highly skilled at that.

And that’s been our experience with people we’ve worked with, executives, leaders all over the world. Most of these people didn’t just automatically come from a background that they were good at it. They developed it. They practiced it. They were aware of their own deficiencies and lack of skill and their own poor behaviors up to that point.

And we worked on saying, “Here’s a replacement behavior. Here’s a better skill. We’re going to practice this. We’re going to have you try it out. Oh, it didn’t go super well. Why didn’t it go well? Let’s give you some coaching. Let’s have you try it again.” And through time, they become masters at holding these accountability discussions.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Justin Hale
I think two big things, kind of going back to the beginning, is I think we tend to obsess over the risks of speaking up, and we minimize the risks of not speaking up. And I would encourage people, if you’ve got a gap in front of you that you’ve been putting off, just do a little analysis for yourself.

Sure, make a list of all the risks of saying something, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable. It’s going to be a confrontation. They might get defensive.” But then I want you to take equal amount of time, writing down a list of things that could happen if you didn’t say something.

What if this continued over the next five years? What would that mean for you emotionally, for the organization, for the team, for the results, for this person? In that relationship, that personal relationship, let’s say, with your spouse, if you didn’t bring up this issue you have with them about the way they treat you, and you didn’t bring it up, what would happen over the next 10 years in your marriage? What would that mean for your relationship, for the feeling in your home?

So I would encourage people to really shift that risk analysis, and I guarantee they’ll start finding that honesty coming out more often. And the second thing I would say is that we talk about this in the book that all lasting happiness and satisfaction depends on our capacity for both truth and love.

Not just love. Not just care. Not just respect, but our capacity for happiness and fulfillment is about that truth, that honesty, the having that conversation, and about caring and loving people. We tend to believe we have to choose one or the other. You can either be honest with someone or you can tell them the truth.

And our ability to achieve the greatest level of happiness and fulfillment and development of people is about our tireless effort to accomplish both of those things. Be honest and be caring. Be truthful and be loving.

And that’s where you start to see relationships flourish in ways you can never imagine because they’re no longer shrouded with hiding and dishonesty and masking and silence. They’re now filled with a beautiful amount of candor.

And so those are two big things I would suggest for people to consider as they start to face these conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Justin Hale
Well, we talked about David Allen earlier. That is one of my favorite quotes is the big David Allen, you know, quip where he said, “Your head is for having ideas, not for holding them.” I absolutely love that. It’s been one of those things that has transformed my life. And if you talk about being more productive, high-performing, get stuff out of your head and you’ll start to see it get done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Justin Hale
Any research on social proof, I find to be super powerful. It turns out that we think that we’re individuals with our own minds, but we tend to do what other people do. One study I found really was fascinating where they were trying to get people in hotels to reuse towels to try to save water.

And so they put a variety of different signs next to the towels to try to do an experiment to see which sign increased the percentage of people reusing towels. And they would say things like, “Oh, if you reuse your towels, you’ll save this amount of water,” or, “If you reuse your towels, we’ll give you some points on your rewards program,” whatever.

The one that had the greatest impact was any sign that they put that said, “X percent of people do this,” “70% of people recycle their towels or reuse their towels.” The ones that were related to social proof, aka, “This is normal. Most people do this behavior,” was the one that had the greatest impact on whether people reuse their towels or not.

And there are dozens of studies like that where we, essentially, say, “We like to fit in,” and that’s a powerful thing to know about why we do what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Justin Hale
A book that I picked up as an undergrad, walking through the university library, looking for something to spark what I wanted to major in, what I want to do with my life, a book called Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci. It’s all about motivation, what drives us. Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic. Loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Justin Hale
Note to Self. So this goes back to the David Allen thing. I got a lot going on. I got stuff to quickly get stuff off my mind, but I don’t want to lose track of where it goes. And for a while, I used to email myself. I used to open up my email app and put myself as the who I’m sending it to, and have to put a subject line in, and then put in whatever message I wanted to, had on my mind.

Note to Self just cuts through all of that. It, essentially, is just, you open up the app and it’s just blank digital space. And all you do is type something and just push send. It automatically emails you. It’s true with images. I take a picture of something and then automatically just, Note to Self, boom, send it to myself.

So, in five seconds, I can go from thought to, it’s in an inbox somewhere that I trust and I can let it go. And so I love that that app, increases my efficiency, so.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Justin Hale
Making my bed. I love that. Love just making it nice, making it look good. I feel like, for the rest of morning, as I walk through my room and I see that done, it sends a message to my brain about, you know, accomplishment, performance, who I am, who I want to be.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quote back to you often?

Justin Hale
There was a leader that shared this with me, and she said, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled.” And that really connects to why we wrote the book Crucial Accountability and why the revision, was that our success has a lot to do with not moments when things are going well.

It has to do when things go wrong, when people make mistakes, if I’m a leader or a parent or a friend, what determines the success of this relationship is often how we handle mistakes, how we handle moments when things don’t go as planned.

And so I’ve shared that with thousands of people I’ve spoken to or worked with, and I hear that back a lot that people find that to be especially powerful, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Justin Hale
Yeah, CrucialLearning.com is a great place to go to learn about not just our books, but our training program, consulting and coaching. And people can find me on LinkedIn, Justin Hale.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Justin Hale
Well, during this podcast, people inevitably had a thought, “That’s really cool.” And my challenge for people would be to say, “Okay, but what’s your next action?” Don’t let that cool thing reside in your hope and as hope in your brain. What are you going to do about it? Pick a small little action, go take that action.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Justin, thank you.

Justin Hale
You’re welcome! Thanks for having me.