Biting the bullet on tough workplace talk

in a constructive, considered way, but never leave it longer than 48 hours.

Bake open and honest conversations into the way you structure your business – instead of just holding formal yearly performance reviews, book in informal catchups every couple of weeks to provide a forum to talk about anything that is front of mind.

Focus on building strong connections with your team – understanding each of them as a person rather than just someone who gets a job done will help you see things from their perspective as well as feel comfortable having an honest chat about something that just isn’t working.

Your team won’t feel comfortable talking about something that may have gone wrong if they don’t trust that you are coming from a good place and actually care, and you don’t trust that they will have done all they can to get it right the first time.

Sometimes it is as simple as managing expectations or a communication breakdown, but you won’t know it until you have the conversation.

Ultimately effectively managing conflict is one of the cornerstones of a high performing team. Finding a way to proactively encourage feedback and constructively critique and approach organisational performance issues from a problem-solving perspective will build business performance and value.

If you can find empathetic and engaging ways to work through these issues with your team you will not only be saving yourself time and money down the track, but setting strong foundations for a dynamic business culture that can weather all kinds of storms.