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A Detective’s 7 Rules For Hard Conversations
They work in the kitchen just as well as the interview room
A funny thing happened when I became a detective: nothing. There was no ceremony and no pat on the back. Nobody handed me a manual for sitting across from a stranger and getting them to tell me the worst thing they’d ever done.
Just the same old me with a different job title and (way) longer hours.
So I learned the hard way, by getting it wrong and then having to do twice as much work to make up for it. I watched my interviews get complicated quickly because I said the wrong thing. I saw people who were ready to talk shut down because of how I asked a question.
Over thirteen years, I kept a mental list of what reliably made a conversation worse.
It turns out that a mental list works just as well at home as it did in my interviews.
Sometimes you don’t need to have exactly the right words. You just need to know what not to do (or say), and you’ll be ahead of most people.
1. Argue over text
In an interview, a lot of the answer isn’t really in the words. It’s in the pause before someone speaks, the glance away, the laugh that’s out of place or comes too late. In my line of work, a…
