It’s really a bitter pill but once taken our lives as a managers can start to gain traction and wind can finally fill our sails.
It’s not always smooth sailing but a least we’ll have strong timbers beneath us.
Let’s take a conversation for example.
When advising or trying to help a friend, the friend often leads the conversation with reasons, rationales, emotions, and pleads for understanding.
And as a listening friend we follow along and the conversation wanders all over – that is natural.
When we’re a manager having a performance improvement conversation with an employee (who may be a friend) all these things now become sidetracks and take the conversation away from where it needs to go.
Our focus needs to be bringing clarity to the expectation of performance and defining the gap in behavior.
No one wants to be the heartless, robotic manager but heartless is not our only choice when we learn to communicate as a manager.
We can still be compassionate, caring and accepting and still guide the conversation forward without defense and argumentation.
We don’t need to change the employee’s mind or invalidate their right to have emotions.
We can give that a little time and space but we need to move forward with clear behavioral facts.
Friendship is one of our most prized possession as human beings.
As managers our definition of true friendship might need to expand a bit and with grace in our hearts we can acknowledge how challenging that is for all of us, managers and our staff alike.
We can also learn to gently keep a conversation on track when we are managing.