How to make conversations with your agency employees less difficult (featuring Allyns Melendez)

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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me someone who is going to help us have I don’t know, an easy conversation about difficult conversations and other things. Her name is Allyns, Allyns, ah, see, I knew I was going to mess this up, Allyns Melendez, the CEO of HR Transformed.

I was thinking about it too much, Allyns, I, I, I need to just stop thinking, right? I mean, that’s, that’s the advice I’m sure you give all your clients, just stop thinking, just do. Yes. Yes. No, I think that’s probably not the advice you would, you would give as an HR expert because it’s, it’s really important to think through what you’re going to do when you’re talking to employees and making sure that you’re crossing your T’s, dotting your I’s and all that.

But before we dive into some of the substance of today’s conversation, why don’t you just share a little bit with our listeners about yourself?

Allyns Melendez: Sure. Thank you, Chip. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I have 26 years of HR experience. And some people say to me, you know, how did you know you wanted to be in HR?

And I’ll tell you that from a super very young age, I mean, like nursery, elementary school level, I always put myself in the other person’s shoes. I’d always be in this super empathetic position of where does everyone stand here? I sympathize with the adults. I sympathize with the children around me. I, I put myself in their shoes and think about how are my words going to land if I need to say something to them, either a positive thing or something that is more constructive.

So HR for me has always been a journey of, of my life. And I built a business around HR and specifically agencies. I think that the agency model is so complex and so dynamic. That there’s less time to work around the people because they’re always looking to collaborate for their clients. And sometimes, you know, we kind of leave people behind.

So HR is just something that I love to do. Anything complex that has to do with people and their behaviors in the workplace is a, is a big love of mine. So that’s why I built a company around HR.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, and as you note, HR is so important in the agency world. Talent is the main thing that agencies have to sell.

A lot of times, agency owners sort of pay lip service to this by saying, oh, yeah, it’s, our team is our differentiator, which is one of my least favorite things to hear because it’s not a differentiator if every agency owner says the same thing. But because the team is so important, it means that the HR function, whether you have a, a full-time HR person, HR consultant, You’re listening to this podcast to get your HR advice, however it is you need to make sure that you are thinking intelligently and acting appropriately in order to get the most from that resource.

Allyns Melendez: And I think that there’s a lot of compliance out there and to grow an agency to do a service or creative ideas and kind of put people to work for your clients in that way. You forget about all the compliance things and having a really strong HR function, whether it be a consultant or an HR services company or an in house HR person, you don’t have time to worry about all the fine details there because again, your clients are going at a million miles per hour, whatever your agency’s set up is. And so having an eye on compliance and having an eye on handling things before they become this bigger, greater thing that takes up so much time.

And then the business owners or the leadership in the company gets resentful of their talent. So they’re sort of talking for both ends. Our people or our talent is our, is our vehicle to provide a great service for you. And yet the time it takes is ignored. And then it just kind of blows up. And then I talk to business owners all the time and they’re telling me the amount of time that I’m taking is all day.

I can’t sell. I can’t get in touch with our clients because I’m handling HR issues all day long. So I’m there to alleviate that. Um, in, in a greater sense, because one, that is my business, but two, I got into business for that purpose. And that’s a huge, huge benefit for the companies that I work with.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

And I’m a huge advocate of, uh, particularly small agencies working with HR consultants. Uh, in fact, I, I always encourage my clients to find an HR consultant that they can trust and work with and build a relationship with to help them with the compliance issues, because frankly, a lot of agency owners don’t know anything about the sort of the procedural side of running businesses, whether that’s tax accounting, HR, etc.

And they need to surround themselves with people who can frankly help to take the headache away, both in the short term of of the compliance and the long term of failing to comply. And so I think having You know, folks who can help you to navigate those waters is important, but it’s not just about the compliance.

I mean, I think that’s that’s the that’s the table stakes, the minimum thing that you need to do. You need to make sure that you are, you know, handling all of the rules and regulations appropriately doing the right paperwork, paying the right taxes and all that kind of stuff, handling benefits properly, which is a huge area, in my experience, where owners slip up because they don’t understand how to manage benefits amongst their team appropriately.

But a lot of it is also just the interrelationship between the owner, manager, and employees. And so I know one of the things we were talking about in the pre show was difficult conversations. And this is something that, in my experience, a lot of the agency owners I work with, they do almost anything they can to avoid a difficult conversation with an employee.

The employees do the same in the other direction. And the longer you allow those, those situations that deserve a difficult conversation to fester, the harder they become to resolve.

Allyns Melendez: A hundred percent. So I love to get involved with agencies when they are faced with these people issues, um, on both sides.

I’ll start with the employee side first, because that to me is less complex. When an employee has an issue and they try to talk to their manager or try to talk to leadership about it, There is this sense of, I don’t know what to do about this. And in an agency, again, when you’re moving so quickly and your clients are being so demanding and the deadlines are very, very close together, there is this sort of, um, resentment that comes from the lack of communication, but also it shuts down communication for future.

And a lot of agencies don’t want to know what is going on with their employees? I hear the, I rather not know. So I don’t have to deal with it. Because as soon as you hear something’s going on, you know, the amount of time, the amount of conversations, the amount of emotional baggage that is going to come with that.

Is so overwhelming that the avoidance is what is usually the go to that business owners, um, basically do. So one thing that they can do is create a 24 7 virtual suggestion box. So you remember back in the days, you used to put a little piece of paper in a box and. You try to put it in someone else’s handwriting so nobody would know it was you.

Well, there’s these awesome tools everywhere, also homemade tools on very, on free websites like SurveyMonkey, where you can set up a forum, an anonymous area, an anonymous link. Where someone could tell you what’s going on at your company. And a lot of business owners are resistant to that because again, not, not just, I’d rather not know.

I’d rather not deal. I’d rather not do the hard work and the heavy lifting that it takes to solve it and to communicate back. If you start to do that, my biggest advice is use a free tool like Survey Monkey, get feedback from the staff, leave the link open in perpetuity.

Look at it when someone submits something and answer publicly, and I mean publicly, I don’t mean out in the social sphere. I mean, internally say, Hey, we got a suggestion box, uh, posting from someone anonymous. And it basically had to do with X. You don’t have to tell them exactly what it was. And here’s what we’re going to promise you, whoever it was out there.

We want everyone else to know. If it’s a no, you say why. If it’s a yes, thank them for the suggestion. That builds trust. And so what that creates for the employee is an openness of if I do not feel comfortable going to a manager and sharing my, my fears, my concerns, my expectations, my feedback, my negativity, my positivity.

I don’t feel that safety. I’m going to do it anonymously. You give them an outlook for that. And the second thing on, on that, uh, still on the employee side is, are your managers trained enough to receive information and do the right thing with it? So I’m going to, I’m throwing in some compliance at the same time.

A lot of managers, especially in agencies that I’ve been working with, and I’ve been in HR for 26 years and work with in various industries and agencies is my favorite last 15 years spent in an agency. Managers do not understand that being promoted into that like account manager or account supervisor level.

You have an obligation to take information from an employee and bring it to senior management. And when you don’t do that, you put yourself in a situation legally that you don’t want to be. And I’m not an attorney. I studied HR law for many years at Cornell. And I’ve been using this my entire career. The conversation with managers is you have an obligation to the organization to take information to senior management.

Why? If someone comes to you with something serious. It’s on you personally, not just your, you lead the organization, but it’s on you personally, because you have the information. So training the managers and understanding that someone puts something on your plate, you’ve got to handle it, walk it over to someone else and give it to HR, give it to the business owner, business owner can give it to HR and they can handle it.

That again, builds trust. And the training is important, getting people trained up to understand. So now from the management perspective, how scary is it to go into a conversation because you are frustrated and annoyed and you do not have the time because client crisis are happening all the time. The demands from the media are high or whatever your agency is doing.

I mean, the stakes are high. So the anxiety for most managers, especially more junior managers, going into a difficult conversation is I’m just going to tell them what needs to be done. I’m going to direct them in the right direction. And they just need to get it. They just need to go back and do their job.

And that’s the truth, right? That’s exactly the outcome that every manager wants. And you’ve got many different types of managers. You’ve got your super calm sort of empathetic manager. That’s the person who’s not willing to go into a conflict. situation. They don’t want to enter into conflict. So if an employee responds in a very conflict inducing way, that manager is backing down.

Oh, it’s okay. It’s totally fine. You’ll get there in time. You’ll finally figure out how to do this right. You’ve got that manager. That manager is not being the one who is going to protect time. That manager is going to keep letting poor performance kind of infiltrate that team and infiltrate the client work.

Bad deal. Training that manager to being more direct and going into that conversation with a more direct mindset, role playing with someone else, getting a peer mirror, practicing with someone who’s an opposite behavioral style than them is really important for them. Then you’ve got your manager who like doesn’t care for conflict.

Like I could just go right in, tell you what to do and leave. We call those like the, the, the quick, like dominant styles. I could do a lot of discord. Be quick, be brilliant, be gone. That’s the same way they throw feedback around. It’s like, Hey, here’s what you’re doing wrong. Do it better. And I’m going to go back there.

You got any questions? No. Right. Great. All right. I’m leaving. So getting someone to kind of slow down and say, what does this person need? How are my words landing on both ends? Right. You’ve got your super dominant. I can just give you two examples. So many other examples in between, right. But I took the two extremes.

How is my feedback going to land on this person? And, and when you’re going into a difficult conversation, you have to think about mind mapping your feedback. There’s, there’s a five set up for that. One, what is the biggest issue? What are we talking about? Is it meeting deadlines? Is it quality of work? Is it attention to detail?

What is it? Let’s just pick deadlines as one. What is the issue? Meeting deadlines inconsistent. Need to get you on track with that because the client work is coming out late. And, and we’ve got contractual obligations to that client because the client work is not being done on time. Putting that in jeopardy, putting revenue in jeopardy.

So even though, you know, your deadlines feel small and insignificant to you, they have a bigger effect, a bigger impact on client work in general and what we’ve been obligated to do. Second is, I’ve, I’ve taken a look at the quality of work when it comes to the deadlines. And I noticed that when you do miss the work or when you do meet the deadlines, that work isn’t, isn’t great.

Errors, there’s issues, factual errors, stylistic issues, grammar, syntax, whatever it’s going to be. You need to talk about that too. That needs to be buttoned up. And obviously it’s a time crunch because the deadlines are being missed as well. The third part of that, right? You stated the two issues that you found in the work.

The third one is what is the analysis? Have you taken a quicker look? A closer look of if I were in this person’s shoes, what is something that has occurred in the past couple weeks or months that has contributed to this? And I’m not talking personal, I’m talking business. Have I given them five more accounts to work on?

Has their client had a client crisis? Have they been on, I don’t know, press trips? Have they been onboarding a client, which takes a lot more effort on the, on the front end than it does on, you know, when you’re kind of floating by and kind of delivering work over a couple months, like what has changed in their sphere or their scope of work that has contributed to some of this deadline missing.

So that’s the three parts. Then I go into my intention, which is the most important part in the difficult conversation. I am here because I want you to grow. Because I want you to know what you need to do to be better at your job. Because I want you here and my intention is to make it clear that things are not going so well and that potentially your job will be in jeopardy if we don’t work together to fix this.

And that is the, the, where you stop the conversation and say, I want to hear from you, what’s getting in the way. If you start with all of that information and you’ve mind mapped it on a piece of paper, you know, I like to use a nice little fun looking map. It’s got little circles on it and lines, um, or just a piece of paper.

You’ve now also done one thing that’s really important, which is documenting. Very important part of potentially either the growth or the decline of this person’s tenure with you. So then you get into this two way conversation with this employee and you discover some things. And I think the scariest part of difficult conversations for a lot of people is what will happen when they start to talk back, what will it be?

Will it be a health issue? Will it be a personal issue? Will it be nothing associated with work because if it’s beyond work, I do not want to deal with it, which is what the business owners usually think about are those senior leadership. That’s, that’s in that problem. Also the more junior leaders, they’re in that position to say, Oh, I totally understand.

I get it. I go through the same thing myself. And that’s in the purpose of relating, but how can you get to solving? If it’s a personal issue, mental health issue, health issue, family issue, you have to be very clear on that is, not in my area of expertise. I think it’s really important that you see a doctor.

And you know, we’ve got time off for you to do with that, deal with that. Um, and I want to support you with that. So if you need to morrow off or you need to make an appointment, I’m here to do that. I’m here to give you that time. Um, a lot of business owners and people think that they need to solve the problem.

And they’re not supposed to, but you’re supposed to say what you can do, which is support you in that. And what do you do in the meantime? In the meantime, I do expect you to move forward and get better at whatever it is, the issue that we’re talking about in this case, it’s deadlines. I need you to start to make some progress there.

And maybe we can talk about some work related items that can help. You know, can we help with time management? Is there a course you can take? Let me give you some tips. Let me get you with HR. They do a fun time management session that can teach you about time boxing and some of these techniques that may help with some of the health issues that you’re having as well.

The court of compartmentalize the things that you need to do. All these solutions can be thought of. And then the biggest fear is if somebody just breaks down and starts crying, or they start yelling at you, and they start getting super defensive. And there is a time where the business owner or the leader does not know when to actually stop the conversation and give some space.

Right. So the last part of that is if it does go down this road of, wow, we are emotionally charged and I feel like I’m going to be emotionally charged and they’re emotionally charged, whether it’s crying or yelling or just shutting down, that’s an emotion. Shutting down is an emotion to me. That is avoidance.

So if it does go into this place where you do not know how to move forward and you’re sort of stuck. You have to say that, I see that the conversation is not going anywhere. Why don’t we continue tomorrow morning? Let’s both sleep on this, kind of gather our thoughts, and talk in the morning. And I emphasize in the morning, because you cannot let the conversation be picked up a week later, or a month later, or during their performance review five months later.

So acknowledging that it needs to stop is really, really important.

Chip Griffin: If you’re a manager long enough, you will experience these things too, right? I have had the screaming employees, the crying employees. You stick around long enough, you will have them. And so you, you’re better off to be prepared and be thinking about how to handle them.

So I, I, you know, I love that you’re, you’re zeroing in on that because it is, it is something that holds you back, but it shouldn’t because you still need to have those conversations, despite the fact that those things might happen. They’re not going to happen every time. I mean, it’s a very, very small proportion of them in my experience, where you experience, get to that point.

Allyns Melendez: Exactly. And when you are, there’s some that just get really lost. And so being able to role play that it’s really important to pick a peer mirror at your organization. If you’re at the business owner level, find some people outside that are also business owners that can just have fun role playing with you.

Like, let me play this really, you know, hard situation where I’ve got an employee who’s really upset and angry with me. I want you to play this super defensive role and just, just challenge me for a moment. Let’s just play this game. Let’s practice together.

Chip Griffin: And it’s also where it’s helpful to have an expert like you involved who, you know, you can sit there and say, Well, you know, I’m worried, you know, if this happens, what would I do?

And then you can talk it through. And so you can explore those kinds of things in advance. And so, you know, I know that when I’ve had, you know, difficult HR issues, and I’ve worked with my HR advisors on it in the past, you know, I sit there and say, Okay, well, you know, here are the, you know, sort of the worst case scenarios, the reasonable worst case scenarios, at least that might happen, you know, let’s just kind of talk through how we might handle those as, as they crop up so that you feel more prepared.

And so it’s not, you know, that deer in the headlights feeling that you can get if you haven’t had a chance to either role play it or talk it through with an expert or somehow prepare for that eventuality.

Allyns Melendez: The questions I ask then is what is the worst that can happen if you don’t have the conversation and if you do have the conversation.

The benefits are there for having the conversation, especially if you use the words that are clear. An employee will hear your job is in jeopardy. They will not hear, Hey, we need to work on this and fix this. They’re not going to hear that the same. And in reality, the business owners is saying your job is in jeopardy.

I may terminate you if we don’t move, move forward in the right place. And so you have to find the right cadence, the right words, the right ability to close out that conversation with the employee and restating back. I just want to restate this is serious. Your job could potentially be in jeopardy. We want to make sure you’re here long term and if these things don’t shift we’re going to be having a very different conversation in two weeks when we touch base again. That is clear.

Chip Griffin: I think one of the interesting things that you’ve also highlighted as you’ve looked at these different things, whether it be the suggestion box or a middle manager, making sure that they’re hearing what the employee says and reporting it up the chain uh, when necessary. Even in the difficult conversation, pausing and giving the employee a chance to respond, react, share, et cetera. I, I think a lot of people, when they first become a manager, they think my job is to direct and tell you what to do. And that is absolutely a piece of it. But another large piece of it, and one that I think a lot of managers overlook to their own peril, is the listening part.

You need to create an environment where the employees are you know, willing to have that community. I mean, the, the suggestion box is a great idea, but hopefully you’re creating enough of an environment that most of the time they will actually go to their direct manager or to you as the owner and not feel like they need to use the suggestion box as a shield because that listening process is ingrained in the whole management of the agency.

Allyns Melendez: And that’s how you build the trust. You allow those folks who are not willing to reveal who they are and they start seeing this sort of public reveal of the answers. And they start to build trust in management, and that’s what you want. And also, the listening part is so important, because the different personalities that you find at the top of an organization listen very differently.

And they shut down very differently. A very calm, collected, patient leader is going to listen a lot better than a higher strung, very, uh, high sense of urgency individual. And usually in an agency at the top, there’s a lot of high sense of urgency individuals and I am one of them. And if you take the time to pause and it can be just crucial to just pause and say, what do you think and truly listen in that moment that needs to become part of the sense of urgency that act needs to become urgent for that person to listen.

Chip Griffin: Well, and a huge part of creating the culture of listening is how you react when you do take in information, right? So if you, if you immediately become defensive or you immediately respond to a criticism of you with a criticism of the person who’s offering it or something like that, it makes people much more reluctant to share.

And so, you know, I always encourage, uh, managers that I’m training to, to feel like they can, they can take on almost any of them, even if it’s a very brutal, direct, maybe even in their minds, completely inaccurate, uh, complaint. They need to take it in. They need to, as you say, pause. That you, you can’t just react in the moment because that’s when bad things happen.

And, and so sometimes you need to reflect on it. Sometimes that timeout is not because the, you know, the employee needs timeout till the next morning. You may need to timeout to think about it and say, you know, is there really some truth to this? You know, do I, do I need to really consider whether I’m the one who is maybe not in the wrong, but maybe I’m not entirely right either.

Allyns Melendez: And Chip, the person receiving that information in the moment needs to be able to say wow. I didn’t know you felt that way. I didn’t know that I was coming across that way. And you can say, if it’s true and authentic, it was not my intention. And I’m sorry for that. Or again, some business owners or some leaders don’t want to apologize for something.

They didn’t think they did wrong, right? These are the right/wrong looking for the flaw sort of people mindset. You can just say, I didn’t realize that that is the effect that my words had on you. And I’m sorry for that. Right. Not that I’m sorry I said it. I’m sorry for that. There’s, there’s ways to really work around the defensiveness and allowing conversations to stay open as opposed to closing it down and saying that’s not true.

Chip Griffin: So what advice do you have for, you know, a lot of small agency owners, as we’ve mentioned, don’t have a lot of their own managerial experience, right? They, they may have done, they may have had a management role at another agency or something like that before they started their own, but, but oftentimes it’s not a lot.

It’s not very deep. And so they’re, they’re sort of learning on the job and then they start as they grow, you know, 5, 10 employees, they start putting in some level of middle management and those people almost certainly don’t have any prior managerial experience. Right. So, in some respects, you almost have the blind leading the blind when it comes to uh, management skills. So how do you suggest that, that agency owners go about upleveling their own management skills, as well as making sure that they’re helping to guide their own new set of managers? Because if, if they don’t, then they’re going to have a massive talent problem on their hands sooner rather than later.

Allyns Melendez: So their junior leadership is going to believe that success looks like the owner of the company. And if the owner of the company is acting this way, I must act this way. So truly focusing on the business owner and getting them individualized coaching, bringing problem solving to the table. So, you know, there’s, there’s coaching, which is all Q and A, and then there’s coaching consulting training.

It’s sort of a continuum that we’re really good at is really understanding. There’s more to us than just coaching. I’m not gonna ask you a question and try to pull the answer out of you for 24 sessions. It is okay. What do you need? What’s your biggest pain point this week or this month? Let’s try to solve that.

And then I’m going to show you how we got there because you don’t have time. Agencies just don’t have the time to ask 45, 000 questions to elicit the answer. Sometimes, sometimes you just have to give them the answer. And then we kind of go backwards and say, how did we get to that answer? And tell me why it worked.

So coaching – really strong coaching would be really great with that continuum, getting some training, some coaching, some guidance, some consulting. And then start to see the shift in the other people. Do a 360. Get feedback about yourself before and after. See if you actually are making a positive impact on the people around you and what success looks like.

Then second, I would say as a company starts to grow, everyone who gets leveled up into a supervisor or management role needs an intro to supervising. They do. And it’s not that difficult. It’s like a two hour session or, you know, like really talk to them about obligations, legal stuff, compliance, kind of scare the crap out of them at first and say, listen, you’ve got a new role.

It means something. It doesn’t just mean more money and a better salary, you know, a better salary, better title. It means some responsibility. I am trusting you with my brand. You’re an extension. You’re, you’re, you’re leadership here, right? You’re, you’re managing someone, you’re impacting someone. I want to show you how it’s done.

I’m also going to give you the tools so that you can figure it out because the way that business owner learns. It’s not the same way that that supervisor new manager is going to learn. So think about the adult learning styles. Maybe they’re a reader. Maybe they’ll be good at reading a book like The Hard Thing About Hard Things or you know, uh Atlas of the Heart from Brene Brown. Like there’s so many ways that they can learn to be better managers finding that nice mix is going to be really important and also making that available to all of the leadership on a consistent basis because guess what?

No one’s situation is going to be the same, which is why I love HR. It’s like, give it to me. Oh, I’ve never seen that before. Let’s get in there.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think the basic training for new managers is, is, is so critically important. And frankly, not even for just people who are becoming managers, but people who are doing manager like things like participating in interviews of prospective employees.

I have seen some absolutely outrageous questions asked by you know, mid level people who are not managers, but are still involved in the hiring process and the questions I’ve seen them ask candidates, just they’re mind boggling. Yeah. And, and the risk that that is creating for your business cannot be overstated.

And so you need to make sure that if you’re going to have someone participate in job interviews, they need to be trained on what they can and can’t ask. Right. Managers need to know just the very basics of not even good management, but just, you know, non nuclear management. So you don’t make things so much worse. But I think I really want to highlight as we’re drawing to a close here, the, the, what you said, as far as the owner, the, the managers look to the owner for cues on how to behave. And so, if you are managing in one particular way, you cannot expect those managers underneath you to behave differently. They will model your behavior, so you need to make sure that you are setting the example for them that you want to see from them. And I, if you hadn’t, if I gave no other piece of advice to an owner who’s working with a new manager, that would be it.

Because I think it’s just all of the agencies that I run into that have management problems, it usually is rooted in how the owner has acted previously with those team members.

Allyns Melendez: Spot on. 100%.

Chip Griffin: So, uh, this has been a great conversation. I think you’ve given some great tips for folks on not just difficult conversations, but how you can avoid the difficult conversation, hopefully in the first place, because you’ve had good processes, good communications, good management leading up to that.

If someone would like to learn more about you, uh, or tap into the resources that you provide, where should they go?

Allyns Melendez: They can go to our website, www.hrtransformed.com. And we also have an Instagram, HR_transformed. We’ve got some free resources on there and some great, um, info on our blog, on our website. So download some free content and get in touch with us.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, it has been great to have you. I appreciate all of the advice that you give have given today. Again, my guest has been Allyns Melendez, the CEO of HR Transformed. Thanks for joining us.

Allyns Melendez: Thanks Chip.