How do I tell someone something they don't want to hear without it feeling like an attack?
I used to have pretty messed up ideas about what it meant to give someone critical feedback. For one thing, I assumed that there was a universal truth about the person that I knew but they didn't. For another, I mistakenly believed that I, and I alone, was the arbitor of that truth, thus making me the person who should tell them. And probably most damaging to my credibility and relationships with others, I believed that doing so meant being "brutally honest" - saying whatever I wanted to say, however I wanted to say it - and if they got their feelings hurt, that was their problem because I was just tellin' it like it is.
What I understand now is that my way of handling these conversations was neither kind nor effective. Even if there was a grain of truth in the feedback I needed to give, I was so damn self-righteous about it that the other person usually couldn't even hear or engage with what I was saying because all of their mental and emotional bandwidth was going toward defending and protecting themselves.
We can say everything we need to say, even deliever the hardest feedback someone might ever hear, while being kind, respectful, and careful about preserving the other person's dignity. I spent years learning how to do this, and now I'm going to give you a few tips on how you can, too.
But before I get into that, let's clear something up. There are steps we can take in a hard conversation to create an environment with the highest chance of it going well, and there are behaviors that tend to derail tough talks that we can be sure to avoid. But no matter how much we prepare or how softly we deliver our message, we can never control how the other person will perceive it or feel.
This is one of the messy truths about hard conversations; even if we do it perfectly (as if perfection were possible in a real conversation, which it isn't), there's no guarantee that things will go how we want them to. That is why the work we do on ourselves before the conversation is so important. In a nutshell, it involves asking ourselves, "What are my goals for the conversation, who is the person I want to be, and how would that person need to show up in order to accomplish those goals?"
As an aside
The work we do on ourselves to prepare for a hard conversation is part of the Say the Hard Things framework, which includes all the concrete steps you need to navigate the experience from the pre-work to circling back later if it goes off the rails.
Interested to learn more? Consider joining The Living Room, where the Say the Hard Things framework lives and we have weekly live workshops to dive deeper on these topics!
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The hot tips I've learned
Once you have those questions answered in your mind, it becomes easier to craft a message that lands without spiking the ball. Here are a few tips for saying what you need to say.
- Use data points, not interpretations.
Describe the observable, verifiable events and facts that have led to the situation you're addressing; avoid injecting your opinions and interpretations of their actions. - Keep your language as neutral as possible.
Avoid superlatives and words that connote judgment, such as "should", "bad", "wrong", and so on. Your presentation of the facts should be as dry as a college anatomy textbook. - Don't make assumptions.
You don't know their intentions or why they did what they did, and it's best not to pretend that you do.
Compare these tones
Here's a quick before-and-after to show you how to implement these guidelines.
"Brutally" honest
I wanted to talk to you about the perception that you're not a team player. It just seems like you don't care that much about what we're doing here, and that you don't even want to be here. I need you to start showing up for the team more and focusing less on what's in it for you.
Here, I'm telling them that they're not a team player without making it clear what that expectation means to me or describing how they've fallen short of it. I'm also assuming that they don't care and don't want to be here. Finally, with my request to "focus less on what's in it for you," I'm basically calling them selfish. Notice, I haven't asked any questions about what is going on in their life that may be causing the decline in performance and engagement.
Direct and respectful
I've noticed that the last five times someone on the team asked for support on an issue, you were the only person who didn't offer to step up and help. And on the last three projects I assigned you, there were pieces that I asked you to redo because the quality wasn't up to our usual standards. All of this is pretty out of character for you; would you be willing to help me understand what's going on?
In this version, I am describing specific events that are verifiable and avoiding interpretations and labels like "not a team player". I'm reaffirming that this is behavior I'm addressing and not my feelings about them as a person by mentioning that it's out of character. Crucially, I'm leaning into curiosity and asking them to help me understand more of the whole picture. This is feedback without judgment.
Give these things a try in your next feedback conversation and let me know how it went.
And by the way, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how you can set this and other types of difficult conversations up for success. To learn more, join us in The Living Room, where we are practicing the entire Say the Hard Things framework.
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