Trigger Warning: This article contains references to suicide and mental health. If these topics may be distressing for you, please consider reading this article with someone you trust or returning to it when you feel ready. If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, or you're concerned about someone you know, please don't face it alone. You can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. There is hope, help is available, and you do not have to walk this journey alone.
To protect the privacy of the people and organisations involved, some identifying details have been omitted or generalised. The leadership lesson and the substance of the events remain true to my experience.
There are days when customer interactions are easy.
Others can be challenging.
And then there was this.
As you might know, I have worked in a couple of different mental health organisations during my career.
Both experiences were a mixture of rewarding, heartbreaking, stimulating, exciting and, at times, confronting.
This particular story happened on day three of a new role.
The contact centre and client intake channels I had inherited were, to use the technical term, a bit of a schmozzle.
There weren't enough concrete processes.
Some staff genuinely didn't know what they were supposed to be doing.
Others, frankly, were in the wrong job.
There was backstabbing.
There was front-stabbing.
Trust was low.
And the employee Net Promoter Score was sitting at around -83.
So there was plenty of opportunity to improve.
But on my third day, none of that seemed particularly important.
Because I received a phone call I will never forget.
The Call
My boss rang me about an incident that had occurred overnight.
It was serious enough that the customer could quite reasonably have considered cancelling their contract with us immediately.
Because of the nature of our work, services were available 24 hours a day. Overnight, the relatively small number of incoming calls were handled on our behalf by the contact centre of a sister company.
As you can imagine, the calls that arrive in the middle of the night are not always routine.
This one certainly wasn't.
There were gaps in the processes available to the overnight team, and the call wasn't handled as quickly or as clearly as anyone would have wanted.
I don't blame the people who took the call.
They worked with the information, systems and processes they had been given.
And importantly, none of us could ever know whether a different response would have changed what happened next.
Sadly, a staff member from one of our major customers died by suicide shortly after contacting the overnight service.
It was devastating.
For their family.
For their friends.
For their colleagues.
And for the people who had been involved in trying to help.
I had been in the organisation for three days.
And I had about an hour to understand what had happened before accompanying my boss to meet the customer face-to-face.
Getting the Story Straight
As you might imagine, I spent that hour gathering information.
Who took the call?
What happened?
When did it happen?
What information was available?
What processes should have been followed?
Where did communication break down?
What did we know?
What didn't we know?
By the time my boss and I started walking toward the customer's office, I was trying to make sure I had the story straight in my head.
I expected difficult questions.
I expected to need facts.
I expected to explain what had occurred.
But during that walk, something occurred to me.
This conversation wasn't going to be about facts.
At least, not yet.
There were people waiting for us who had just lost a colleague.
They were hurting.
They were angry.
They wanted answers.
And no timeline, process map or carefully constructed explanation was going to change the fact that someone they cared about was gone.
That was when I remembered something I had heard years earlier.
Go to the Balcony
Many years before, I had watched a TED Talk by negotiation expert William Ury called The Walk from “No” to “Yes.”
One of the ideas that stayed with me was his concept of “going to the balcony.”
The principle is simple.
When you are caught in a difficult interaction, particularly an emotional one, there is a temptation to react immediately to whatever has just been thrown at you.
They accuse.
You defend.
They push.
You push back.
They raise the temperature.
You raise it a little further.
Before long, you're both standing on the metaphorical stage, completely consumed by the argument.
Going to the balcony means mentally stepping away from that immediate reaction.
Looking down on the situation.
Seeing the bigger picture.
Asking:
What is actually happening here?
And perhaps more importantly:
What does this moment need from me?
As we walked toward that meeting, I realised this conversation needed a balcony response.
Not a defence.
Not a technical explanation.
Not an argument about process.
Not even the perfectly reasonable observation that if the call had been handled differently, nobody could say with certainty that the outcome would have changed.
All of those things might have a place later.
But not today.
Today there were grieving people sitting on the other side of the table.
The Opening Salvo
We sat down.
To their credit, everyone was cordial as the introductions were made.
Then the reason for the meeting was stated.
I was introduced.
My title was given.
And the opening salvo came directly at me.
There were a number of emotionally charged accusations.
Understandably so.
But if I were to distil them down to their simplest form, what I heard was:
Your organisation failed our colleague.
And sitting underneath that was something even more personal:
You are responsible for what happened.
I had a choice to make.
I could defend myself.
After all:
It was my third day.
It wasn't my team that had answered the overnight call.
I hadn't designed the processes.
I hadn't trained those staff.
We weren't an emergency or crisis service.
And there was no way anyone could know that a different sequence of events would have produced a different outcome.
All true.
And none of it was what that conversation needed.
So I went to the balcony.
And rather than defending my position, I said something along these lines:
“I appreciate that this is incredibly fresh and painful for you. Nothing I can say today about what happened is going to change the outcome. When the time is right, we will work through the facts together. But today, I want you to know that we will partner with you to understand what happened and what each of us can do to minimise the risk of anything like this occurring again. Most importantly, I want to offer my deepest condolences to you, your teams and your organisation.”
And the room changed.
Not because everything was suddenly okay.
It wasn't.
Not because the questions disappeared.
They didn't.
And certainly not because a few words could lessen the tragedy.
But the temperature changed.
We stopped being two organisations preparing to defend competing positions.
For a moment, we were simply people acknowledging that something terrible had happened.
And from there, we could talk.
Facts Have Their Time
We spoke about what would happen next.
A few weeks later, when the immediate emotion had settled somewhat, we went through the facts.
Properly.
We examined the call.
We looked at the processes.
We identified failure points.
We clarified responsibilities.
We strengthened the way the overnight service operated.
We asked what could be done differently by us and by the customer.
There were things to learn.
There were things to fix.
And we fixed them.
But the order mattered.
Empathy first.
Facts second.
Had I walked into that first meeting armed with a defence, I suspect the outcome would have been very different.
Because when someone is grieving, frightened or angry, the technically correct answer isn't always the useful answer.
Leaders Love Facts
Many leaders are good at facts.
I certainly am.
Give us a problem and we want to understand it.
What happened?
Why?
Who was responsible?
What does the data say?
What needs fixing?
Those questions are important.
But people aren't spreadsheets.
There are moments when somebody doesn't need you to solve their problem immediately.
They need to know you've understood its impact.
There are moments when defending your intentions only communicates that you're more interested in protecting yourself than hearing them.
And there are moments when proving that you're technically correct can make you relationally very wrong.
That's where the balcony becomes useful.
Before responding, ask:
What is happening underneath what is being said?
Anger may be grief.
Frustration may be fear.
Resistance may be uncertainty.
An accusation may simply be somebody desperately trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense.
That doesn't mean accepting every accusation.
It doesn't mean abandoning accountability.
And it certainly doesn't mean ignoring facts.
It means recognising that facts have their time.
One of Our Greatest Partners
Something unexpected happened after that meeting.
The customer didn't cancel.
Instead, we worked together.
We rebuilt processes.
We strengthened the relationship.
Trust grew.
And over time, that organisation became one of our strongest partners and advocates for the work we were doing.
I don't believe that happened because I had some brilliant answer in the meeting.
Quite the opposite.
I think it happened because I realised that this wasn't the moment to have all the answers.
The balcony gave me a different perspective.
That perspective changed my response.
And the response helped change the relationship.
Before You Respond, Find the Balcony
Thankfully, most leadership conversations won't involve circumstances anywhere near as serious as this one.
But the principle travels surprisingly well.
A team member lashes out in a meeting.
A customer sends an angry email.
Your boss questions a decision you've made.
A colleague becomes defensive.
Someone gives you feedback you think is completely unfair.
Your instinct will often be to respond from the stage.
To defend.
Explain.
Correct.
Prove.
Win.
Sometimes that's exactly when you need to find the balcony.
Not forever.
Maybe only for ten seconds.
Long enough to ask yourself:
What is really happening here?
What might this person be experiencing?
And what does this moment need from me?
You can always come back to the facts.
You can always clarify what happened.
You can always disagree.
But once you've responded defensively to somebody in pain, it can be very difficult to take those words back.
Leadership isn't just knowing what to say.
Sometimes it's knowing when not to say it yet.
So the next time you find yourself in a conversation where every instinct tells you to defend your position, perhaps resist the urge for a moment.
Step away from the stage.
Go to the balcony.
The view might change your response.