Failure to Communicate by Weeks Holly.;

Author:Weeks, Holly.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

What happened here?

This conversation has gone wrong for everyone: for Erica and Stewart, certainly, but for Gordon, the vice president, too. Two parts of the problem are familiar from chapter 6. First, there are power issues in the picture, with bosses and subordinates on more than one level: Erica works for Stewart, both of them work for Gordon, and they all work for the donors. Second, Stewart, at least, had a combat mentality in his skirmish with Erica: from his point of view, they were in a zero-sum conversation that would have just one winner and one loser.

Power issues did turn up the heat. But simply put, it was not a power battle that pushed the conversation over the edge for Stewart or Erica. It was the fallout from their signature combinations of emotions.

If we want to find ways to get ourselves out of these difficult conversations intact or to keep out of them in the first place, we certainly won’t get far, as we saw in chapter 6, by trying to shoehorn all tough conversations into the “one-up wins, one-down loses” cliché. But we’ve also seen before that trying to put conversations back on track by reducing the question to who was right and who was wrong won’t shed much light on how to improve them, either. It’s easy to see Stewart as the bad guy here, a bully and a buffoon. It’s always easy to see a difficult conversation as one with a bad guy and a victim. Reversing the roles, Stewart certainly thought Erica herself was a bad actor at the time. And it looked as though Gordon, the most senior manager there, just punted, hoping that a little time and distance would lessen the effects of a calamity he didn’t cause and didn’t want to claim. It’s a little more complicated to see that each of them—Erica, Stewart, and Gordon—was caught up in an emotional morass of his or her own. Nevertheless, it’s more useful to look into those tangles than to act like the Three Stooges, pointing fingers at anyone but themselves.

Let’s pull this example apart enough to see what happened and what can be done about it. We’ll look first at Stewart because, from everyone’s point of view except his, the conversation’s downward slide started with him.

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