“How to Say You Stink…Nicely”
Deliver hard & delicate messages while remaining empathetic and personable (a key leadership skill)
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How can you say "You stink" nicely?
Delivering hard messages while remaining empathetic and personable can be very difficult.
This message, "you stink," could be slang for a performance problem, but in this case it referred to someone who had very strong, unpleasant body odor. In an open format office environment, the people seated near the individual were suffering and unhappy.
But how do you politely tell someone that their smell is offending others?
I challenged myself to practice this skill and you can watch the video recording (below). It's really difficult to give people a kind but firm message on a tough topic even when you have time to prepare—and it's even harder live "on the spot.”
I came up with this event idea for three reasons:
To help you see how to attempt it and get better at it.
(Entertainment) I'm sure some of my stumbles will be fun and funny.
It is an important skill and I want to practice and go through the experience again.
There is a deeper lesson:
If we want to get good at something, we need to practice in a safe space first. I've created my own practice opportunity.
More generally, you can use this pattern for anything you want to improve.
Figure out how you can engage in "intentional practice."
If I spend 5 minutes crafting and delivering each hard message in this hour, I will practice delivering 12 extremely difficult messages. In "real life" as a leader you might have to give one hard message a month, and one of these extremely difficult, sensitive messages only every couple of years. Thus, in an hour, I will cram in a whole career of "sensitive message" practice.
That is how you get better at any skill.
My high performance coach says: “To perform at your best, create chaos in practice.”
Even if I completely butcher some of the messages, I will learn and get better at the process. Remember, as a leader, your goal is to be personally polite, calm, and friendly (personable) while being professionally firm and direct.
Readers- Where have you constructed intentional practice in your life?
Watch on YouTube.
Hard audience messages I answered
(My own story to start): “You have strong body odor (you stink) and others sitting around you have complained about it.”
What I should have said vs. What I actually did.
Lessons: Have a private conversation at a calm time and open with “I need to talk to you today about something and it may be a little awkward…” (people do better if you give warning that bad news is coming). And, you do not need to tell the other person that they personally smell, instead, you need to relay that there is an odor problem that they need to fix.
“Your breath smells so bad that it makes people feel uncomfortable interfacing with you in a conference room and the team culture is in decline as a result.”
Lesson: Use the SBI Framework (Situation, Behavior, Impact).
“An engineer that was working remotely came to the main office after a night at the hotel and he reeked of alcohol, like he drank a lot the day before - wasn't drunk this day though. I knew him and valued his work and he was going to talk to leadership about a project he was working on. I told him to consider refreshing himself but wasn't sure how to deliver that.”
Lesson: Give them the clear message and let them save face.
“How do I tell my boss’ boss that my boss is not the best leader in the world he thinks he is?”
Lessons: If you attempt this, you must have a good standing relationship with your skip (boss’ boss), be a top performer, clear and specific examples (data points — have at least 3), and allies who you have approval to use their name. Also, it is worth figuring out why the skip has this high opinion (you may be missing an important reason or value that person brings).
"You have demoralized the team with your micromanagement. Your desire to control everything, down to a every comment in Jira, status transition and such agonizes the team. You hinder the team performance by order of magnitude, demoralize everyone, and ensure most project either fail or deliver many months late and with poor quality. You also don't understand shit about our Core product offering or technology behind it."
Lessons: Go in with a constructive mindset, not one filled with anger. Do not bring your emotion in the room because all the other person hear and feel is your emotion. Read the book, Leadership and Self-Deception, find it in my book list. Also, start with the question (they are less threatening and spark a discussion) “Hey boss, can I talk to you about how to work well for you? I’ve noticed that you are very in the details…”
“My manager is the head of product at a startup. Because he’s new, he hasn’t earned trust with the CEO yet. So he’s prescriptive on product direction, processes, and needs to look at everything before it can go to the C-suite. How do you tell him that he’s a blocker, he needs to trust his team, and that making mistakes is ok if we learn from it? The teams are slowed down from all these approval layers.”
Lesson: Ask “Hey boss, can I talk to you for a minute, I know that you are new here and are just coming up to speed, I want to ask you about how I and the team can help you with that because I’ve noticed that you are very in the details, and in some cases, that is slowing us down…Can you help me understand what it would take for you to give us a little more space and trust in the team, how can we work together towards you giving us more rope?”
“My manager has shifted to using AI-generated responses for important questions on Slack. I understand the efficiency goal, but these responses lack the context and judgment needed for our complex work environment. It's affecting my trust and engagement. I want to address this constructively without straining our relationship.”
“I believe you don't have what it takes to make it.”
Lesson: Ask “Do you think our team is the right place for you to do your best work right now or should you be looking at alternatives?”
“I have a person (Sr Manager) who sacrifices a lot of the job. Basically he gained 60-80 pounds, the only thing he does is work. I'm working with him on delegating and offloading things, but he doesn't want to release things. He is around 30 so it's so bad. What I really want to say to him - "Dude, you are killing yourself for nothing, stop and think". He has no equity or anything like this.”
Lesson: Try to find out why they are pushing so hard. Ask “I’ve noticed that you are sacrificing so much for this job, I’m glad that you care so much, tell me a little about that.”
“Work on a project with a group, individuals within a group get recognition, but one of the individuals didn't contribute much. How do you tell them that they won't be recognized?”
“You are honestly terrible at dealing bad news with no emotional intelligence or thought about focusing on data-driven feedback, this is hardly a real performance review.”
“The technology team under you (Director) is not happy with the culture that does not drive technical innovations and instead being more business oriented which expects immediate results rather than investing in long-term.”
Lesson: Start with common ground. Also, consider that maybe the Director is right—technology innovation is largely a bunch of BS if it does not make money (especially within companies focused on turning a profit).
If you want to go deeper on EQ, read the article on improving your soft skills.
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With Annie Duke?! Wow!! 🤯
We had a man at our church who smelled bad. Many began to avoid sitting by him. The parish nurse talked to him about it and his reaction was, “Oh, it’s just my feet.” She gave him a special wash for his feet, but it continued. And he didn’t seem to care he shook it off and deny it. He said if was his feet. ( I doubt he used the special cleanser the nurse provided him. ) He knew he stank and hd didn’t care.