Handling Difficult Conversations

Handling Performance Shortfall – The Three Minute Technique

I have built the steps using the acronym ‘PREPARE & CLOSE’ for easy recall. Essentially, there are 12 steps to follow.

1. Prepare the Person

Help the person to face up to a difficult conversation. You may start by saying, “I have important but difficult news to share with you”. It’s critical that the recipient is now prepared to face up to a difficult conversation, and you want to make sure you have created the readiness to face up to what follows. Being caught abruptly with sudden news can come as a rude shock

2. Rapport and connection to be built at the outset

Do start by building personal connect. You may like to say, “I know that what I am going to share with you will be uncomfortable, even a shock. However, I do believe we need to square this off and move past this”. Ensure that the recipient receives your message with humanity and grace.

3. Establish the gap from the Expectation clearly

Ensure you provide specific details of the performance shortfall or behavior. For example, begin by saying, “You are late to work once again”.

4. Pause

Ensure you pause and wait for a response. This is a critical step. It’s not enough to land the feedback, you need to wait and elicit a response. Be comfortable with silence. Let it create the tension you need to progress things.

5. Avoid the ‘side-step’

Make sure you pay attention to any ‘side step’, a remark that seeks to divert the issue to something else (Oh Gosh, I was stuck in traffic).

6. Re-state the Expectation

State, “I need for you to be on time each day, everyday”.  If need be make sure you continue to reiterate the expected behavior, till the recipient understands this well.  He may respond now that he/she will comply with the expectations. That’s not enough. Move to the next stage.

7. Enquire what specifically he would do to bridge the gap

Ask, “ What specifically will you do to come on time to office, Andre?”. This is a very important step. You need for Andre to generate the solutions to his problem. Avoid giving suggestions or advice. He needs to generate the solution. You may wish to facilitate this process if you believe he is struggling with generating solutions. Often the person may be in an emotional bind and may not be able to clearly see through this phase. Being sympathetic is key, but its all critical that you are firm. You may say, “I know Andre that a lot of people are depending on you Andre, and we are depending on you as well. I need for you to be on time at work, each day, like everybody else”.

8. Clarify what you have heard

Say, “I hear you say that you will do xxx and xxx so that you will be on time to work each day, everyday”.

9. Listen attentively to confirm

Listen carefully to cues both verbally and non verbal to ensure there is no dissonance to what is being promised

10. Onboard the new behavior

Share in positive tone, “I am certain that by you doing xxx and xxx you will be able to turn this behavior around, and be on time each day as expected”.

11. Share your acknowledgement to his new initiative and commitment

Say, “Andre, I’m quite certain you can do this, and I have full confidence in you”.

12. Ensure Review mechanism is built in

Say, “Andre, let’s review how you are doing on this again by next week, shall we?. Cheers”.

That’s it!

Correlation does not imply Causation

I just know, or Do I?

Mike Hartmann in a Ted Talk, titled, Unpacking the biases that shape our belief (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7Mhne4CzU) wherein he shares the following statistics:


One person reads the following headline:

77% of cases in whooping cough outbreaks were fully vaccinated!

Another person reads another headline as under:

Unvaccinated children had five-fold risk of getting pertussis!

And Mike read the following:

Pertussis outbreak in elementary high school with high vaccination rate


After reading these headlines, you as a reader may come to the conclusion that vaccines are not effective"


So let’s review the facts:

1. There were 208 school students and of which 195 were fully vaccinated against pertussis.
2. 35 cases of outbreak occurred.
3. 27 out of 35 elementary school students were in the fully vaccinated group and 8 in the not vaccinated group.

In other words while 14% of students vaccinated were effected, almost 62% of those unvaccinated were effected.

We all fall trap to intrinsic bias, that confirms our own beliefs of, “I just know!”
It is the interrogation of data that can free us from such bias. To start with, we must be willing to examine and review our own bias.

One way to review this is through Causal graphs. Causal graphs allow for us to talk about causal pathways both in an intuitive and pictorial way.

Lets first start with translating normal English to Causal Graphs or DAG (directed acyclic graph).

One needs to note that Causation and Association are different. When we find a correlation we say its is an association. However, when the variable (exposure) has an influence on the outcome, its is said to be causal. Is smoking ‘pot’ and having troubled relationship during teenage, an association or a causation?
And if one jumps of a cliff, would that be the cause of injury?

Let's review the following 4 cases:

(i). A----→ Y Cause and Effect

In figure I, A causes Y. The arrow from A to Y indicates this as a symbol.

        ------------------------------------->
(ii). L (parent)----→  A (child)       Y (grandchild) Common Causes

In figure ii, you could have common causes for Y occurring.

For example,
• Firstly you have data that L (smoking) causing Yellow Fingers (A), but there is no evidence that Yellow Fingers causes Cancer (Y).
• You may also have causation where Smoking (L) causes Y (Cancer)

            ------------------>
(iii).    A          Y ---→L Conditioning on Common Effect

In figure iii, there is a collider L, is an effect by two common causes, Y and A.

For example:

(L) Mortality can be caused both by Y (say Kidney Disease) or A (Age)
Of course, we can say Age causes Mortality too.

Age is therefore a common cause of KD and Mortality.

iv. Chance
Something happen by chance and there is no causality.

How do we start to eliminate bias?

We start with recognising Confounding. Confounding is the bias due to the presence of common cause and the outcome. For example, we may infer, that Yellow fingers caused by smoking leads to Lung Cancer!

Confounding can be detected when it must meet three criteria’s:

1. Must have an association with the outcome
2. Must be associated with the exposure
3. Must not be in the causal path of from exposure to outcome

While smoking may lead to lung cancer, there maybe an association with Coffee drinking and smoking, but Coffee drinking is not causal to lung cancer.

Judea Pearls Rules :

1. Two variables are d-separated* if all paths between them are blocked
2. Two variables are marginally or unconditionally independent if they are d-separated without conditioning.
3. If however, the collider is ‘conditioned’ a back entry is possible.

* d-separated is a relationship between three disjoint set of vertices in a directed graph.

As you explore data, you will soon recognise, associations, causal and confounding issues.

In conclusion to establish a causal relationship, one has to assess Consistency, Strength, Specificity, temporal relationship and coherence of the association.