Every week I share something from my own experience, or from the work I do with coaches, in the hope that it makes you a little better at leading the people in front of you. If this one does that, I would be grateful if you handed it to someone else. Forward it along and point them at the sign-up link below. Thank you.

One more thing worth your time this week. I have written before about earning the truth from your people, and how you set the conditions so they will tell you what is really going on. The obligation runs the other way too, which is what this week is about. That piece is here: Earning the Truth.

Friends,

Football is back, the mornings here have finally started to turn, and I have spent a lot of time the last two weeks in rooms with leaders talking about the parts of the job nobody looks forward to. Which brings me to this week.

I was working with a client recently, a room full of experienced leaders, and I asked them a simple question. Who is the person you need to have a hard conversation with and have not?

Nobody answered. I suspect every one of them had a name in mind.

I have had my share of those conversations, and the hardest one I can remember ran in stages. A subordinate commander of mine, over a series of sit-downs that got steadily more direct. It started as an observation, here is what I am seeing. Then it became a concern, here are the behaviors that worry me. It ended with me telling him I was not sure this was the profession he should be pursuing, and asking him to be honest with me about where he thought it was going, because I could tell him where I thought it was going.

That is not an easy thing to say to a man’s face. It took as many conversations as it did because he had very little awareness of how he was being received, and by the last one I was weighing whether to recommend his relief.

The one I learned the most from went differently, and it is the one I would want you to have.

I was in a staff job with officers working for me, and I started hearing from the subordinate headquarters we supported that one of them was a problem. Not approachable. Slow to respond. Rigid about how things had to be done, and unwilling to bend to what those units needed. In our line of work the staff exists to serve those headquarters, and he was not doing it.

I got as far as considering whether to move him or relieve him before I caught myself on something uncomfortable. I had never told him. All of that feedback had come to me, and none of it had gone to him, and I had been sitting on it while building a case in my own head.

So I sat him down and laid it out plainly. We have a problem, here are the concerns, here is the impact you are having.

He had no idea. None. He was genuinely surprised, and I will admit I found that refreshing, because it meant the problem was a blind spot rather than a choice. And to his credit he fixed it immediately. He became more approachable, more flexible, more useful to the units he was there to serve, and he stayed that way.

The lesson was not about him. It was that I had failed to do my job, and I had very nearly ended a good officer’s assignment over information I never gave him.

I think about that every time a leader complains to me about someone on his team. Somebody not pulling her weight, not doing the work the way it needs to be done. My question is always the same.

Have you told her?

Most of the time the answer is no. I ask because I have been the leader who had not.

Here is what I have come to believe about it. The longer you go without having that conversation, the more of the responsibility for that person’s performance belongs to you. You cannot hold anybody to a standard you have never said out loud. And the moment you do say it, you have given him a real chance to succeed or to fail. If the behavior continues after that, you have a different and much clearer conversation ahead of you. But most of the time, in my experience, the behavior changes.

That is what accountability is. Not punishment, and not nitpicking. It is closing the gap between where someone is and where she needs to be, and you do it because you care what happens to her, not in spite of it.

The dread is almost always bigger than the conversation. Nearly every one of mine turned into a professional exchange with someone who was grateful to finally know where he stood. Not all of them ended well, and that never once relieved me of the duty to have it.

What I have watched myself and other leaders do instead is get so wrapped up in how uncomfortable it will feel that we quietly choose ourselves. We avoid it because avoiding it is easier on us, and we pay for that with our people’s development and our organization’s performance.

Choosing the hard conversation over the easy avoidance is a leadership responsibility. Full stop.

So here is what I would have you do, and it is one thing.

You already know the name. Put a date on the calendar this week and have the conversation.