5 Steps for Speaking Up
5 Steps for Speaking Up

5 Steps for Speaking Up

5 Steps for Speaking Up from rockstar executive coach, Jenna Buffaloe, is the framework we both love for making hard conversations easier.

What is 5 Steps for Speaking Up?

Leading executive coach Jenna Buffaloe explains how we often see ourselves walking a difficult conversations high wire act between being honest with a risk of damaging the relationship or preserving the relationship but holding back our true feelings.

5 Steps for Speaking Up walks us through how to be 1) honest and AND 2) caring of our conversation partner. Her 5 steps anchor around sharing a “Concern and a Suggestion” as follows:

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  1. WE START WITH JUST THE FACTS: Our goal is for our conversation partner’s response to our facts to be, “That’s true.” There isn’t room for interpretation, we’re laying out what happened so we can start on common ground. Instead of “you never get back to me,” for example, we more precisely say, “I’ve sent you 3 emails and 2 texts in the last week and haven’t heard back from you.” Our conversation partner may have good reasons for being incommunicado, but their reaction will start with “That’s true.”
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  1. WE SHARE HOW WE’RE FEELING: we ask ourselves how we’re feeling and then share that. This is hard, and perhaps it doesn’t seem professional to us, but it helps the other person engage. Perhaps we’re feeling frustrated, concerned, confused etc., that’s the adjective we share, “I feel frustrated…”
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  1. WE STATE OUR OPINION OF WHY WE’RE FEELING THAT WAY: we’re adding a “Because” after the feeling to explain what’s driving that sentiment. Where if we’re sharing anything that could come across as an accusation, it’s important to soften it by adding a “And I realize that might not be what’s happening.”
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  1. WE SHARE OUR DEEPER TRUTH: here, we’re sharing our deeper truth of why we care so much and why this might be bothering us. Perhaps it’s about why whatever we’re working on is important to our company or our career, it’s the underlying driver.
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  1. WE MAKE A REQUEST: this is the action that we’re hoping to get agreement on. Some specific request(s) for getting an agreement in place.

If we follow all 5 steps outlined above, we’ll be honest, but we may not yet have been caring.

To do this, we must be curious about what it’s like to be the other person. Therefore, we need to add something like, “All of that was from my perspective; I realize I may not have the whole story; now, I really want to understand how you see this.”

Overall, it distills down to a combination of honesty + caring through curiosity.

Jenna also shares a metaphor we both love, which is changing a conversation from a game of ping pong (table tennis for the international folks) to a game of catch: rather than going back-and-forth quickly, it becomes a game of making sure that each side says, “Yeah, I got it,” before throwing the ball back to their conversation partner. We slow it down and say, “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” and we either get it right (great) or we get it wrong, but we’re generating goodwill by ensuring we understand the other person before we share our own perspective.

When to use 5 Steps for Speaking Up?

Anytime we navigate challenging conversations while maintaining honesty and care, we recommend 5 Steps for Speaking Up. Common examples include:

  • Escalations at work: perhaps we have a disagreement with somebody from a different team, whether in our function or a different one; we’ve all been guilty of complaining to our boss or somebody else, but this is a perfect time to practice the 5 Steps.
  • Feedback sessions and Performance Reviews: whether sharing feedback with our direct reports or upward feedback with our boss, the tension between honesty and being caring is ever-present, especially if the input we share is heavier on the constructive side.
  • Personal relationships: see above and substitute in your child, your parent, your sibling, your spouse etc., and all the same dynamics play out. Exacerbated by the fact that we may have built up “suboptimal” communication patterns over decades with our loved ones.

How do we use 5 Steps for Speaking Up?

John:

Jenna has been a huge force in my life and career and she’s a person I turn to when facing big challenges or big decisions. Almost inevitably, our conversation gets to the things that I’m feeling but not saying because speaking up is hard. Having a toolset to go into challenging conversations confidently can be liberating and has given me the courage to speak up more frequently.

James:

This might be the single framework where I have the biggest disconnect between understanding it intellectually and being able to execute on it successfully. I agree with it completely and understand it pretty well on paper, but when it comes to applying it, I’m so much more inconsistent. Mainly because I sometimes struggle with the patience it takes to play catch successfully when I’m much more of a ping-pong player.

Overall, these ideas remind me a lot of the work we did at LinkedIn with Executive Coach extraordinaire Fred Kofman - author of one of my Mount Rushmore of business books, Conscious Business - and his urging to always separate what’s a fact from what’s an opinion.

I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at this over the years, but there’s still one situation where I get it so wrong every single time: it’s when I decide to inform my wife that she’s stating an opinion as a fact; this never seems to get the appreciative, supportive reaction I was hoping for ;)

John:

“Playing catch” is a great visual and a reminder to slow down when conversations go off course. The other thing I need to remind myself to do is say what I’m feeling. People can sense if the words and emotions don’t match so it helps to express what’s going on beneath the surface.

James:

These ideas also remind me of the book “Connect” by Stanford professors David Bradford and Carole Robin, who use a related tennis analogy to Jenna’s ping pong version, urging us to stay on “our side of the net” during an argument. I love how they simplify an argument into three pillars:

  1. Our intervention and motivation, which only we can see
  2. Our behaviour, which everyone can see
  3. The effect of our behaviour, which only the other person can see

I recommend the book - inspired by the Stanford GSB’s most popular course, “Touchy-Feely,” where this LA Times article offers a nice Cliff’s Notes summary, too.

John:

As a closing thought, Jenna wants us to know that one framework we didn’t spend time on is all about changing the way you think before your change the way you speak. She calls it “5 Steps to Untangling your Thinking” and she teaches a whole class on it. Reach out to her if you’d like to learn more.

Want to learn more?

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON SPEAKING UP AND HAVING HARD CONVERSATIONS?

First, “Difficult Conversations” from several leaders of the the Harvard Negotiation Project - housed in Harvard Law School (where Jenna attended) - goes deep here:

Second, “Connect” from David Bradford and Carole Robin at Stanford, tackles some of the same material, including going deep on the tennis metaphor that’s similar to Jenna’s ping pong one:

Third, “Radical Candor” from Kim Scott shares some of the same DNA, focused on how great managers can challenge their team members honestly, all while caring personally about them:

Fourth, Marshall Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication” has some of the same ideas (and, if you like Audible, Rosenberg’s own voice is extraordinarily soothing):

Finally, last but not least, Fred Kofman, a longtime Executive Coach (who worked with us at LinkedIn from 2013-18) covers some similar ground in arguably the best business book ever, “Conscious Business”:

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