I Had the Hard Conversation. Then I Let It Slide.

In this episode, I share the semester I spent chasing an instructor in my faculty for every report he owed me, the conversation I finally sat down and had with him over the break, and the four months afterward when I watched him slide right back into the pattern and said nothing. 

This episode is about how the conversation is one afternoon and holding the line is every day after it. When someone slips back and you stay quiet, rather than thinking you're not being generous with them, understand that you're teaching them that your standards have an expiry date. And most of the leaders doing this aren't avoidant by nature. They're the ones who care most about being fair, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see in yourself.

I get into the three reasons this happens, the ones that sound completely reasonable from the inside, and the accountability ladder I use now so that a missed standard has somewhere to go besides another round of the same conversation.

In this episode:

• Why the first slip after the conversation is the entire ballgame, and what your silence in that moment teaches the other person
• The difference between nagging and accountability, and why one comes from powerlessness and the other from a prior agreement
• What letting it slide costs you with your strong performers, long before it costs you anything with the person who missed the deadline
• The four-rung accountability ladder, with a script framework for each rung
• The one thing I now do during the conversation, while the person is still sitting in front of me

This week's permission: You are allowed to bring it up again. The conversation you had was the start of something, not the end of it, and following up on an agreement someone made with you is the job of being a leader.