Having Tough Conversations

Hello everyone. Dennis Engelbrecht with The Family Business Institute and the CEO Roundtable program for contractors.
Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to give us any comments, suggestions to our blog. Always want to try to keep
improving best we can.

Today I want to talk about having the tough conversations. Leadership and management is difficult and I think there's a
lot of conflict involved. What's really difficult is dealing with people. I think it's even harder if you're a nice person. If you're
a nice person, you don't want to hurt people's feelings, right? So if they haven't quite performed to your standards or
they're not working as hard as you want or they're just not getting it done, those become difficult conversations and
they're difficult conversations for good people. But having said that, I want you to think about it a couple of different ways.

I think the first way to think about it is, it's your responsibility. It's not just your responsibility to yourself, to your
organization, it's your responsibility to that underperforming person. Very likely, they're sitting back thinking what they're
doing is okay, it's adequate. They may be satisfied, or on the other hand, they may have that underlying feeling because
they see the look on your face or the responses that they're not doing well and then they're sitting back and they're
unhappy, de-motivated, stressed, coming to work grudgingly instead of with enthusiasm and all of that. That's not good
either. Neither one of those is good. Or some folks have a little more ego and despite their performance, they think they're
killing it. They think they're fantastic, they think they deserve a raise, a promotion, the next area of responsibility.

Of course, they're going to be disappointed when they don't get that. So, you do in fact have a responsibility that individual
for truth telling. If you expand upon this to an entire culture of your business, this truth telling is going to be key to setting
a good culture, having high expectations, having high performance, having great results, all of that. I think in one of our
earlier blogs, we talked about a quote that the culture of your business, or your company, is established by the lowest
level of behavior which you tolerate, which the leaders tolerate.

I think there's some truth to that. Now think about it. What that means is you have to have those tough conversations.
Now we have Nay here on the camera, let's just say Nay and I are having this conversation and I'm truth-telling. Well now
she has an opportunity to understand where her behavior is falling short of expectations, perhaps better understand how
she can raise her level of performance and then maybe if she has that ego and has those desires to do even more and to
have more responsibility, have a more achievable pathway to get there.

If she already knew she wasn't doing this, at least she has some reality and she can quit stressing about it and she can
decide this either isn't for her or there's a pathway to improvement, but now she can have a better life. She can hopefully
improve her performance and and be a positive team member. But if we never have that conversation, here's the reality.
The reality is, that performance or attitude or whatever it is, is going to reflect on the people around her. We're going to
have more non-performance. We're going to have worse attitudes. We're going to have a lower culture for our business.
All of this points back to you and your willingness to have the difficult conversations.

So that's today's encouragement. I talked about putting on a face in one of our prior things. It may be difficult for you to
have those conversations, but get in role, put on your face, come in as an actor, have those tough conversations. Get it
done. It'll be better for your business, better for your employee, and better for you. Again, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging
Deeper. Thanks for tuning in.