There was a man in my team whom I liked very much.
He was warm. He was loyal. He had been with the company longer than I had. And he was, quietly and steadily, no longer able to do the job we needed him to do.
I knew this in January. I said it to him in July.
Those six months are among the things I am least proud of in my career, and I want to explain why, because I meet leaders every week who are living inside their own version of them.
What I told myself
I told myself I was being kind. I told myself he was going through a difficult period at home and the timing was wrong. I told myself the situation might correct itself.
None of that was true.
I was protecting myself from twenty uncomfortable minutes. And I paid for those twenty minutes with six months of a team that could see the problem clearly and had begun to wonder whether their leader could.
That is the real cost of avoidance. It is never contained to the two of you.
Delay does not soften anything
When I finally spoke to him, the conversation was harder than it would have been in January, not easier.
Because by then I had six months of accumulated frustration in my voice. Because he had six months of positive silence from me that now looked like dishonesty. And because he asked me, reasonably, why I had not said something earlier.
I did not have a good answer.
From where I stand today, I believe this: feedback delayed is feedback distorted. The kind version of a hard conversation is the early one.
How I do it now
I do not have a clever model. I have four habits.
- I go in with one message, not five. If I cannot write it in a single sentence beforehand, I am not ready.
- I say the difficult thing in the first minute. The long warm-up is for my comfort, not theirs, and everyone knows what is coming anyway.
- I separate the behaviour from the person. "This report was late three times" is a fact. "You are unreliable" is a verdict, and people defend themselves against verdicts.
- I then stop talking. Genuinely stop. The silence after the difficult sentence is where the real conversation begins, and most leaders destroy it by filling it.
Manage yourself before the room
Emotional fitness matters most in these twenty minutes.
Before a hard conversation I take what I call the helicopter view. I lift myself above the situation and look down at two people, one of whom happens to be me. What does the other person need to walk out of this room with their dignity intact?
You can deliver almost any message if the answer to that question stays in front of you.
A quiet moment
Think of the conversation you are currently not having.
You know the one. It arrived in your mind before you finished reading that sentence.
Ask yourself honestly: who is the delay actually protecting?
Adapted from themes in my books, "Take The Lead" and the forthcoming "The Quiet Leader."