Written by Nicola Richardson, Founder of The People Mentor.
The People Mentor helps small employers, managers and leaders handle difficult conversations, strengthen accountability and lead with calm, practical insights and confidence.
Manager communication skills are at the heart of every high-performing team — and most managers were never properly taught them. This article looks at why communication between managers and their teams so often breaks down, why difficult conversations get avoided, and what small employers and managers can do to build the clarity, listening and follow-through that actually change behaviour.
Key takeaways from The People Mentor
- Talking is not the same as communicating. Sending emails and holding meetings does not mean your team understands what you mean.
- Most managers were never taught how to handle difficult conversations. The Chartered Management Institute found that 80% have had no formal training in it.
- Clarity comes before words. If you are fuzzy about what you want the person to walk away understanding, no amount of skill will rescue the conversation.
- Avoiding a difficult conversation is a choice with consequences, not a neutral act of kindness.
- Emotion in a conversation is not a sign it has gone wrong. Your response to it is what matters.
- Communication is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. It gets easier the more you practise it.
I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me when I first stepped into a management role. Communication at work isn’t about being articulate. It isn’t about having the right vocabulary or knowing how to run a decent meeting. It’s about whether the people around you understand what you mean, feel safe enough to tell you the truth, and trust that you’ll handle difficult moments with some degree of grace.
In over 40 years of working with managers and plenty of years managing teams of my own, I got this wrong more times than I’d like to admit. I thought I was communicating. I was sending emails, holding team meetings, and doing one-to-ones. But communication isn’t the same as talking. And when I began to understand the difference, everything changed, for both the people I was responsible for and me.
If you’re a manager or business owner who’s feeling the weight of team tension, performance issues, or the kind of conversations you keep putting off because you genuinely don’t know how to start them, this is for you.
The Gap Between Talking and Communicating
This might sting a little. Most of us have never been formally taught how to communicate at work. We were promoted because we were good at our jobs, not because anyone sat us down and explained how to deliver difficult feedback without causing a meltdown, or how to have a performance conversation that actually leads to change.
Research from the Chartered Management Institute found that 80% of managers have had no formal training in handling difficult conversations. 80%. That number doesn’t surprise me in the slightest, because I see its consequences every single day in the leaders I work with.
The result?
Conversations that should take 15 minutes get avoided for months. Small issues quietly snowball into full-blown team dysfunction. Performance problems that could have been nipped in the bud turn into lengthy HR processes. And the manager, in the middle of all of it, is lying awake at night, wondering why no one told them this was part of the job description.
If that resonates with you, you’re not failing. You were just never given the tools.
The First Thing You Need to Get Right: Clarity
I’ve sat in on enough difficult conversations to know that most of them go sideways not because of emotions, but because of vagueness. The manager hasn’t thought through what they want to say. They go into the conversation hoping it will sort itself out, and the employee leaves with no idea what was expected of them or why the conversation even happened.
Before you have any important conversation at work, you need to know exactly what you want the other person to walk away understanding. Not roughly. Not vaguely. Exactly. What behaviour have you observed? What impact is it having? What do you want to be different going forward? And what does a good outcome look like for both of you?
At The People Mentor, I start every piece of communication work in the same place. Not with the words or the tone, but with getting clear about what the conversation is really for.
When I work with managers through the COMPASS Conversation Model, we begin with clarity. Because if you’re fuzzy on that going in, no amount of communication skills will save you.
“Sometimes your attitude in team meetings concerns me” is not a clear message. “In Monday’s team meeting, when I was explaining the new rota system, I noticed you rolled your eyes and made a comment under your breath. Two other team members heard it, and I could see it affected the atmosphere in the room” is clear. One opens the door to confusion and defensiveness. The other gives the person something concrete to respond to.
Why Most Managers Avoid the Conversation Altogether
Let’s be honest about what’s really going on when we avoid a difficult conversation. It’s rarely laziness. It’s fear. Fear of the emotional reaction. Fear of making it worse. Fear of saying the wrong thing and ending up in HR. Fear of damaging a relationship you genuinely value.
I understand that fear. I’ve felt it myself, early in my career, when I was managing a team member whose performance was affecting everyone around them. I kept telling myself it would sort itself out. It didn’t. It got worse, the team got frustrated, and eventually I had to have a much harder conversation than I would have needed to if I’d just dealt with it six weeks earlier. If that is where you are right now, I’ve written about why managing an underperformer feels so exhausting, and what actually helps.
What most managers don’t realise is that avoiding a difficult conversation is itself a choice with consequences. Unresolved disagreements escalate into conflict. Team members who aren’t being held accountable know it, and so does everyone else. The person whose behaviour is causing problems doesn’t get the chance to put things right because they don’t even know there’s a problem. And you, the manager, are quietly carrying the stress of it all.
Avoiding the conversation doesn’t make you kind. It makes the situation worse for everyone involved, including the person you’re trying to protect.
If you want a quick way to spot where your communication might be breaking down, here is what I look for and how I address it.
| What you may notice | What it could mean | What to do next |
| The same issue keeps coming back after you have raised it. | Your message was not as clear as you thought, or there was no agreed-upon next step. | State the specific behaviour, the impact, and one concrete change, then write it down together. |
| The person becomes defensive as soon as you start. | You may have led with your judgement rather than an observable fact. | Open with what you saw or heard, not with your view of who they are. |
| You keep putting the conversation off. | Fear is doing the deciding, not judgement. | Name the cost of waiting, then book a time and prepare your first two sentences. |
| The conversation ends, and nothing changes. | You had a monologue, or you closed without a clear commitment. | Ask for their perspective, then agree on who does what by when. |
| Emotion derails the conversation every time. | You are trying to rush past the feeling to reach your point. | Acknowledge the emotion out loud, pause, then carry on once the person has had a moment. |
The Role of Emotions (Yours and Theirs)
One of the biggest misconceptions I hear from managers is that a difficult conversation has only gone well if nobody gets upset. That’s not the goal. Emotions are not a sign that the conversation has gone wrong. They’re a sign that the person in front of you cares about their job, their reputation, how they’re perceived. That’s a useful thing to work with.
What you need to get right is not the absence of emotion, but your response to it. When someone gets upset in a conversation, the worst thing you can do is panic, backpedal, or try to rush past the feeling to get to your point. The best thing you can do is acknowledge it. “I can see this is difficult to hear” or “I appreciate this wasn’t easy to talk about” cost you nothing and keep the conversation alive.
Your own emotions matter just as much. If you go into a difficult conversation already frustrated, defensive, or feeling like you’re the one being wronged, that energy will be in the room. The work you do before the conversation: Getting clear, settling your own nerves, checking your motives is just as important as what you say once you’re sitting across from someone. I’ve written more on how to manage your emotions at work without losing your cool, because getting yourself steady first changes how the whole conversation goes.
In the COMPASS model, we spend real time on this, what I call the Motive Check. Before you say a single word to the other person, you need to ask yourself what you genuinely want from this conversation. If the honest answer is that you want to make them feel bad, prove a point, or get it over with as quickly as possible, the conversation will reflect that. If the answer is that you want to understand what’s going on and find a way forward together, that will come through too.
Listening is Not Waiting to Talk
I’ve watched managers deliver what they think is a brilliant piece of feedback, only to tell me immediately that they’re not sure the person really took it in. When I ask whether they gave the employee a chance to respond, there’s usually a pause.
Communication does not only go one way. If you’ve planned everything you want to say and leave no room for the other person to share their perspective, you haven’t had a conversation. You’ve delivered a monologue. And monologues, however well crafted, rarely lead to the kind of change you’re hoping for.
The A in COMPASS stands for Ask for Perspective, and it’s one of the most powerful steps in the whole model. Because until you genuinely understand how the situation looks from the other person’s point of view, you’re only working with half the information. There might be something going on in their personal life that’s affecting their performance. There might be a team dynamic you weren’t aware of. There might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the behaviour you’ve been puzzling over for weeks. The better you understand what makes your people tick, the easier this step becomes.
Listening, really listening, means resisting the urge to jump in with solutions while the other person is still talking. It means tolerating the discomfort of silence. It means asking follow-up questions that show you’ve heard them. And it means being genuinely open to the possibility that your first reading of the situation might not be the complete picture.
Getting the Tone Right (Without Losing Your Message)
Tone is one of those things that’s deceptively simple to understand and genuinely difficult to get right under pressure. When we’re anxious, we often default to one of two extremes. Either we soften the message so much that the other person doesn’t realise there’s an issue, or we overcorrect and come across as cold or aggressive.
The sweet spot is what I’d call honest warmth. You can be direct and kind at the same time. You can hold a firm position while still being curious about the other person’s experience. You can deliver uncomfortable news without making someone feel attacked.
The language you use matters enormously. There’s a world of difference between “You’re always late with your reports” and “The last three reports have come in after the deadline, and I want to understand what’s getting in the way.” One closes the conversation down. The other opens it up. One puts the person on the defensive before they’ve had a chance to speak. The other invites a genuine response.
I always encourage the managers I work with to stay anchored in observable facts rather than interpretations. What did you see? What did you hear? What was the measurable impact? When you lead with those, rather than with your judgement of the person, the conversation has a much better chance of going somewhere useful.
From Conversation to Commitment
A difficult conversation that ends without a clear next step isn’t finished. It’s just paused. And that pause, in my experience, is where all the good work unravels.
If you’ve had a conversation about a performance issue, what specifically will change, and by when? Who is responsible for what? What support do you, as the manager, need to put in place? And when are you going to check in to see how things are going?
The final step of the COMPASS model is Securing the Action Plan. Not a vague “let’s see how it goes.” Concrete, agreed, written-down next steps that both parties are clear on. This is what separates a conversation that changes something from one that just burns an uncomfortable half hour.
It also protects you. If the situation continues, you have a record of the conversation, what was said, what was agreed, and what the follow-up looks like. That matters, especially if things escalate further down the line.
Manager Communication Skills Are Learnable
I want to say this clearly, because I know how many managers I’ve spoken to who believe they’re simply not good at difficult conversations, as if it’s a personality trait rather than a learnable skill. It isn’t. It’s a skill. One that gets easier the more you practise it, and one that makes an enormous difference to your team, your own confidence, and the health of your business.
Nobody expects you to have been born knowing how to address a performance issue, manage a conflict between two employees, or deliver feedback that actually gets through. But you are responsible for learning how. And that starts with understanding that avoiding the conversation isn’t a neutral choice. It’s an active one, with real consequences for real people.
Every difficult conversation you have, even the ones that don’t go perfectly, builds your confidence as a leader. You get better at reading the room. You get more comfortable with silence. You get less thrown by an emotional reaction. You develop a reputation that makes people trust you to handle the hard stuff.
The managers who struggle most aren’t the ones with the worst communication skills. They’re the ones who’ve convinced themselves that the conversation isn’t worth having, or that they’re not capable of having it well. Both of those things are fixable.
Ready to Change the Conversation?
If you’ve been putting off a conversation that needs to happen, or if you know your team would benefit from a manager who feels genuinely confident handling the difficult stuff, I want to help you get there.
Through the Catalyst Conversations programme, I work with managers and small business owners to build real, practical communication skills using the COMPASS Conversation Model. We work through your actual challenges, not hypothetical ones, and you come away with a clear framework, a DiSC profile to understand how your communication style affects those around you, and the confidence to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding.
The conversations that feel hardest are usually the most important ones. And the managers who learn to have them, calmly, clearly, and with genuine care for the person across the table, build the kinds of teams and businesses they’ve always wanted to lead.
Get in touch for a conversation. No strings. Just a chat to see where you’re at and whether I can help.