How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching and Counseling in Difficult Circumstances | Page 140

This book is in B&W, not color - Print page in Grayscale for Correct view! stakeholders are saying your company is dishonest, your probably don’t want to use an echo like, “Our company is dishonest”; that might imply you think so too. Nor do you want to start an argument: “Our company is not dishonest!” Nor do you want to pretend you didn’t hear what your stakeholders were telling you. “You think our company is dishonest” is a candid, straightforward echo that can’t be misinterpreted. But it’s awfully intrusive. Add some deflection, some conditional language, and some specifics, and you come up with something like this: “It sounds to me like some people here tonight think our company was dishonest when we said….” Echoing is very empathic, but it’s not as empathic as listening. Don’t interrupt to echo. (I make that mistake a lot.) 6. Agreement: “I Think You’re Right about That” The notion that agreeing with people is an empathic thing to do isn’t as obvious as it might seem. Sometimes disagreeing is the empathic thing to do. The essence of empathy is to make other people feel understood and respected (respected in the sense that you have made the effort to “get” their position) – not necessarily agreed with. Facile or insincere agreement is going to come across as facile or insincere, not as empathic. I have a close family member who almost never expresses disagreement directly; when he thinks I’m wrong but doesn’t want to discuss it, he says, “You’re probably right.” I don’t experience that as empathy but almost as dismissal. He doesn’t care enough to argue. If in fact you disagree with what a stakeholder is telling you, trying to fake agreement will actually get in the way of showing you understand and respect what he or she is saying. Nonetheless, finding and focusing on areas of agreement is an empathic thing to do. Of course it won’t help much if the areas of agreement are peripheral. Finding something unimportant to agree about may occasionally be a useful icebreaker in difficult negotiations, but often it comes across as sarcastic and trivializing: “Well, at least I can agree with you that 8 a.m. is too early for our next meeting.” You need to look for areas of agreement that will feel to your stakeholders like significant concessions – which means they may feel to you like significant losses. Let’s assume your stakeholders are berating you. Maybe it’s a low-hazard, high-outrage risk controversy and they’re angrily (and fearfully) telling you how arrogant and dishonest they think your company or agency has been. Maybe it’s a high-hazard, high-outrage crisis situation and they’re fearfully (and angrily) telling you how badly they think your company or agency has prepared to cope with the crisis. Almost inevitably when other people are giving you a hard time, some of what they say is true; some of it is exaggerated but has at least a germ of truth; and some of it is nonsense – garbage. When they’re done venting and it’s your turn to respond, which of these three do you tend to focus on? If you’re a normal human being, you focus on the garbage. “That’s garbage!” you explode. And then you give two or three examples of things your stakeholders said that are demonstrably untrue. Whose outrage are you managing when you do that? Your own. Who are you empathizing with? Yourself. To empathize with your stakeholders and address their outrage instead of yours, try to focus your response on the criticisms that have some merit. “Yes, we did screw X up. And we weren’t as candid as we should have been about Y.” I’m not advising you to agree with criticisms that are false. That won’t work. (And you won’t do it anyway.) But if you listen hard for criticisms you can honestly agree with, odds are you’ll find some. If you want to do empathic risk communication, focus a large part of your response on those. You shouldn (