From the course: Difficult Conversations about Politics at Work

Assessing your goals

- [Instructor] Before we start any difficult conversation, we need to be crystal clear on our goals. When it comes to difficult conversations about politics in the workplace, you can discover your goals by asking yourself these three simple questions. First, what kinds of conversations are appropriate in this environment? Second, considering what is appropriate, what is a realistic goal for this conversation? And third, what do you want your relationship with the other person to be like after this conversation ends? Based on my experience and the people I've worked with, the vast majority of people who find themselves in these political discussions, tell me that their goals are usually to exit the conversation without giving or receiving damage while maintaining a workable relationship with their colleagues. At the end of the day, you don't need to like them and you don't need to be buddies or anything like that. But the reality is that you still need to work together. And so we need to have the conversations in a way that makes that still possible. If you ask yourself these three questions and come to a similar conclusion, you'll realize something really exciting. Achieving this goal of maintaining the peace is actually quite manageable. And that is the main point of this first section.

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