Successful difficult conversations

Are you one of the 4% of schools who don’t have one of these people problems?

For over a decade I’ve been helping sort out those tricky staff issues in schools; the ones which require a difficult conversation to fix.

Soon after I started, I noticed some issues cropping up regularly.

So I started to ask other schools if they needed to have a conversation about any of these issues with a team member.

I’ve now asked over a thousand school leaders if they currently need to have one or more of these common difficult conversations. Only 4% don’t. Which means 96% do.

And these issues are all fixable, but somehow seem to stay unresolved or drag on. 

You’re probably curious about what these common problems are. Here are the three I’ve heard most regularly:

  • Not following policy
  • Lateness
  • Caretakers

You can hear about the 5 most common ones here in this video: five most common difficult conversations that exist in almost every school.

And these are just the most common ones, I’ve seen plenty of others – feel free to share.

If you are with the majority and need to talk to one of your team about an issue, ideally you want to only have to do this once and get the outcome you seek straight away.

But I see an awful lot of mistakes that prevent that happening. To avoid them, check out this week’s resource below.

Spotlight Resources

Free e-course – 10 mistakes leaders make in difficult conversations

Over the years from training thousands of school leaders, I have noticed patterns, common pitfalls and stumbling blocks when it comes to difficult conversations in school, and so I have created this e-course to help you to stay clear of the traps and, in turn, have more successful difficult conversations.