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Navigating Difficult Career Conversations: How to Tell Your Boss You're Leaving, Talk to Your Spouse About a Career Change, and Negotiate Your Salary · Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search

• 0:00
  Tom: I was standing there in the shower, and my hands were shaking.
• 0:03
  Scott Anthony Barlow: There's a conversation that you've been putting off. You might already know which one.
• 0:06
  Amanda: I clocked out at 5:00 and turned to my husband and said, "I hate this. I hate this so much."
• 0:11
  Shreya: Majority of the people were like, "I think you should quit."
• 0:14
  Scott Anthony Barlow: You probably haven't said it out loud, not to your boss, not even at home.
• 0:17
  Cathy: I didn't tell my family for a good three or four months after it had happened because I sort of, because I was scared, frankly.
• 0:25
  Holly: There's always this voice that was inside of me that the first time I thought about doing something different or getting out, it was like, "Well, you can't do that."
• 0:33
  Scott Anthony Barlow: We tend to put off conversations like these, but here is something that most people don't consider.
• 0:38
  Kwame: The best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations.
• 0:41
  Holly: I think even if you just start to question that voice, you don't have to have all the answers.
• 0:47
  Tom: After I left, I was, it was like a weight off my shoulders, honestly.
• 0:51
  Scott Anthony Barlow: On this episode, three real-life difficult conversations that most of us struggle with in our career, and the exact words that were used to navigate them.
• 1:02
  Introduction: This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.
• 1:30
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Many of us have a version of a tough conversation that we've been avoiding. Maybe it's one with your boss or a coworker, or maybe even your significant other. Maybe it's about money. Maybe you're avoiding a conversation that you need to have with yourself.
• 1:45
  Author Tim Ferriss said it this way, "A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have." Just think about the career stories that we've documented on this podcast. You've heard many of the quotes at the beginning of this episode.
• 2:01
  Tom, who finally told his boss that the job had stopped fitting, or Amanda, who told her spouse that, yeah, she needed something different, or people who were pushing back on a job offer and ended up asking for more. In all those cases, we got to be intimately involved because we were helping people navigate through those tough conversations, and every single one of those conversations was one that people were afraid to have.
• 2:26
  You're gonna hear three specific types of conversations and how to navigate them, and a real person's story illustrating how they did that. In this case, the first one's gonna be how to tell your boss you're leaving without burning bridges and while setting up your team for success. Another one will be how to tell your significant other that you want something different for your career.
• 2:48
  And lastly, we'll leave you with a conversation to negotiate your salary in ways that you might not have imagined before. And along the way, I'm gonna actually show you not just real conversations, but the real people who have had these conversations. And then we'll even bring in one of my good friends who just happens to be one of the world's leading negotiation experts.
• 3:09
  Holly Dixon went to law school, and she knew early on that the legal field was not the right fit for her, and then she stayed 20 years anyways. We shared her full story on a previous episode of the Happen To Your Career podcast, but she started out working with the Innocence Project in Northern California, then moved to a federal defender's office in Tennessee, and then later on, North Carolina.
• 3:30
  And all were good jobs. They had good people that were involved, but that many years of non-fit starts to wear on you.
• 3:38
  Holly: I realized that I was in burnout. I was tired all the time. Literally, I would come home from work, and I would put my pajamas on and turn on Netflix, and that is all I wanted to do. I did not wanna have contact with people. Okay, my body is no longer allowing me to just keep rolling with the punches. My body's telling me it's time to go.
• 3:58
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Knowing isn't the same as having a direction, and most people will sit in this situation for years.
• 4:05
  Holly: I don't think I identified it as burnout until after I left and had some time to be like, "Oh, that's what was going on." Yeah. I just knew this didn't feel like me, and it felt awful, and it was getting worse.
• 4:16
  Scott Anthony Barlow: At some point, Holly made the decision to leave, and once she had finally made that decision, we got to help her plan that conversation. And you might be wondering, what did she actually say?
• 4:26
  Holly: It really started with going into my boss's office and being like, "Hey, I am ready to go. I'm ready to leave. I need some time away from legal completely." And the first 10 minutes of that conversation was, "Well, what job do you wanna do here? We can give you another job." Like, he wanted to keep me, which is amazing.
• 4:46
  That's how you know, like, you got an amazing relationship with your boss. He was trying to figure out, "Well, you can do something else." I'm like, "Yeah, but I wanna go."
• 4:53
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Well, we knew this might be challenging for her, so we tried to help her keep it as simple as possible. No speech, no big list of grievances. She said she was leaving, and then she stood by that decision.
• 5:06
  Holly: So that first conversation was just sort of, like, getting it out on the table and him accepting it. 'Cause I'm ashamed to say, I don't know everything you do, so I want you to piece out everything that you do. And we started having this conversation about, is this needed? If it is, who does it go to?
• 5:21
  We had a three to four-month conversation, and I told him, "I am done. I need to go, and we will work out what happens with my position, how things get distributed. I'm not just gonna give you two weeks and go."
• 5:34
  Scott Anthony Barlow: The part she went on to say is that she wanted to help set everyone else up for success. This is an important part here because I think that if you're planning a proactive exit, then that means it's not gonna be two weeks to be able to set people up for success.
• 5:50
  So it's probably going to be a series of conversations. Holly actually cared about the people that she was working with, so she wanted to make sure they were left in a good place. I think the world needs more people to do exactly that. So what she didn't do is she didn't walk in with an exit plan, and instead of your standard two weeks notice, what she did, she walked in with a firm decision, and then she asked for partnership in setting everyone else up for success.
• 6:14
  And then the plan got built together as a partnership over the course of the next few months, and by the end of it, she was the one providing quite a bit of the direction.
• 6:25
  Holly: I could be very firm with him. There were some things that he was like, "We're gonna give all these to this person." I'm like, "Absolutely not. This person already has too much. This person might be able to do this thing. This person can't do all three of these things." And he would listen, and it was so collaborative the way we came up with how to gracefully exit me.
• 6:44
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's some of the wording that you can borrow. Two sentences. "I'm ready to go. I need time away from this. And I want to work out with you how this happens and how to set everybody else up for success." I've personally done versions of this where I haven't even given a firm date before. That's an advanced maneuver, though. So what I would encourage you to do is make it a part of that conversation about when your target date is to leave at the latest.
• 7:10
  Then also during that first initial conversation, you can share with them that you're broaching the subject now and want their help creating the plan. And then, of course, that leads to it becoming a series of conversations instead of an announcement. And this is what turns an incredibly difficult conversation into an exit that people thank you for, and people are excited that you did it in this particular way.
• 7:32
  Holly: I will say first, I completely understand why some people cannot do that. That is not every culture. That is not every company.
• 7:41
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, for some people, there's a version of a career change conversation that you might find even more difficult than the one with your boss, and that is the one at home. Amanda had been in corporate roles that were burning her out, and her husband had made a career change before she did.
• 7:57
  He left a career that was not that excited about, and he left to go into video game design, which he loved. And watching him go through that process had changed something for Amanda.
• 8:06
  Amanda: I saw how excited he got when he would learn something new or when he could show off his skills to a peer or his supervisors, and they didn't know he had that skill.
• 8:19
  And he would get just so bubbly and exuberant, and I wasn't talking about my career like that anymore. I was in the beginning, but now I'm like, "Ah, I just want this day to be over." I wanted that, and I told him, "I want what you have."
• 8:35
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So Amanda didn't just decide she was going to do this and then inform her husband afterwards. She began an initial conversation. Now, in this case, this is likely to be a series of conversations, too, and think about that first initial conversation with the person that you love as just a way to broach the subject and ask for partnership.
• 8:53
  You're not necessarily throwing out every logistical detail or telling them when or anything else. You're just bringing up the subject in a way that allows them to understand what you're going through.
• 9:06
  You know, a lot of times people don't want to have this conversation because they care about their partner, and they're worried about how their partner might take it and causing the other person pain in one way or another, and they don't want them to worry or them to feel uncertain.
• 9:20
  But what this actually does by choosing that action is take away the other person's chance to be a partner in working through this. So that initial conversation can be very simple and very honest. Amanda's version was, "I want what you have. I wanna feel excited about what I'm learning, and I'm not feeling that anymore, and I understand that something needs to change about that."
• 9:44
  I haven't figured out what or when yet, but what she's doing is she's opening the door for further conversations. Another way it might sound might be, "I need to talk to you about something. My work has stopped feeling right, and I think something needs to change. I don't have a plan yet. I know that I just don't wanna figure this out without you."
• 10:03
  What you're not doing here is you're not presenting a decision. You're inviting them into the process. People tend to react differently to being included versus being informed after the fact. Now, in Amanda's case, her particular situation required that they still had some level of income coming in, so she wasn't just gonna make a jump to nothing while waiting.
• 10:24
  She needed what we would call a bridge role to stabilize things while she figured out her next move. This is part of the continuing conversations that she had with her husband.
• 10:33
  Amanda: I went to my husband and said, "I need something. I think I can leverage my network to find something that'll help keep the kids fed because they're teenage boys. And then we'll be good to go, and once everything picks up, we'll just go from there and decide when it's time for me to step away from this other role.
• 10:55
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Her husband did not just say yes; he became her biggest fan in helping her do this. And that couldn't have happened if she showed up with the plan already completely made.
• 11:05
  Kwame: My motto is the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. If you look back over the course of your life, the most influential parts of your life, the most impactful things that have ever happened in your life, there was a conversation that happened around that, and your success and failure in life is really largely gonna be based on how you present yourself in these difficult conversations. So the stakes are higher than we recognize.
• 11:29
  Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Kwame Christian. He's the founder of the American Negotiation Institute, host of the number one negotiation podcast in the world, and he has made difficult conversations his entire career. He's a really good friend. He and I have chatted usually every few weeks for probably eight or nine years now.
• 11:47
  Now, I tend to think about negotiation the same way that some people think about golf or tennis. It's like a hobby. And Kwame is one of the few other people in the world that thinks about negotiation that differently in that particular way. So not a surprise we get along. Here's his definition for negotiation.
• 12:04
  Kwame: My definition for negotiation is any time... any time you're in a conversation, and somebody in the conversation wants something. And so when you think about it, you're negotiating all the time.
• 12:15
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So this might mean the project that you accepted without pushing back, or the offer that you took the first time without countering, or the raise that you didn't ask for because you were not sure how.
• 12:26
  Those are all various examples of negotiations, but so are everyday occurrences too, like whether or not I could get my three-year-old back when I had three-year-olds to go to bed. Different type of negotiation. Still a negotiation, though. Most of them can happen without us even recognizing them as opportunities and negotiation type of conversations.
• 12:49
  Kwame: Most people don't take the opportunity to negotiate at all. But if we don't have that higher level of awareness, these negotiations are happening every day, and we're not taking advantage of these opportunities.
• 13:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: The skill here is not learning to negotiate. It's learning to see negotiations that are already happening and recognize that they're in difficult conversations.
• 13:10
  Kwame: When it comes to salary negotiation, okay, yes, we talk about the money, but did we talk about title? And it's not even that people aren't performing well; it's that they're not performing at all.
• 13:20
  Scott Anthony Barlow: So not a surprise. The biggest negotiation mistake is not asking at all for what it is that you want or you're looking for. However, when the moment comes, Kwame has a question that he considers the single most powerful question that you can ask.
• 13:34
  Kwame: "What flexibility do you have?" And so this is why it's so powerful. Number one, it's open-ended. Number two, it's non-threatening. Okay? So you're requesting more, but you're doing it in a way that won't register as a threat. And number three, it assumes that there is flexibility.
• 13:52
  Scott Anthony Barlow: "What flexibility do you have?" Variations on this might be, "What else can you do?" What you're not gonna say, though, is, "Can you do better?" Or, "Wow, I was really hoping for more." It's just three simple words that open up the conversation, assume that there is room, and put the other person in the position of defining what that room looks like.
• 14:11
  So what could a full negotiation conversation sound like? Well, first, let's acknowledge most people walk into a salary conversation either apologetic or aggressive, whether they mean to be or not. And I'm not a fan of either approach, except for in very specific situations.
• 14:27
  Otherwise, apologetic signals that you do not fully believe in what you're asking for, and aggressive can create defensiveness in the person that you really truly need to be your partner in this negotiation.
• 14:38
  The approach that works is calm, specific, grounded in value, and not in need. So of course, we don't say, "Wow, I was really hoping for more." That's about you. It's about your feelings. What we might say is, "Based on what I understand about this role and what I'm bringing to it, I was expecting something closer to X. What flexibility do you have?"
• 14:58
  Now, the structure here is you're sharing your anchor number, grounded briefly in value, followed by Kwame's question. You're not demanding. You're opening the conversation, and you are making it easy for the other person to respond without feeling attacked, defensive, like they, you know, anything that you don't want them to feel.
• 15:17
  One more thing Kwame said that changes how people think about this. Prepare before you go in, and I'm not talking about with a specific script, I'm talking about with clarity. What is your target and your walkaway? You need to know your numbers. You need to know what you're asking for. You need to know the minimum you would accept, whether we're talking about salary numbers, whether we're talking about anything else.
• 15:39
  What else besides salary matters to you? Is it title, flexibility, start date, review timeline, time off? Whatever it is. When you know all of that before the conversation starts, the conversation stops being terrifying, and it just becomes a decision tree. Each response from the other side moves you to the next branch.
• 15:58
  Kwame built a three-step framework called the Compassionate Curiosity Framework, and it was designed for negotiation, but it works well for every difficult conversation that we've talked about in this episode, whether it's with your boss, your spouse, or even with yourself in some cases.
• 16:14
  Kwame: So step one is first acknowledging and validating emotions. Step two is getting curious with compassion. And step three is engaging in joint problem-solving.
• 16:24
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Step one, acknowledge and validate emotions, yours first, before the conversation can even begin. We wanna try and put a name or definition to what we're feeling, not as a weakness, but in preparation. Kwame explains why that starting point matters so much.
• 16:38
  Kwame: It doesn't make sense to send a message to somebody who isn't psychologically ready to receive it. So that's why we need to start with that emotional component.
• 16:40
  Kwame: It doesn't make sense to send a message to somebody who isn't psychologically ready to receive it. So that's why we need to start with that emotional component.
• 16:47
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Step two, get curious with compassion toward the other person and toward yourself. What are they afraid of? What would a good outcome look like for them? You're not going in to win; you're going in to understand.
• 16:59
  Step three is joint problem-solving. The salary conversation is not about getting the most; it's about finding out what's important to the other person and what is valuable to them so that you can find agreement on the value you bring. The spouse conversation is not about persuading; it's about figuring out together what the next chapter looks like.
• 17:18
  And the conversation that Holly had with her boss is not about escaping; it's about honesty about where you are and what you need in the future. Holly did do all three of those things, though, even before she knew and understood what they were. She acknowledged her own panic attacks as real, valuable information, things that were happening, and she got curious about what she actually wanted instead.
• 17:39
  And then she had the conversation with honesty with her boss about where she was, and she didn't go in with an entirely finished plan. Amanda, of course, did the same. She acknowledged to herself that she wanted what her husband had. She got curious about what that would actually require, and she also got curious about what her husband thought and how she could help, and she went to him before she had all the answers, not after.
• 18:02
  The stakes here are far higher than we recognize, and it's not because these conversations are dangerous; it's because we don't realize how much can be gained by having them over and over again. What we skip doesn't go away; it just stays exactly where it is, waiting for us to be ready someday. Well, here's the really interesting thing.
• 18:21
  You know, Holly was not ready. She had the conversation anyway, and everything that changed in her career started with that conversation. Same thing for Amanda. Amanda was not ready at all. She had the conversation anyway. Her husband became her partner in figuring it out instead of someone that she had to eventually inform or an obstacle along the way.
• 18:40
  I think the really interesting thing here that most people don't think about is that the more you have difficult conversations, the easier it gets to have difficult conversations. What you consider to be difficult just starts to move up and up and up. Your comfort zone expands for level of difficulty. That happens when you practice this.
• 18:59
  Here's the thing that I recognize, though. A lot of times, handling these, what are potentially high-stakes conversations, is very challenging to do alone. It's something that we do all the time. A lot of the work that we're doing is helping people prioritize what actions to take, and a lot of that tends to be having certain conversations that are uncomfortable at first.
• 19:19
  If you want help with that or any other part of your career or building the life and work that you're excited about, then drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. I'll connect you with the right member of our team. We'll understand what your goals are, and then guess what? We'll help you figure out how to make that happen in the real world, whether it's conversation-driven or otherwise. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios. I'm out.