with us today is Mark Murphy his most recent book is truth at work the science of delivering tough messages it's a really critical book and critical concept which is that you know the hardest thing any of us have to do the thing that holds us back most often from getting traction on what's most important to us is is often a conversation that we're not having and and that we're you know ideas that were not putting out there in a way that might create some kind of conflict so mark has the solution for us in truth at work it's a very well thought-out disciplined process and he's here to talk about it with us today mark welcome to the bregman leadership podcast thanks so much for having me it's great to be here so mark you talk about the science of delivering tough messages and you talk about the a truth talk the need for truth talks what's the truth talk the truth talk is essentially a real dialogue it's a real conversation where we surface issues that not everybody wants to talk about and the reason it's important is that several fold number one we have right now going on a real lack of conversation what we have throughout the media throughout social media we have a lot of what I would call reciprocated diatribe and that is people kind of shouting messages back and forth at each other but that's not a conversation generally speaking when you think about a conversation there are as many questions as there are statements it's a two-way sharing of information but not just a sharing of information there's an assimilation a digesting a dissecting of that information and ideally somebody's perspective is going to be changed but that's not what we have at the moment with this reciprocated diatribe we have shouting but that's not a conversation so that's really what a truth talk is supposed to be so it's interesting because when I think about these difficult conversations that people have it almost always starts with somebody saying I've got to deliver a tough message to this person I got to tell them something that's going to be hard for them to hear we enter into it it sounds like as a setup right because we aren't thinking I have to have a conversation we're thinking I need to deliver a message and you're saying that the idea of going into a conversation with the intent to deliver a message is a mistake it's a mistake in that it puts us in the mindset that the other person's perspective isn't relevant or valid and even if we're talking about for example let's say we have an employee who's late 15 days in a row it's not that I necessarily care that this person has some incredibly valid reason for being late 15 days in a row but rather if I go into the conversation that their perspective is irrelevant much less stupid I'm already setting this up for the person to get defensive and not hear anything that I have to say I can't work around their psychological defenses if I don't go at least go into it with the idea that they have a viewpoint now it may not sync with mine their viewpoint may ultimately lead to them not being a good fit with my company but it's not going to be I'm never going to get them to really understand my perspective if I don't first reach out and try and understand what's kind of going on in their head because their buy-in is critical to them actually making a behavioral change I can hear certain leaders that I work with their voices in my head saying wait a second the guy is late 15 times it's not rocket science like just I gotta let them know like they can't be late done I got to need their perspective they just it's not rocket science so refute that for me so there's there's kind of two ways to look at it one is if we're at the point where it's not rocket science they've made the choice not to show up well then just fire them if we actually want to sit down and have a conversation where we're trying to get them to understand why they can't be late well then we need their guard to come down a little bit we need them to engage and actually figure out well yeah the boss has a point this is the relationship we need to have I need to show up on time and so my because I get a lot of the same thing from leaders that I see well yeah they're they're late it's it's terrible well then just fire them but we're not having a true talk at that point at that point if somebody has messed up so much that they're clearly not a fit great what I see a lot of managers do is put themselves through this process where they're having this pseudo conversation they pretend like they're sharing some deep information and getting buy-in from the other person but really all they're doing is telling the person don't be late well okay I do that but that's not a conversation so let me ask you one other question that comes to me and then and then I want to dive into the meat of the book yeah I had a conversation very early on in my career I had started my company this is probably about 20 18 years ago let's say and there was a coach who's working for me who violated a contract he there was a contact that said that they can't contract directly with the client because their contracting through our company and they went around and tried to do that so I called him in and to have a conversation with him and I really wanted to approach it I approached it with curiosity like wow I really didn't understand why they would do this and I said look I wanna first of all am I am i right like did did you in fact go because the client called me said did you go try to go around and contract directly to the client and he said yes I did and I said help me understand what's going on for you that you made that choice like it you know to you know we have a very clear contract and you already knew but you made that choice and I kind of want to understand and his response was look I don't want to be psychoanalyzed and and so then you know then my response was okay okay so you know you violated the contract so I'm gonna have to fire you but I but I tried to approach it to sort of understand his perspective and yet he came back with I don't wanna be psychoanalyzed and I've actually heard that a couple of times and I'm wondering you know from a truth-talker perspective when you have a message but you're still coming with curiosity how you avoid that so there's a couple of things number one is that in a real conversation it does take two people to want to engage in this and when you have somebody who's defensiveness is so up that they say listen I would rather opt out of the organization then I would sit down and have a true dialogue with you I mean odds are this is a person who's been caught they're embarrassed etc etc and you know kind of coming into a conversation like that this is you know one of the things I would always tell somebody is know what your goal is if the goal is ultimately there's no changing it they violated the contract you're going to free up their future or you know my euphemism for firing them you're going to separate way part ways with them regardless of the outcome of this conversation oftentimes somebody can sense that and they're basically saying listen I don't want to have 20 minutes of preamble before we get to the Urata here and at that point honestly there isn't a lot of comeback because this isn't all this also is not a great setup for a real dialogue we already know what the goal is the goal is you broke this non-negotiable immutable rule and so no matter what each of us says in this conversation you're still getting let go and there are going to be people who will just say let's just fire me just let's just make this go faster bad day time rip it off and be done you know that's interesting because I actually think I was open to you know if there was some reason that I could understand and we could figure this out we can get through it but maybe that's maybe I wasn't being honest with myself maybe I was just you know you violate a contract like that you're you know we're done like and so maybe he sensed that maybe I wasn't coming to the conversation but the kind of openness I thought I was coming to the conversation and he sense that so that's interesting and something to think about let's briefly go through the eight steps of the anatomy of a truth talk you know very short over view and then we'll go into some some more detail yeah so essentially every true thought kind of has to begin with some understanding of what might be blocking this person from wanting to engage in this and there's all sorts of psychological defenses and even financial defenses that prevent the person from these truth killers prevent them from wanting to have a real conversation once you get some lay of the land we really want to kind of jump in their head a little bit and get a sense of what's going on inside their head and this is where I get some resistance from managers sometimes where they come back with a I don't want to understand their perspective and I approach this more like pretend you're a negotiator yeah you have your position but you're not going to get a great deal unless you understand what's going on inside the other person's head you can't sell unless you understand their perspective you can't negotiate unless you understand the other person's perspective and the fact is you don't have to agree with it I'm not saying you have to come away and say oh they should be allowed to be late fifteen days in a row that no but you have to understand it before you can deal with it once you do that you've basically got a getaway everything else all the emotions the emotional reactions the interpretations and get right to the facts and this is kind of the heart of a truth talk is that truth talks are not really big emotional explorations they're really getting rid of everything else that isn't factual so we can then have an unemotional conversation about what's really happening once you do that we can then invite this person into a conversation and this is really as simple as saying hey listen would you be willing to have a conversation with me about this I'm I'm not coming in to yell at you I actually want to have a conversation I want to understand this once you've done that now you can listen to them understand where they're coming from and it's always a good idea when possible to let them go first kind of share where their head is at which is you know like sales 101 negotiating 101 don't start with the big speech elicit from the other person once you've done that you can share your perspective maybe create a word picture which is sort of a common understanding of what our expectations here are come to some agreement and then we're ready to get some buy-in and actually move forward so you know if I were to distill a truth talk into its essence it's basically jump inside the other person's head figure out what's going on in their mind get rid of all your emotional baggage all my stuff I gotta get rid of that once I've gotten rid of that I invite them into a conversation and now we can start to hash things out so this step two of focusing on the facts and getting rid of the emotional piece it makes a tremendous amount of sense and is tremendously difficult right because you know we often confuse our emotional responses to facts or with facts we confuse them with facts so my question is what guidance can you give us that can help people really distinguish between facts and you know interpretation of facts and the emotional reaction to facts and and and the goals that we're trying to achieve how do we separate that out to really have a conversation about facts so there's there's kind of two techniques and one of them is incredibly simple and a little goofy but it's if we literally imagine you've got a blank piece of paper in front of you and you just make like a 2x2 grid and you just label this grid facts interpretations reactions and ends what I would recommend and I do it personally before I go into a tough conversation I want to actually make my notes to myself and say okay this is a fact and they're being disrespectful okay I'm going to put that in the fact well okay now once I kind of label everything out I go back and I look at it and I say I put some some stuff in the fact box here and I'm not entirely sure so then the second thing I want to do I have an acronym fetish so I would say you want to scout for the facts so you want to make sure they're specific and candid and objective but ultimately you want to make sure that if there were a video camera in the room with the video camera see the situation the same way I saw it in the video camera or the tape recorder might say I don't know that that was disrespect per se rather I think that might be just a series of words that we've interpreted as disrespectful they said your idea will not work is that disrespectful did they see it as disrespectful well then probably the video camera would have said no they said the words your idea will not work that's not the same thing as totally being disrespectful so if we actually kind of box this out and then we make ourselves look at the stuff we put in the fact column and say what if video cameras see this the same exact way that I saw this oftentimes what we find is now it's this is not really you know fly-on-the-wall kind of perspective here this is not the way the video camera in the corner would have seen this situation and that is sometimes what we need to do to force ourselves to really segment out what the facts are versus what our interpretation of those facts are it feels like a critical practice in life right which is that I think most of us walk through life feeling like our perspective is probably shared and and that when people do things we often personalize them and feel like they're doing them to us and I had someone tell me the other day if it starts raining and you're walking outside and you get all wet is the rain targeting you yes then I thought like that's actually very good point like the rain is not targeting me it's just raining like that's what rain does and that's actually true for people in many ways so so it's you know 2d personalized it helps maybe to to identify you know what's actually factual and what's my reaction to the situation is happening still though it's hard I mean if I think it requires maybe years of therapy to say I will you know I will look at a situation and not invest all of my emotional baggage in that situation and actually even be aware that I have emotional baggage that I shouldn't be investing that's you know it's not that it's not that easy I think to do if you found with leaders that you work with that they get it immediately or there's a process some do some don't so for the ones that don't there are two things that kind of help number one is that once you understand that the brain is essentially an interpretation engine our brain absolutely works against us in this regard our brain does not if we were kind of hardwired if you hear a rustling in the bushes outside your window for example the brain does not naturally say oh my isn't that interesting there's a rustling in the bushes if I I have a 13 year old daughter if she and I were up she's my horror movie buddy if she and I were up late watching some horror movie and I hear a rustling in the bushes I'm likely to say ah dang that's that's one of those clowns coming to get us I saw that the movie last night or if I were a bird watcher I might say oh well isn't that interesting I bet that's a yellow-bellied red-haired thrush or something and so our brain is hardwired to view the world with interpretations rather than kind of dispassionate facts but the other thing then this is important is that social media is actually training our brain to respond in the exact wrong way so when you think about what works on social media well Twitter Facebook Instagram etc they want us to respond quickly and emotionally and when you respond quickly and emotionally that's what Twitter thrives on but that is the exact wrong response when you're walking into a tough situation so one of the things that I find works well is a pointing out to people that listen part of this is not you if part of this is your you're surrounded by stimuli that say respond emotionally respond personally do it quick quick quick and somebody once asked me how do I make my brain work faster in a tough conversation and my answer was you don't what you can do though is slow the conversation down and even something as simple as saying to somebody in your office said you know I'm pretty ticked off of what she did that meeting last week say oh okay look we just pause for a second here because if we start to insert just a three-count before we start reacting and uncorking and if you train yourself to a three count it'd be pull out a piece of paper say do you mind if I take some notes I really want to give this it's full do you can habitual eyes those things and over time they will start to train you that when you see something that sets you off you're going to kind of hardwire this response that breathe just just breathe pull out a piece of paper and even if you're not consciously thinking I have to think about facts and interpretations reactions and ends and all of that forget that for a minute habitual eyes a three-count and a piece of paper that does bit by bit over even just a couple of months start to make a difference you're talking to the guy who wrote the book for seconds so you know this idea of slowing down is very you know you're you you have an all ears audience to this one I figured we had some intellectuals in panic oh yeah exactly so one of the things you said that I found very interesting and counterintuitive is you talked about if I understood you correctly setting your own goals after taking in their perspective it's a step that says you're taking their perspective then you're deciding what it is you want to achieve and it's that's very counterintuitive because most of us won't go into a truth talk without having a goal of what we want to achieve with it I mean if someone's late 15 times my goal is for them to not be late 15 times talk to us about why it's useful to to only have that goal the if I'm understanding it correctly after you've had that conversation and how do you do that how do you really not go into a conversation with an intention of what you want to achieve good question so one of the things that go back to that 15 late example so you go into it and if your goal is truly I want them you know I cannot have an employee that is late 15 times we kind of have a an inflection point here we can either say there is no salvaging this this is violate the rule we're done here in which case my goal is I'm just going to go fire them and at that point we're not really having a conversation if we are going to have a conversation though part of what I'm doing when I'm kind of climbing inside their head a bit and trying to figure out their perspective is I'm assessing what kind of goal I have any shot of achieving here so if I really look deep into their perspective I'm looking at their pattern of behavior I'm listening to the things they've said I may take a step back and say you know what my goal isn't a conversation here I might not be able to do this and this is the thing that sometimes we go into a conversation with with one goal in mind but if we don't open ourselves up to the possibility that the data may tell us something different the data being there what's in their head and what comes out of their mouth if we don't open ourselves up to the data may change my goal and force me to readjust what is doable here then essentially we fall back into this reciprocated diatribe where I'm going to yell they're going to yell and we're going to end up at an impasse so it's not so much that it always has to be perfectly linear rather it's more a case that I need to be open that I may learn something about them that forces me to reevaluate whether my goal is doable not doable you know you go into a tough conversation with your boss for example and you're like okay well I've got a kind of a jerk as a boss this is untenable if I go in and I say my goal is they're going to treat me with respect okay well maybe but you may find something out and you can set that as an initial goal I mean you know that's fine but you may go into the conversation and all the sudden years starting to realize that uh-uh this is this is not gonna work and so rather I've got to adjust my goal to I've got to just keep things quiet for the next six months so I can find a new job and that's the adjustment process that that we need to be open to so briefly I want you to share this idea of a word picture which I found very compelling and important in in conversations where we may be using words that each of us has a different interpretation of so the word picture concept was born out of this idea that if I go tell one of my employees I need this report done ASAP we've all got a different definition that could mean in the next five minutes it could mean by the end of Friday it who knows with it's nonspecific and so the word picture concept was partly that and partly one of my surveys recently found that only about 29 percent of employees know whether or not they are truly doing a good job okay so people don't know if they're on the right track with their work and we have fuzzy definitions of a lot of different words so a word picture essentially said take everything you want your employees to do where every boundary you want to set the conversation and break it into three categories essentially bad good and great needs work good work and great work and then you want to define each of those categories in a really behaviorally specific way so for example if I go talk to my kids and I say I want you to do better piano practicing they're going to look at me and go but I did good piano practicing well it's not good enough it doesn't mean my definition of what good enough is and they're going to look at me and oh but I don't know what that is so I would sit down with them and say all right and because I torture my children this is exactly what we've done sat down and said all right well define let's define what bad piano practicing looks like well I guess if I just play the piece through three times and I sit there for 15 minutes that would be bad okay perfect I like that I can see we're not doing it enough times we play it through what is good piano practicing well good would be I'd sit here for 40 minutes and I would if I make a mistake when I'm playing my piece through I would stop and fix it ah like that what would be great piano practicing that if that's good if that's you know that's nice you can live with that what's even better well I wouldn't even bother playing my piece all the way through I would only work on the parts where I know I'm struggling and I would play it until I have worked out all the kinks in that particular measure okay now what I've essentially done is I've created this behaviorally specific grading scale for what bad good and great is now if I go have a conversation with them I don't even have to say you know Afghan boxing wasn't very good I can just say so where do you think that piano practicing fell when I could say I know that was needs work at all I'll go do it more and it allows them to automatically sell correct and the same exact thing happens in the workplace and if we do this for a tough conversation we could go into a conversation and say alright well tell me what a bad conversation would look like well we both walk away we've said our piece but we've used a lot more sentences in questions than on and on and on and it's just a way of saying let's define some stuff before we start talking across each other let's just define some stuff so we know exactly what it is we're talking about it feels important and it feels like the risk of sounding or feeling patronizing as the person leading this exists and that you have to really go into it with both confidence but also humility and a willingness to learn and you know because because I can imagine that everyone you go into a truth conversation with might feel like you're 10 year-old son and that's one of the is an absolutely huge risk and that's one of the reasons why we actually have to begin with their perspective rather than I've got this agenda and I'm going to shove it down their throats because that can even if you don't think we're letting that leak out it can still leak out and that's my conversation really truly has to be I want to understand if we don't go in with that ounce of humility that curiosity I want to know what's inside their head if we don't truly feel that it absolutely unconsciously leaks out they pick up on it and now all of a sudden it feels very parent-child and that's exactly what we do not want to happen we have been speaking with Mark Murphy his most recent book is truth at work the science of delivering tough messages mark it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast thank you so much oh thank you so much for having me this is great fun