The conversation nobody wants to open
Managers and difficult conversations
Nobody practises feedback, because practising means practising on a person. Here the direct report is an avatar who deflects, goes quiet or says the real thing, depending on how the manager opens.
You
You are about to raise missed deadlines with an engineer who is well liked and, until this quarter, reliable.
The AI plays
Casey Lund
Senior engineer on your team
Knows the work has slipped, is carrying something outside work, and will hear the first sentence as an accusation.
“Is this the part where you tell me I am not pulling my weight?”
Casey Lund opens.
An example scenario. Yours are written from your own playbooks, policies and calls.
Progress across the team, with example data.
How the session goes
Casey reacts to how the conversation is opened, not to a script. Lead with blame and the deflection hardens; leave room and the real reason surfaces. The manager can rerun the opening until it stops sounding like an accusation.
- 01
Reacts to how you opened, not to what you planned
- 02
Deflects toward workload and other people
- 03
Says the real thing, if you left room for it
- 04
Agrees something specific, or nothing at all
What the report gives the manager
The report quotes the sentence that landed as an accusation, scores Emotional intelligence, Clarity, Reasoning and Technique application, and shows whether the agreed next step was specific or vague.
- Words
- Whether the point landed, or only got said
- Voice
- Whether they sounded steady, or sounded rattled
- Face
- Whether they stayed present, or checked out early
- Body
- Whether they held the room, or shrank from it
Built from your own material
Your performance and feedback framework
Your managers charter or leadership principles
The conversations your managers escalate to HR
How hard you make it
Questioning intensity
Patience
Abstraction
Support
Feedback depth
Who runs it
First time managers
People leaders
HR business partners
Cross functional teams
The first time a manager says the difficult sentence out loud is not in the difficult conversation.
BioInvent runs this with cross functional research teams.
Read how BioInvent runs itFurther reading
BioInvent: Practice for High-Stakes Science TeamsBring us your version of this conversation
We write the character on the other side of it, then walk you through a real scored session.
Book a demo