Are you even a real farmer if you haven’t had any tough conversations on the farm? All kidding aside, running a business with family and often non-family employees can involve some difficult and emotionally charged conversations.
Country Guide searched out three books written by professors, corporate trainers and members of the Harvard Negotiation Project for their top tips on how to approach the conversations that can make or break your farm business.
Where do you even begin?
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All sorts of questions and feelings swirl around and bump into each other when you start to think about how you’re going to get started on a high-stakes conversation. It can even make that conversation seem impossible.
So, do what you do everywhere else on the farm. Get real about it.
Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, co-authors of How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, suggest first figuring out the goal of the conversation. Conversations can happen for a variety of reasons, so determine the functional goals you want to achieve.
Are you trying to come to a mutual assessment of something, for example. Or are you trying to get to the bottom of something on the farm that keeps happening and needs to stop. Or maybe you’re just looking for input into what should be next on the farm agenda.
“Ask yourself, ‘Why am I having this discussion? What do I want to get out of it?’” write Boghossian and Lindsay. They also stress making your goal all about understanding, not winning.
“Abandon adversarial thinking (conflict, arguing, debating, ridicule, the idea of winning), and adopt collaborative thinking (listening, learning, co-operation) … One key to realizing you can have seemingly impossible conversations is recognizing that discussions are natural learning environments for both people.”
The five authors of Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High say that a key first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix “the problem of believing others are the source of all that ails us.”
Business leaders who excel at dialogue tend to turn this logic around, the authors write. “They believe the best way to work on ‘us’ is to start with ‘me’.”
It means that farmers who are really skilled at crucial conversations will ask the following questions: what do I want for myself, what do I want for the other person, and what do I want for the relationship?
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Keen, authors of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, say that it isn’t about finding the answer to a difficult conversation, it’s about whether you’ve been looking in the right places. “At heart, the problem isn’t in your actions, it’s in your thinking.”
Because difficult conversations are a part of life it’s important to keep conversational goals realistic. “Eliminating fear and anxiety [around difficult conversations] is an unrealistic goal,” they write. “Reducing fear and anxiety and learning how to manage that which remains are more obtainable. Achieving perfect results with no risk will not happen. Getting better results in the face of tolerable odds might.”
Keep the risk level tolerable
The authors of Difficult Conversations say that difficult conversations are of three types: the “What happened?” conversation (disagreement about what has happened or what should happen, who said what and did what), the “Feelings” conversation (are my feelings valid? Should I acknowledge or deny them? What about the other person’s feelings?), and the “Identity” conversation (the one we have with ourselves about what the situation means to us).
“Engaging successfully requires learning to operate effectively in each of these three realms,” they say. “We can change how we respond to each of these (conversational) challenges… by understanding the errors and havoc they wreak.” (They go in depth into the three conversation types and approaches for each in the book.)
They continue: “Once you understand the challenges inherent in the Three Conversations and the mistakes we make in each, you are likely to find that your purpose for having a particular conversation begins to shift…and you may find that you no longer have a message to deliver, but rather some information to share and some questions to ask.”
Why is it so difficult to decide between avoiding a conversation or confronting someone? The authors of Difficult Conversations say that it’s because “if we confront the problem, things might get even worse. We may be rejected or attacked; we might hurt the other person in ways we didn’t intend; and the relationship might suffer.” But we also know that if we avoid the issue, “our feelings will fester, we’ll wonder why we didn’t stick up for ourselves, and we’ll rob the other person of the opportunity to improve things.”
The best option? “Approach every conversation with an awareness that your partner understands problems in a way that you don’t currently comprehend,” say Boghossian and Lindsay.
If we aim for learning instead of telling or blaming, we can improve our odds at successful conversations.
Who’s really to blame?
“Why is it always the other person who is naïve or selfish or irrational or controlling?” ask Stone, Patton and Keen, authors of Difficult Conversations.
“Why is it that we never think we are the problem?”
The authors say it’s imperative we stop arguing about who’s right and, instead, that we explore each other’s stories. They see this as where the trouble starts: the important parts of your story collide with the important part of your conversational partner’s story.
“We assume the collision is because of how the other person is; they assume it’s because of how we are. But really the collision is a result of our stories simply being different.”
The trouble is, the conversation stops being a conversation. Instead, it becomes a battle of messages, otherwise known as an argument, which inhibits our ability to learn how the other person sees the world.
As the authors write, “Wherever you want to go, understanding — imagining yourself into the other person’s story — has got to be your first step.”
What if you get stuck?
Sometimes you seem to be doing everything right, things seem to be going so well, and then — kaboom! — everything goes off the rails.
These ideas may get the conversation back on track:
Try Rapoport’s Rules for disagreement: This code of conduct was designed to offer guidelines for productive arguments. It aims to de-escalate tension and help people disagree thoughtfully and respectfully. So, to engage successfully, you follow these steps:
Attempt to re-express your conversation partner’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I had thought of putting it that way.’”
List any points of agreement.
Mention anything you have learned from your conversation partner.
Only now are you permitted to make a critique or refutation.
Get curious: The authors suggest, “Instead of asking yourself, ‘How can they think that?!’ ask yourself, ‘I wonder what information they have that I don’t?’”
Pull back: Crucial Conversations also says that when stakes and emotions are high, and things are turning ugly, we need to pull ourselves out of the argument in order to see what’s happening to us and those around us. “(We get) so caught up in the content of the conversation… that we are blind to the conditions.” The authors say, “The moment you sense fear, frustration, anger, outrage or disgust from your conversation partner, pay attention to the specific words they use… listen and acknowledge them as soon as possible.”
Stop playing the blame game: Boghossian and Lindsay suggest avoiding the word “you.” Instead, switching to “we” and “us” encourages collaboration.
Also, the Harvard Negotiation Project found it’s better to invite people to collaborate.
Emphasize how you’ve each contributed to the issue at hand and how you can each help solve it. It may make all the difference.
Resources
– Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, a book by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen.
– Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, a book by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler and Emily Gregory.
– How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, a book by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay.
