Tuesday, September 28, 2021
How to Have Hard Conversations at Work Without Being Confrontational
www.businessinsider.com: All of us have been on the receiving end of a difficult conversation at work, and many have had to deliver a hard message to others. Unless you are totally inhuman, none of these are painless, and we all wish we had some way to make them more meaningful and more effective. We all want to feel good about our work and relationships, and we want others to feel the same way.
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The topic of this article has so many applications to a variety of industries, including the theatre industry. A stage manager must know how to communicate with their counterparts as well as crew they are responsible for. They also often are the bearer of bad news in a production if something went wrong, their job being to relay that new information to the rest of the team. Now, there is a method to that communication that is extremely important when keeping a healthy relationship among people in the workplace. This is where this article comes to play in this situation. The first tip this article mentions (“Build confidence by trusting yourself and the other party”) is not only important at the time of the conversation but should be established at the beginning of a production so that when these situations do turn up, you already have a healthy environment for your conversation. Another idea mentioned is to make sure you are “confident” when speaking, which I find to be extremely important especially when you are not confident. In that case, you must admit that you do not know something because I believe the most important factor in a healthy work relationship is trust, and in that, truth.
I was drawn to this article as a stage manager because even at the high school level I have had to have some pretty difficult conversations with my cast/crew. This task is especially grueling because I was having conversations with my peers and the power dynamic always seemed balanced weird. Now moving into college I find myself faced with the same dilemma of hard conversations with my peers. Currently, I am on the other side of the power dynamic which is an interesting change of pace. This new perspective has given me a valuable understanding of how I can do better with talking to people now that I know how certain words have affected me while being on the other side. This is a huge aspect of this article because it keeps coming back to this idea of a mutual respect establishing a mutual understanding of each other. This keeps hard conversations more docile when escalation is a very imminent fear.
This article could not have come at a better time. I feel like this should be a required reading for all of PTM if not all of the School of Drama Production and Design students. There is a lot to learn and unpack from this article. Having difficult conversations is extremely important and necessary in our business. Art and other creative endeavors create these situation inherently. The creative process involves so much emotion and opinion that there is no way around difficult conversations. These conversations can involve anything from personnel issues, to design issues, to funding issues. No matter what it is, they need to happen. How they happen is the most important part. In the end, whoever you are having this conversation with, will most likely be your college again in the future, and learning to be respectful during these conversations can go along way in how your personal relationships will go.
I thought this article was especially interesting because I think a lot of the ideas Zwilling suggested can be applied to areas outside of just the workplace. I think we’ve been using alot of these ideas in Anti-Racist theatre, such as trusting the group, displaying courage, and asking questions rather than shutting down. I think something this article emphasizes which we don’t often think about is that in a conversation it’s about how the other person is interpreting what you say, just because you think it is being heard one way that might not be the case, and I think that's something really important to keep in mind, just in general communication. I think there was an overall theme of taking a point and making it clear and sticking with it, which I think is specifically applicable to this article, and I think that makes a lot of sense in a situation when it might be hard to hear something or awkward to discuss.
This article gave really detailed insights on how to conduct useful and effective conversations. Learning how to carry out conversations without making others feel offended, confused or not engaged has been a skill I’ve wanted to master. I think some of the points mentioned in the article can relate to what we’ve been learning in ARTEP class. Personally, I’ve been trying to practise active listening and showing resonance when having conversations. I think demonstrating curiosity is a really good way to show that you’re engaged in the dialogue. It’s also so important to choose the right words, and by that I mean using correct terminologies or words best fitted for what you’re trying to express. This has been particularly difficult for me because there’re many times when I find myself struggling to remember a particular word, or simply when I don’t know the vocabulary for what I’m trying to say.
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