Hard Conversations

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

Careers, Business/management, Work, Advice, Harvard, Help, Mentor, Workplace, Business, Management, Challenges, Entrepreneurship, Hbr, Office, Business/careers, Business/entrepreneurship

4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are you dreading a work discussion? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Leslie John, a professor at Harvard Business School. They talk through what to do when you need to set your boss straight, meet with a direct report who wanted your new job, or hash things out with a negative team member.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:32.5	Today we're talking about difficult conversations with Leslie John.
0:36.1	She's a professor and teaches negotiations at Harvard Business School.
0:39.3	Leslie, thanks for joining us.
0:40.3	Thanks for having me.
0:42.3	So what is it about difficult conversations that makes us react so anxiously to them?
0:47.3	It's uncomfortable, right?
0:49.3	Like you feel like you're hurting the person's feelings, right?
0:53.3	There's this presumption when we're talking about tough conversations that there are conversations
0:56.6	you need to have. But are there cases in which you actually don't?
1:02.1	Yeah. So this may not be a popular thing to say, but I'm a proponent of kind of calculated avoidance,
1:09.0	right? Sometimes it's just not worth bringing up a difficult conversation.
1:14.1	If you think you should pick your battles, how do you do the calculation, which ones are worth
1:17.3	fighting? I would say it's probably more of an art than a science. I think I would look for,
1:23.0	is it a persistent issue? Is it a serious issue? And is there a sense that bringing it up can help drive towards a solution? Can you have a productive conversation about it?
1:37.8	Dear HBR, I started working at my company almost straight out of college. The CEO, who is very involved in all
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.