Morphing into Management

These days I spend most of my time prepping for "difficult conversations."  I actually rehearse, write down bullet points, and try to anticipate the worst.  My life was not filled with such measures before I hit management. 

I could breeze through telling parents their child died and some difficult decsions were needing to be made.  I could reality test families of what their grasp was of a new terrible diagnosis.  For some reason, these conversations were almost second nature. 

Now I deal with conversations surrounding accountability, realtiy testing their perceptions, and ultimately attempting to inspire people to do their best.  These were topics I did not learn in graduate school.  In fact, there really isn't any sort of formal training on these issues.  I have spoken with those who have their MBA's and even they struggle.

My boyfriend and I discussed our daily agendas last night.  He commented that all I do is have "difficult conversations."  True.  Its funny that I never used to call them "difficult" until I started picking up the jargon from my boss/mentors in leadership.  I think one of my biggest road blocks is that I have way too much empathy.  Not only can I walk in that person's shoes, I can tell you the make, size, and style of the footwear.  Yes sir, I really put my heart into it.  By doing this, I tend to soften the message and impact.  This just ultimately gives me cause to beat myself up after for not being as firm as I needed to be. 

I've learned in my tenure that leadership is not defined by people liking you.  Its about influence.  And with influence there comes trust and respect.  I find its a lot easier to foster people liking you more than the two concepts of trust and respect.  Think about it, have you ever seen a grade-school age kiddo trying to use "trust" and "respect" on the playground?  Hell, no.  We are taught how to make friends, aka getting people to like you. 

These can be foreign concepts to install in people.  However, it is my duty as a leader, to figure it out and unfortunately have a lot of difficult conversations.