By MARTY LEVINE
When Frits Pil asked Pitt staff members to “raise your right hand if you don’t feel anxiety through the whole conversation” — particularly with those at work, about work — only one person attending this year’s Staff Council Spring Assembly lifted a hand.
Thus, Pil said: “We avoid it.”
Pil, faculty member in the Pitt School of Business, dissected “Conflict and Complex Conversations” as the theme for this year’s gathering on May 28.
Although he recommended one way to rid yourself of paralyzing anxiety or self-consciousness — by writing down how you imagine the conversation could go, thus removing the anxiety from your head — Pil mostly advised the group on ways to speak to each other, directly and meaningfully.
Pil regularly counsels corporations on organizational improvement efforts. At Spring Assembly, the first thing he advised participants to do is introduce themselves to each other by revealing several items he specified. Instead, everyone opened with their names and job titles.
“As we are learning where people work and what they do,” Pil said, “they are (reduced to) that type of person. We slot them: ‘They can help me, or not.’ One of the first challenges is: How do we develop exchanges that are more substantial?”
When you’re talking to your friends, you already know how to interpret their intentions properly. With work colleagues, that is often not the case.
But even “the most difficult conversation you’ll have with people at work” — when there is a problem that’s been brewing for a long time — “you have to have these conversations. Otherwise the negative experiences will continue.”
It helps, Pil said, to imagine the disadvantages of not having the conversation and to start it off by telling the other person, “I appreciate you being here today.”
Although two people at work may seem to have different goals in a conflict, they ultimately want the same thing, Pil said: “The visibility to be promoted.”
That is hard for both sides to realize, he said, “because we enter the same conversation thinking about ourselves. When we start the conversation, we have a right and a wrong.” But ask yourself: “What are our positions? Where are we coming from? When we understand where the other person is coming from, our lenses change.”
We often judge a person by their behavior in the moment, Pil pointed out, and people who are anxious during tough conversations can seem angry. If instead of judging by behavior, we could understand a person’s viewpoint, we might better be able to change their mind.
To let the other person understand your viewpoint, he instructed participants “to practice different ways of being clear.” He demonstrated how asking “Can I?” or “Can you?” questions allows the other person to redirect the conversation by responding without actually answering. He recommended instead that questions begin with “Will you?” or “May I?” which more directly request a yes or no response.
Most people have a hard time saying a simple “No” to a request, he said: “The no’s become ‘Maybe.’” You have to say “No,” and you have to say it in body language, Pil said. “Not ‘No, I’m sorry.’ Not ‘No, not today.’”
“We have takers in the world,” he said. “If they are used to getting yes from you, they will keep asking.”
Expressing anger productively is another tough task for adults, he said. “Anger for adults is a secondary emotion. The primary emotion is fear; anger follows from the fear. Asking ourselves where is it coming from is very productive.
“When someone doesn’t want to own their responsibility for their problem, they redirect” the conversation away from the issue or from themselves. “Don’t let yourself get derailed. You’ll just get increasingly angry if you don’t get resolution... Part of our [objective] is to articulate, for that person, how to get to the other side of the issue.”
In fact, he recommended, if you receive an angry response, “express gratitude to the person for bringing this to your attention ... It shifts the conversation.”
When a person is angry, sometimes it doesn’t help simply to say, “I hear you.” He suggests, instead, saying very little, and using non-specific nouns, pronouns instead of names, and just responding with a simplified version of what the person has just said. Your natural inclination may be to give advice and to tell someone things you experienced that are similar, but that must be avoided, he said.
If you have the urge to apologize, he added, say instead, “‘I feel really bad about where we are in this situation.’ But you don’t have to apologize for your stance.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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