6 posts
A hard conversation at work goes wrong in the same places: the warm-up, the restating, the pause you fill. How to get through it, and check it landed.
Good 1:1 prep isn't a longer agenda. It's ten minutes with the last conversation: what you promised, what they raised, and the question you'll wait for.
You restate because you don't trust you were heard. The team logged the restatement-pattern at meeting two. By meeting eight, they're just waiting for you to finish so they can speak. Trust the first sentence.
You wonder why your team's gone quiet. They didn't get more agreeable. Three meetings ago you shut down a half-formed disagreement without realizing it. The team noticed. The team always notices.
The most informative thing in a 1:1 is what your report was about to say before you said something instead. The cost of filling silence is invisible to the manager and unmistakable to everyone else.
The hallway, four days after the 1:1. They ask about the thing they raised. You stand there for a half-second too long. They probably didn't notice. You did.