You've thought about who you are and how you want your career to be. You have some soft skills to deal with situations that could cause problems. What about the team around you? How do you build functional and constructive professional relationships? How can you add value? What do employers look for when they are promoting?
Skill-building in this course will include asking questions, listening, developing likeability (you’d better be stellar if you’re difficult), identifying cognitive bias, apologizing, receiving apologies, and the basics of whistleblowing. After this course, you will be able to:
- assess your own listening and reactions and retune them in advance or on the spot for a more constructive outcome
- add value at work by keeping situations easy instead of difficult
- manage your own approach
- be prepared when things go wrong
The prerequisite for this course is Course One of the Specialization "Professional IQ: Preventing and Solving Problems at Work".
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Week 4: When Things Go Wrong
Despite your best efforts, sometimes problems can’t be avoided. Learn an effective strategy for apologizing, and how to engage in disputes professionally.
Director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
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You may be wondering when's the part when we go and
actually have it out with the person you have the problem with.
The more serious the problem is the more preparation,
it's important to put in before you take that step.
And there are some more steps that if you take them now,
will really help you be successful in resolving the problem that you're facing,
and in having the dispute.
If your dispute is something relatively minor,
you're still going to want to run through these steps in your head.
If the dispute is bigger and about something,
a really important point,
you may want to actually stop,
write it down on paper,
work your way through it and spend a fair amount of time on it.
So the amount of time you spend expands
related to the seriousness or potential seriousness of the problem.
Even for a little problem though,
to stop, consider alternative explanations,
see if you might have done something wrong,
figured out the documentation,
figured out where the pieces are, will help you.
Even if it's just a quick checklist you
go through in your head before you go and talk to someone.
The next steps are really important.
And again they involve mindset and actions,
before you actually take up with the person.
The mindset piece is to assess your goals.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to solve the problem,
are you trying to get something changed,
are you trying to have somebody made aware of facts?
What is your goal?
What would satisfy you if the action was taken?
What would fix the problem?
It's important for you to be able to articulate,
quite clearly, what action you seek that would make this better?
What would repair the problem you see?
Do you want somebody to apologize?
Do you want somebody to change what they've done?
What are you seeking?
And be able to say it,
with some specificity and clarity.
If you don't know what will solve the problem,
what information is needed to solve the problem?
Who needs to be aware of it?
What steps need to be taken?
What procedure applies?
It's not enough to say there's a problem.
It's really important to say what's the solution path, what would fix it.
The more serious the consequence the more
important it is that you talk with somebody first.
The more that you have somebody with whom you can
confidentially say I am so upset with Bill,
I need to go talk with him.
Here's what I want to say.
Here's my concerns.
How does that sound to you?
If you're dealing with a problem that is easily
resolved by going directly and speaking with someone,
you might not need to do this.
The more upset you are and the more potentially serious the consequence,
the more important it is to seek advice.
Seek advice if, seek advice carefully.
Don't be a pot stirrer.
Don't go around and talk to a lot of people.
Don't go around and talk to people who will talk to others.
Make sure it's a confidential relationship.
Make sure that the relationship is professionally appropriate.
If you're talking about confidential company information,
do you have a company mentor who's in a position of
having access to that privileged information?
Is there a lawyer who has a professional obligation to keep confidences?
Do you have a therapist?
Do you have a minister?
Do you have a spouse who keeps their mouth shut and is trusted?
Do you have someone with whom it's professionally appropriate to talk?
Or do you have someone with whom you can speak
without raising all the exact particulars and maintain the confidences of the situation?
Somebody, a former professor, somebody,
a former mentor where you can say I cannot give you the details,
I'm struggling with a problem of this nature,
here are the kind of elements of it.
Do you think I'm thinking about all the important elements?
What you are seeking is somebody who can help you get outside
your own head and overcome some of the cognitive biases we've talked about,
the errors that we make in our own thinking.
You want to avoid confirmation bias,
you want to avoid the more that you dislike or are
uncomfortable with the person who is central to the problem you're trying to resolve,
the more important it is to get somebody who can play devil's advocate with you and raise
questions that you might be overlooking in
your being caught in the bubble of the problem.
Getting a little objectivity and distance and somebody professionally
qualified who can help you assess the problem as objectively as possible,
and really make sure you're seeing it
clearly will help you be an effective problem solver.
I encourage a lot of the teams that I work with that if they're
stuck in a situation like that where they have to have a difficult conversation,
that they can practice with me.
Right? They can practice in a safe spot with
somebody before they go in and actually have the conversation.
So there's always a place that you have support,
there's always a place that you have help,
from people that have more experience and the more you do this
you get comfortable being uncomfortable and that's the goal.
The third and final step before you actually go and see
the person or take the next step whatever it might be in your process,
is to develop a plan.
You may need to write a script.
You may need to have some words that you can say that you
practice to say this is what I'm concerned about,
here are the facts that it's related to it,
here are the people who are involved,
here's the policy that applies and here are
the actions that I think would help address this situation.
In some order, the more you have
a problem solving approach to it for which you have some kind of plan,
the better off you'll be.
There's a caveat that goes with it, a caution.
It's important not to go and say the only way this can be solved is what I say right now.
The plan should be here's the problem,
here's how I'm going to lay out the elements,
here's the documentation that relates to it,
here's the policy that applies to it,
here's why I'm concerned,
here are some steps that it seems to me might be advisable.
What shall we do? Because the whole goal of
this is to solve the problem and making sure that you're as professional,
as calm, as grounded and enrooted in reality as you can be
will lead to a more successful outcome than anything else.
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C. K. GunsalusDirector of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
