The best time to manage a conflict is before it happens. Andrew Quagliata, senior lecturer of management communication at the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration, and host Chris Wofford explore the importance of clear expectations and strong relationships in effective leadership—at work and at home.
Open communication, clear expectations and constructive feedback are essential components of effective leadership. Through comparisons of management and parenting, Andrew Quagliata, senior lecturer of management communication at the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration, outlines strategies for stronger communication in any setting during this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast, hosted by Chris Wofford and brought to you by eCornell.
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Chris Wofford: On today's episode, we're joined by communication expert and senior lecturer at Cornell's S.C. Johnson College of Business, Andrew Quagliata.
Chris Wofford: Andrew makes a strong case that tough love is a powerful key to success in leadership and parenting, as it turns out. It's about inspiring our people with empathy and care while maintaining high expectations and employing one of my favorite new terms, radical candor, that is keeping it real through openness and critical honesty.
Chris Wofford: So be sure to check out the episode notes for the details on Andrew's communications online certificate Programs from Cornell. Tough love is powerful stuff, and I think you'll learn something about yourself, and ideally, become a more effective manager and parent. So good luck! Here's my conversation with Andrew Quagliata.
Chris Wofford: Andrew, you grabbed my attention last week with this article at andrewcogliata. com called Tough Love, the key to success in leadership and parenting. I said, boy, I want to know more. Why are we talking about tough love? And I should ask, do you teach this kind of stuff to your students at Cornell?
Andrew Quagliata: It's a great topic. I was intrigued by it as well. My focus is on interpersonal communication in organizational contexts. So what does that mean? Well, my day job, I'm really teaching students to write and to give presentations, and they're having to think about how they're communicating to other people.
And then also, I spend quite a bit of time in my executive education work for Cornell, going out talking to executives about their interpersonal relationships in the workplace. And what it really turns out is there's a lot of things we can learn about how we communicate in work and how we communicate at home.
Chris Wofford: So if my takeaways are clear from the article and the conversations we've had, to be an effective parent or leader, like if we bring a certain level of care or love to the relationship i. e. maintaining high expectations, employees or kids will thrive to their best of their ability under these conditions. Yes?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah, exactly. We need to balance high caring and high expectations. So from a leadership perspective, that means caring for your team members and holding them accountable for high performance. And when we do this, that's going to lead to effectiveness. When it comes to a parenting perspective, which we also talk about in the article, it's being responsive and having high standards.
And that, ideally, is going to lead to greater child well being. So, organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant calls this inspiring.
Chris Wofford: So what does it mean to be inspiring like as a leader or a parent? How do you do it? What are you supposed to do?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. Well, I'm not sure my kids would call me inspiring if they were here, so what else? Then it means that the relationship needs to be solid. And that often comes with time and it's about building trust with that other person. But we could say the same thing about people we manage, couldn't we? Well, I need to be present. I need to actually have some time with them. I need to build trust with them.
And when it comes to expectations we have to talk about, well, what do we value? What are those behavioral expectations? What's appropriate? What's not? I often think about when I was a kid and we'd play a game and somebody would then start to make up rules as the game went on. Nobody liked that, right?
We were like, wait, no, you can't change the rules. So what we, in the best situation, we define those rules or expectations in advance. And then we try to play by those rules. And then if those rules aren't working, we can step back and we can say, let's renegotiate our agreement that we made on those rules.
And ideally when we do that, people know why we're asking to change the rule. They know what their expectations are. When it comes back to my kids as an example is when we, when I ask them to change their behavior, they don't question why because they know that we had established an expectation for a behavior, and they weren't living up to the behavior.
And so they don't get really upset with me for holding them accountable. They say, you're right. We did agree to this and we move on and they know I love them.
Chris Wofford: So where's the tough part in here, right? So the expectations kind of set the framework out there. Where does the tough come in when somebody doesn't meet those expectations? Is that what we're talking about here?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. Yeah, most of our days aren't spent correcting other behavior right most of it can be regular interplay or interchange, but what happens when we fail to meet someone else's expectations? That's where the tough part comes in and tough might not be what people traditionally think is tough.
Tough might just mean being direct saying hey, this isn't going like I thought it would go, let's talk about it. And notice the tone of my voice in the way that I say that. I don't think anyone would say, wow, he's being really tough right now. Some might, but the tough isn't in the tone. The tough is in uh, "it's sometimes hard to have these conversations," but I'm gonna tell you this because I love you and I care about you and it's gonna be better for all of us in the end if we address this issue now and rather than just hide from it.
Chris Wofford: And maybe the tough is the inspiring part to some degree. Yeah. Ideally.
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: So organizational psychologist and author Grant points to another piece Radical Candor, it's called, by Tim Scott. And this is sort of tough love adjacent piece that you had tipped me to before we started talking today. The idea is, and it's what it sounds like, right?
Where essentially leaders need to really keep it real with their people give them the straight, dope, radical candor. Tell me a little bit more about this and what's involved. Yeah. Sounds like tough love.
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Uh, Scott says we need to care personally and challenge directly. So I think some people misinterpret this framework and focus too much on the challenge directly part before they care personally.
There's a funny Dilbert cartoon that's kind of like, well, I'm just being radically candid with you. And it's like, no, it's not an excuse to be a jerk. Uh, so what is, let's first say when we're trying to adopt this model we need to care. So, show more than your work self, so that might be being vulnerable. Encourage your team to share with you. Part of this we need to model, if we're going to be candid with other people or direct, we need to let them be direct with us. We need to be human, we really need to understand that the relationship comes first. And then, once we have a relationship with someone, then we can challenge them directly.
So that means delivering hard feedback. How you deliver the message really matters as well. So it's not, again, about being mean necessarily. It's about just trying to be clear and specific with people. So, yeah Tim Scott and Radical Candor lays out a wonderful framework. And what's the opposite of Radical Candor?
Well, there's a few other quadrants you could be in her matrix, and the one, to kind of link back to your earlier question, is kind of this idea of uh, she calls it ruinous empathy. And this is where you're just being really nice and you're too worried about the other person's feelings. That in the end can actually be a bad thing for that other person.
At some point they're going to come to you and say, why didn't you tell me I, I was doing this? Or why didn't you tell me I had this deficiency? You let me go through my life or my work and didn't give me the gift of that feedback.
Chris Wofford: I think the caring part is really interesting too, because I imagine it involving a lot of emotionally intelligent questioning of the person who you're going to deliver the radical candor to, right? You have to understand their motivations, what gives them agency, why they do what they do. Right?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah, certainly I think observing people's behavior, asking them questions, and then being prepared to listen to them is a big part of it, and it comes back to coaching and not controlling.
You might even be help, help them even figure out what's going on without even having to tell them. But if after that probing and questioning, they're still not there, you might need to be more direct and really give them that feedback.
Chris Wofford: Right. And you know, there's some delicacy to this. I think in the wrong hands you could be a little brutal and insensitive and maybe unrelenting uh, in your critique. So I don't know. Do you have anything to say about that? Right? Yeah. How do you sort of know when you're being too tough?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. And I asked myself that question from time to time for sure. First thing, there's another quadrant that I haven't mentioned yet called obnoxious aggression.
And so this is when you challenge directly, but there's not enough relationship there. And there's an old quote, I don't know who said it, but people need to know you care before they care what you know. And we all can just think about this in our own lives. I want everyone to think about someone who's given you feedback, but you didn't have a good relationship with them, and you did not receive the feedback well.
And then someone who could have given you that exact same feedback, but because you knew they loved you or cared about you or had your best interest at heart, you could hear the feedback. That's what we're talking about. That's the relationship first. So if you, if you found that you've been too tough, and this can happen, you'll get feedback as the message deliver person. The feedback could come verbally, and many times it'll be non verbal. You'll see someone's shoulder slump, head down, eyes, perhaps water, they'll get upset. So, what you have to ask yourself in that moment is, how's my relationship with this person? And often times we misjudge our relationship strength with other people.
We might think it's better than it is and say, Oh, well maybe it's not as strong. I need to sure up the relationship side before I deliver more of that feedback. And then you could ask yourself, are my expectations too high? Perhaps are they unclear? And perhaps do we need to revisit these expectations?
Are there barriers preventing this? Are there logical, emotional barriers? Are there environmental barriers? It's really important to go back to that. And one of the things I like to think about, it is one other tool for those of you listening, is I, I like to think about John Gottman's research.
He's a marital psychologist. And again, we're not talking about marriage so much today, but I think we can take a tool from his toolbox. He suggests that we, in a relationship, you want one negative feeling to five positive feelings as a ratio.
Chris Wofford: Why?
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. So, that, that balance of saying if we have too many negative interactions, it's not going to be healthy for a relationship.
Andrew Quagliata: So a healthy relationship has a positive positive feedback to negative feedback ratio.
Chris Wofford: Oh, I see. Okay.
Andrew Quagliata: So, so one way you might think are you being too tough is if you just keep critical, and there's no positive coming, the ratio may be out of whack. And that's in a marriage.
But you also can think about that in your other relationships as well. Am I just giving this person a lot of critical feedback all the time and never telling them what they're doing well? We might need to start to pay attention. Oh yeah, I need to give them some more positive feedback. One way I think about this, even with my students, right?
If I'm evaluating some of their writing is they certainly want critical feedback so they can become better writers, but they need in there some positive feedback as well
Chris Wofford: You know you asked me to think about how I think about tough love, I went right to parenting and I think you and I you know, we're talking about this a little bit I thought hard about this one and as a parent, I think I may have done one or two things right through the years uh, with our kids, Jen and I fairly consistently would assume a level of responsibility that may have just been a little bit beyond where my kids were.
Chris Wofford: And I gotta tell you, this didn't come from anything studied. It was, I think, instinctive. This is kind of where we went. That is, we kind of set high expectations. Not unreasonable, high. And I think, from my viewpoint and looking, looking back, I think it helped to create resilience in them, independence.
Like, self direction, problem solving abilities that they otherwise wouldn't have gained had we not given them the high expectations. And also the flexibility and relative independence to go and do those things. So, you know, Here's an example, right? So, uh, can, can you take me to go get ice cream?
No, I'm not going to take you to get ice cream. I have to work right now. It's a 20 minute walk. Why don't you go with your brother? I'll give you four dollars. Go get the ice cream, stay within budget, bring me the change, and we'll see you in 20 or 40 minutes. Yeah. There's a lot in there as a parent, you think, well, you know, we've all done it a lot, but. It took a little bit of what I consider tough love to do that. Yeah, right. Yeah, and they thrived within that framework.
Andrew Quagliata: Yes, it sounds like at the foundation though. They knew you loved and cared about them, and there were probably some expectate you set a clear expectation like a budget expectation, but beyond that there was probably some expectations that you set well before like about leaving the house and going somewhere else look both ways before you cross the street, stick together. If you're not going to get back when you say you're going to get back, make sure you give me a call. Like those kinds of conversations all happen. Those expectations were set well in advance so you could let them go out into the world with some comfort.
Chris Wofford: Right. And then I stared out the window and waited for him to get home.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. All right. We did it.
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. I like what you said there too. There, there was this, age appropriate eExpectation. Yeah, and I suspect you also had some different expectations for each of your children. You didn't treat them like the same human being. And kids don't always like this "Hey, you let them do this when they were this age," but times are different and the kids are different and yeah, and that's what part of being tough is it's not easy to tell one kid that they can't do something that maybe the other did.
But when we spend time explaining the why behind things, I think children are pretty perceptive and understanding people as well.
Chris Wofford: I think my second kid, my daughter, didn't get the same amount of attention. Let's be honest.
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Um, So when does tough love become something insidious harmful? We talked a little bit about going over the line tough love stands as kind of an old school concept, right?
Chris Wofford: Oh, I know what tough love is.
Andrew Quagliata: So we shouldn't think about it like maybe our fathers and grandfathers thought about tough love, that's for sure. And I do think this language that we've talked about today of caring personally and challenging directly can be helpful or caring and having high expectations can be helpful.
I want to begin with just thinking about the platinum rule. Treat others how they would like to be treated. And that's opposed to the golden rule, treat others how you'd like to be treated. So we might go through life thinking like, okay, I'm gonna the way, the way I like love is this, well, that might not be how your teammate or your employee or your own children like love.
So this is an individualized approach. I also like to draw, I don't know who wrote the book Love Languages, but that often helps me with my own kids to be like, okay quality time, acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch. Those are the four I like to think about with the kids and my, I have two daughters and they would rank those four things differently. So trying to balance out what they like.
The key when we're thinking about, you talked about, is it, is it, can it be bad? Certainly can be, right? I think my dad used to say too much of anything is probably not a good thing. I like to think about how we can employ this. We can model it. So, if I challenge others directly, I'll invite them to challenge me directly.
We need clear communication. So what are the expectations and the reasons behind them? Employees and our children really want to know why. We need consistent support along the way. When we set those expectations, perhaps particularly with our employees, they need some training and they're going to get feedback along the way.
But same with our kids. "Hey, I expect you to shovel the driveway." Right? Well, gotta show them how to shovel the driveway, as an example. Uh, and, And when they don't do it perfect, go out and say, "Oh let's talk about how we can do this better." And then, of course, I think empathy throughout all of this.
Just recognizing that emotions play a big role in this. And there's some people that, those tough love people might say, emotions, there's no place for emotions in work. That's a real old school way of thinking. The realities we know that emotions are uh, we can't deny those. So recognizing the emotions that go along with this process as well.
Chris Wofford: I'm thinking about the listener or the leader or the manager of people who is thinking. "Oh boy, you know something else to think about." I've got a whole different way to think about my work. Does this mean more work or does it mean working smarter more economically that kind of stuff?
Andrew Quagliata: You know what? I often will say to people particularly when it comes to effective communication, it often might mean there's more work in the beginning, but there's less work at the end. What do I mean by that? Is if we make these agreements, then, we have clear expectations about the behavior, then we have a healthy dialogue when the expectations aren't happening, I challenge directly.
But if we don't set, take that time up front, we're too busy to sit down and talk about what we expect of each other, that's not getting things done. That's a false statement, right? Then all of a sudden when people don't meet our expectations, and they won't, then we have to deal with it, but then the person's really upset because you didn't detail the expectations.
They're just playing a guessing game. So, when we can set those expectations in advance, again ultimately, what I like to think about is in teams. We know that there's going to be conflict. We know that there's going to be disagreements. Why don't we have a conversation about how we will manage the conflict in advance and our process for resolving disagreements before those happen, as opposed to inventing the rules like on the playground when we were kids as the game goes.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, exactly. So, we're just starting this conversation for a lot of people that are listening here. Right. A lot of people may not for better or for worse, think too critically about their leadership style or frankly their parenting style or think about it too much or overthink it. But I think what your article really did for me it acted as a good jumping off point for further understanding a lot of what we're talking about here.
Because for me the organizational psychology stuff, it's not the lane I usually ride in. Yeah. So there's a lot to learn for me. But you know, so we're going to point listeners to your blog and deliver some next steps. Where do people go from here? There's got to be some exercises we can do.
Andrew Quagliata: Yeah. So I've got a few uh, reflection questions on, on, on the blog post about it that people can ask themselves. But I, I think a good way to think about this is, the first time we do things, it does feel a little clunky. So I'm gonna go back to the, these agreements. We have them all the time, right? I have a syllabus that's an agreement. We have employment contracts that are agreements. We have unspoken agreements, perhaps with our spouses in our families. We have new agreements as they as our kids grow older, we update our agreements and in change in organizations. We're having agreements change all the time, perhaps how change is communicated is what really matters. So I want I want everyone to think about just the agreements in their own life, particularly in the workplace. We've got performance expectations where we set goals where there's clarity around what success looks like when we define these people know how to reach them, when we have clarity on in job descriptions your role and responsibility. If your job description that you've written for your employees looks very different than what they're doing, that's not good.
Set up a job description that is a realistic job preview of what they're doing. Same with professional development. We want to develop and train our people setting up a plan that can align people's aspirations with organizations needs. I'm a big fan of communication protocols. This is how we're going to, what channel we might communicate different information on, how information should flow within the organization.
These are expectations for how we'll make this decision. If you ever go into a meeting and you're not sure, is this a meeting where we're brainstorming or a meeting where we're deciding? If it's not clear, people leave frustrated. But at the beginning, if someone says, we're just going to brainstorm in this meeting, that's setting the expectation.
So, okay, if we're just brainstorming, but then if we say that we're deciding, some people aren't ready to decide, say, well, that's, that's what we're going to do in this meeting. That's an expectation. How are we going to resolve conflicts when they arise? How are you going to get feedback from me? When are you going to get it? What will that feedback look like? Telling people in advance. I always tell my students, when you start a new job, ask your employer what metrics they'll use. To evaluate your performance, right? Because within a few months you're gonna be having a performance appraisal and if you didn't know the criteria, you're gonna be a little bit surprised.
And I learned the hard way. Like I got my first performance appraisal. I said, oh, you didn't, I didn't know these were the criteria, but now that I do, you can be sure I'll uh, perform well next time.
Chris Wofford: We talked about this phenomenon of the annual review, the performance dialogues that we have coming up in our jobs. You and me, right? Yeah. This is the time of year. It's actually performance dialogue season. I don't know if you heard about that. No. But that's something that we do. And quite often what happens is by the next year, we review, here are your goals. Yeah. And sometimes my boss and I look at each other and say, who are we? We aren't those same people. This isn't the same workplace. Things sure are different. So what I'm getting at is frequency and clarity of communication throughout the year, obviously.
Andrew Quagliata: Exactly. And this is where I think when people take on management roles they need to learn that there's a difference between being an individual contributor where your job is to get your job done. And then when you become a manager, isn't, you've got to get your job done. But part of what that means is the stuff we've been talking about today, which doesn't always feel like traditional work. It means spending time with your employees, getting to know them, building trust. And I mean, I've heard organizations that have annual reviews, that sometimes skip their annual reviews.
What we want to be at is where when the annual review time comes there's no surprises that you're having conversations all along. You're not saving it for that review. And that, that can be whether that's weekly updates, weekly check-ins with your staff, or quarterly, but certainly waiting for once a year is hardly enough.
Chris Wofford: Right. And I'm not saying that's the way it went down, but sometimes the documentation reflects that. How did we get here? Cause I talked to you every day, all day. Yes. I thought we were aligned. We're good. Right. All right, Andrew we've hit on a lot of topics and themes. How do we make this all actionable for our listeners?
Andrew Quagliata: I think we could draw on the book, 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and one of their commitments is practicing integrity, and they don't mean it in the traditional sense but, but wholeness they talk about and they have a four step process that I think really could help and it begins with making clear agreements.
So we've got to be precise about what we say we're going to do and when we're going to do it and do the same with other people. And then we've got to keep our agreements. So do what we say we're going to do. And when other people don't do what they say they're going to do, or you agree to we've got to hold each other accountable.
And then finally, because the world's a complicated place and we can't always live up to those agreements, we need to sometimes renegotiate those. So as soon as we realize we're not going to keep an agreement, communicate directly with those people that are involved. And then fourth, we've got to clean up our broken agreements because they will break at times and we can take we can lead by example by taking responsibility for not meeting agreement and hopefully that'll teach other people as well that they can own up when they're not living up to their end of the bargain as well.
Chris Wofford: All right, I'm ready. I'm in. All right, Andrew Quagliata, thank you so much for coming in today.
Andrew Quagliata: My pleasure.
Chris Wofford: Thanks for listening to Cornell Keynotes. Check out the episode notes for information on Andrew Quagliata's online certificate programs in communication from Cornell University. Thanks again, friends, and subscribe to stay in touch.