Building relationships by having hard conversations and moving past conflict together
Most people don’t like conflict, disagreement or giving negative feedback. As a result, we (managers or design leaders included) often try to ignore issues for as long as possible. This is because the moment you acknowledge the conflict or disagreement you need to have a difficult conversation and most of us were never trained or encouraged to have these type of conversations.
During my talk, I would argue that I don’t think you can build a strong relationship with anyone if you are not able to have difficult conversations with them.
That being said, you need to have built some trust in advance for that conversation to take place and get to a good outcome, so how do you do that? I’ll share my thoughts around what I think helps build trust, what has worked and not worked for me in the past, in this area.