We Need to Talk

15 January 2024

For many years, people have ranted and railed against the dread managerial "Do you have a second to chat?" opening that has no context around it. Just Google "Can we talk" and you get something in excess of 4 billion responses, many/most of which talk about how to respond to those openings, coupled with a stern shaking finger for those who use them. But what should we use instead?

Imagine, for a moment, you're a manager. Your job, more than anything, is to keep a steady and close pulse on the team as a whole. You need to talk to them, listen to them, respond to them, and connect with them at both an intellectual and emotional level. In many respects, you are the connection they have to the rest of the company (particularly in remote-work situations), and much of what they know about the rest of the company will flow through you. Communication is essential.

But, truthfully, there's another part of the job that we often ignore in conversations like these, and that's that managers are often privy to information that they are not permitted to share with anyone, or at least not until some particular deadline has been passed or some kind of criteria has been met. Confidentiality, thy name is "manager"; you must never discuss personal information about one of your team members to anyone else, even if you know (or, more often, think you know) that the individual doesn't consider it personal or is comfortable with you discussing it with others. That's theirs to tell, not yours. There is so much you cannot discuss until it's "done": upcoming promotions, demotions, hiring, firing, reorganization, performance, it's a whole list of things that must--by both law and company policy--be kept close to your chest until "the right moment".

(We will also leave alone for the moment that "the right moment" is often decided long ahead of time, and by people who aren't you or even in the room with you. Complain as much as you wish, this is not likely to change. Ever.)

All of this puts a natural tension on the free and open communication that any reasonable and/or compassionate manager wants to have.

Let's assume for the moment that you have news to share with one of your team. For the sake of argument, the actual news itself doesn't matter--while it would be tempting to say, "Oh, it's terrible news about layoffs" or "It's that dreaded separation/termination conversation", the opposite is often true, too, for purposes of this blog post. Either way, as your manager, I have a piece of news that I need to share with you.

Now, keep in mind a few key considerations:

I really need to have the conversation in person. Because of the sensitive nature of the news (again, regardless of whether it's a promotion or a termination), I need to be looking at you in the face when I deliver it, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, we have to make do with a Zoom call because we're not in the same timezone, but then it's all that much more imperative to do this "face-to-face". Doing this over an email or a chat window is just classless and incompassionate at best, legally-liable at worst.
This isn't just normal day-to-day news. Often it has a time component to it, and I need to get the news to you as quickly as possible. I need to do this because...
The rumor mill will be flying fast and furious. Again, the kind of news doesn't matter--somehow people know they're being promoted even when their hiring manager hasn't heard the news yet--and so it's imperative that we get together to discuss this as quickly as possible, before rumor catches up to you and gives you a false report that I would then have to spend as much time deconstructing and denying as I do giving you the real news and explaining the consequences of that.

Assuming I've been diligent about my communications with you, I have a couple of options available with which to deliver this news:

Our weekly 1:1. This is often a great time/place to do it, because it's just the two of us, and anything we say here can often be done in confidence. That said, however, if the news is team-wide, I am now trusting that every single person on the team will be trust-worthy and refuse to share the news with anyone else before I've had the chance to discuss it, and that everybody on the team will be disciplined about their communication and not accidentally leak the information to somebody else on the team, who will silently resent being "the last to know" (which could very well be the case, if they're the last 1:1 in the week).
A weekly team huddle. The weekly team huddle is often the best place to deliver team-wide news all at once, but only if it affects the entire team--individual layoffs, individual performance actions (PIPs, etc) are entirely inappropriate to bring up at the team huddle, as would be any sort of salary adjustment (whether up or down), as it's only going to invite comparisons. You're going to end up dealing with some of that in any event (people on the team will, probably, talk to one another about raises and such, regardless of what you'd prefer), so you certainly want to be prepared to handle those discussions, but having those conversations out in a public form (the team huddle) is pretty much the worst place possible to have them.

Beyond those, when do you have regularly-scheduled meetings with each of your directs? Most manager's don't, and so now we get in to the world of the dreaded unscheduled chat.

Look, let's be face it: Any time you schedule something with your direct that isn't part of a regular cadence, it's going to raise some eyebrows. And as soon as their eyebrows go up, so will their anxiety. It's a natural human response: The brain is basically hard-wired to assume the worst of a situation. (Want to really watch this in action? Send your spouse or significant other a text message with just "Can we talk?" and then don't send anything after that. Or worse, start to type a follow-up, then erase it without sending, then start to type a follow-up, then erase it without sending, and by about the fifth or sixth iteration of this, you'll have effectively pushed them into a psychotic break.)

If you really want to try and ease your direct's anxiety, you can try to provide some context. "Hey, can we chat? I need to talk to you about your promotion." That certainly provides some context to the conversation, but it also runs the risk of misinterpretation on their end. "I need to talk to you about your promotion" can be interpreted by the confident as "I need to tell you that you got your promotion!" which, when it turns out that they didn't get it, feels like an utter rejection and low blow. "I need to talk to you about your promotion" to the anxious can easily be "I need to tell you that you blew it and didn't get the promotion", but they're also just as likely to interpret it as "I need to tell you that you blew it and not only did you fail to get the promotion, the CEO is furious at your impertience and wants you fired", ridiculous as that may sound. (Anxiety and unwarranted assumption really knows no boundaries.)

The other danger of providing some context about a conversation is that unless you can do so without giving away part of the conversation, you run the risk of the worst of all situations: When the direct replies back with a response that demands more information or explanation. Now you're in exactly the situation you didn't want to be in, trying to explain or discuss a sensitive topic over a context-less medium like text, email, or instant messenger chat. If you try and punt on the conversation, your direct stews and simmers and gets angry or upset; if you don't, you're unable to read them effectively (and vice versa) and it becomes easy to really blow the whole thing into a Really Big Deal. Definitely not high on the Ted Lasso Scale of Senstivity and Compassion.

I'll be transparent here: I personally have never found a way to ask a direct for an unscheduled meeting without triggering those negative feelings, and I really don't think there is one. Thus, my only real advice or suggestions here is as follows:

Understand that your direct is going to be on edge. If you give them the context-free request, they're going to be assuming the worst. It's human nature, and you can't really avoid it.
Minimize the window of discomfort. For everybody's sake, do not ask to chat with somebody on Friday, and then schedule the meeting for Monday afternoon. Do the request first thing Monday, instead.
Be up-front as much as you can. Don't schedule-bomb somebody and silently drop a meeting on your direct's calendar without at least telling them in an email, "I need to chat with you about something, and it's a little urgent. Saw you had some free time this afternoon, grabbed it for a conversation. Talk more then." Yeah, your direct is going to start doing weird gyrations in their head as they try to mentally go over everything they've done in the last few days that might trigger this, but remember, you can't help that. And, if you just silently schedule-bomb them, it'll just be that much more surprising and panic-inducing.
For the love of all humanity, don't just cancel the meeting without reason or ghost it. Seriously. That's also a recipe for a psychotic break, and honestly, I think it's grounds for justifiable homicide in twelve states. If you put the meeting on the calendar, be there, or at the very least postpone or reschedule it with a reason. And keep in mind, you're leaving your direct twisting in the wind during the interim--if that doesn't bother you, then maybe you lack the compassion necessary to be a good manager.

And, hopefully it goes without saying, if you can provide context to the conversation, by all means do so! Then you avoid all of this, and the world is a bright and happy place again. Most of the time, anyway....

Tags: management teams

Last modified 15 January 2024

We Need to Talk

If we can't use this, what do we use instead?