Mastering difficult conversations
By Rob Blaauboer
Many people dread difficult conversations. What is a difficult conversation? I would say any conversation where there is a difference between two people as far as expectations, emotions, or outcome. Although difficult conversations occur in our private lives (try telling your teenager that they cannot go to that specific party), they are also an integral part of your business life. For instance part of the skill set needed to manage a team, your co-workers, clients or even your entire company.
It would be great if everything always went according to plan: all employees perform great, no projects that go wrong. But, as a manager or employee, you know there are situations where you need to have an awkward conversation. Luckily and hopefully, you need to have these only every now and then.
But that is a double-edged sword: if you only have these talks occasionally, how can you become better in these discussions?
That is where Dialogue Trainer comes in. This startup, exhibiting at the all-digital CES 2021 (the platform is still active until February 15), will help you master the skill of managing difficult conversations, in management, corporations and sales.
How do they do that?
In a very simple way. They have, what I call a conversational agent, that you can engage with and try out a difficult conversation.
I have tried the example and I have learned a lot. Because, also for me, a difficult conversation is not something I do every day, week or even month. So, I stumbled my way through the simulation. The case is clear, this is a colleague we need to keep on board, but we do need to be aware of her behaviours and change her way of working/communication with others.
The simulation takes me through a discussion with her, with the possibility to backtrack, in other words, if I am too direct, it will tell me the impact of my current way of communicating and allow me to have a different approach.
That is one of the nice things of DialogueTrainer, the possibility to try out different approaches but also to get real-time feedback why a specific approach does not work or does work. You get to retry your approach until you get it right, according to the scientific research out there. In the end, you get a detailed score. I will not share too many things because this is something that you need to experience and try out yourself.
There are several scenarios available, and DialogueTrainer can create new scenarios based on specific situations in your organization. If you, like almost everyone, feel like you could improve your skills in difficult conversations, look at DialogueTrainer who are exhibiting at CES 2021.
