A guide to difficult conversations

Another interesting idea: apparently, positive motivation (reward) works much better than negative motivation (punishment). Allegedly it's "scientifically proven" (for some definition of "scientifically") which I haven't yet taken the time to research, but I plan to.

I've been thinking about how to apply this in two of the most important areas of interpersonal interaction in our lives, in our careers and in interpersonal relationships. We often discuss on HN why it's difficult in careers (conflicting interests, hard to measure results, under-specified goals, etc.). In relationships, I think the main difficulty is that we enter relationships with so many expectations (i.e. "my partner should love me and spend time with me and give me gifts" or similar) that these can't really be used for positive motivation, instead we interpret the absence of them as negative motivation. One idea I had, though, is to explicitly verbalise rewarding in addition to the actual reward (i.e. instead of just spending time with them, say "I really liked that you did X yesterday" and spend time with them).

That's not how I see it. Yes, the employer (the organization) may be psychopath but I am not interacting with an organization while having a difficult conversation. I would be interacting with a manager or a colleague or someone who reports to me. These are human beings who are not psychopath. These are also not short-termist. Sure, we would all change jobs sooner or later but I would sure like to maintain good relationships with them and hopefully work with them again in future. So it makes a lot of sense that while talking to them I talk to them with some empathy which I think they deserve.

It all really depends though. This speaks to concepts like the 5 love languages (time, words, acts, touch, gifts) but words mean nothing to me personally. Words are easy, show me instead. But each person has their own needs and bias.

>It gets the problem wrong. It's very unlikely the problem is a lack of opportunity for co-founders to provide one on one feedback. The solution is one that no one really wants and wouldn't fix the issue. The problem is the co-founder poorly choosing words and poorly choosing the venue to deliver them. I also don't think it focuses on the right

I don't know - to me that was clear from the statement.

>When you said, “I’m not happy with your work,” to me in front of the team, it undermines my authority and the way it's phrased is inappropriate.

This is what NVC calls an evaluation. The other person can simply disagree about it undermining the authority.

There's a reason negotiations books (not just NVC) emphasize talking about how you felt. It is because few ordinary people would deny your feelings. The cofounder is not going to jump in and say "No, you did not feel embarrassed". It is, however, very easy for them to say "You're overreacting. People know you're the boss. Nothing is being undermined."

Also, your phrasing is clearly blame oriented. That'll automatically set up the defenses.

>Co-founders should be equal and it's not really the place of one to be "not happy" with the other's work.

Even before I read the NVC book, I started telling people "should is not in my vocabulary" (I told my last manager this). And not surprisingly, it's a "forbidden" word in NVC (with a few exceptions, of course). In my experience, should statements make conversations go downhill. Should is often a lazy word. It is often used as an excuse not to explain something. My former manager had a habit of "The team should ..." and "An employee should ...". The team often disagreed, but without her giving a well thought out rationale that people could discuss, there were just should statements. It is intellectually lazy.

(And of course, in reality, many cofounding relationships are not equal).

>I mean, do you really want or expect an honest answer to the question? Because it's probably something along the lines of "I think these meetings are a waste of my time".

I'm surprised you say this, given how often I've been through this and observed managers go through this. One of my former bosses had a meeting with our team and a team across the globe who dialed in (one meeting with all of us in the "room"). Few people from our team attended. So after a few weeks, instead of expressing frustration, he said he noticed many people weren't attending, and inquired as to why. And he did get variants of "waste of my time", but since he was inviting in his query instead of complaining, he got valuable feedback on why it was a waste of time. As a result, he alone met with the remote team, and then would summarize the outcomes of the meeting to our team during one of our other meetings. It also allowed for a better time for the remote team since there were fewer people to satisfy.

There have been plenty of times where using the NVC style for people who are late to meetings has resulted in fruitful outcomes. Sometimes the person who is late has stuff going on with his health, and we move the time to accommodate his medical needs. In my experience, telling someone he is always late and needs to shape up under these circumstances will usually mean he will never express why he is late.