The 3 Mistakes People Make in Hard Conversations (and How to Avoid Them)

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is EntreLeadership. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey, with over thirty years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. Most leaders hate having difficult conversations with a team member. But trust me, avoiding the hard conversations doesn't protect your team. It paralyzes it. So the best leaders out there don't run from this. They lean in. That's why today, John Falcons from the EntreLeadership team and one of my board members, Brendan Wojcco, will show you exactly how our team has the kind of tough conversations that solve problems, grow trust, and make the business stronger. Alright. Thanks, Dave. Well, Brennan, we have this conversation all the time about difficult conversations, but I know all of your work on that really kinda started with a story, didn't it? Your own experience. Yeah. It's like a fun, not fun story. Right? It's fun now. It's fun now. It wasn't in the moment. Right. Yeah. So, like, one night, my wife and I are sitting on the couch, you know, at our house. It's totally normal. She gets a text message. Right? And I kinda barely noticed she got the text message until, you know, when I did notice, she's kinda, like, staring at her phone. And, you know, something about that moment, you could kinda just feel, like, the air drain out of the room. Right? And she didn't she didn't say anything to me. She just kinda turns and looks. I grab the phone, I look at it, and my wife had gotten a text message from a woman named Anne. K. And I had fired Anne's husband that morning. And it it it was just like the text message was just like, hey. That's all it said. So you didn't really know what was coming next. Right. You know? And, you know, like, you get the three little bubbles that are that are telling you on the text message thing. The person on the other end is sending, like, a really long message. Yeah. And so at at this point, my wife and I are both, like, you know, sitting there, like, staring at her phone. Like, what the heck's gonna happen next? What what's the next message that's gonna come through? Right. And, when the message came through, it was, like, not what we expected. And she she basically said, hey. I know her husbands have just walked a really tough road together. Right. But I feel like it was handled really well, and I just wanna, you know, communicate that I'm grateful for that and, wanna know if we can still be friends. Yeah. Okay. That could have gone a very different direction. That could have gone a very different direction. And, and and there were, like, a bunch of lessons in that. Right? Like, I I think I think at that point of my leadership experience, I was, like, ten years into my into leadership at that point. …