Someone has asked you to a meeting. You know what it’s about and you know it is going to be tough — emotionally tough.

Here are some tips for how you can lead yourself through that conversation.

"Let's just have an open discussion!" This is a well-intentioned statement that we hear a lot in teams.

There are a couple ways it could go wrong, though.

Let’s start with this: what do we even mean by 'open'? The intent of calling an open discussion “open” is to encourage participants to share openly. But it also tends to refer to the process, or way the forum is conducted, like 'open mike,' and there’s rarely full openness in what is shared.

A big part of leadership development is building the courage to authentically and constructively speak our minds in order to build and maintain alignment with others. Effective leaders highly value the need to maintain alignment. That means asking early for clarification and greater understanding, before the little unclear things are allowed to fester.

It's difficult to change when we're around people who know the 'old' us. You might relate to this when you think about being around your parents or siblings as you've developed your own life as an adult. If you're a leader working with the same people, how can you evolve and become different?

Leaders can use humor to embrace changes as they grow personally. This can help face colleagues who otherwise might unwittingly keep them in a box.

One common topic I work on with leaders is communication effectiveness.

Leaders often express fear of being misunderstood. There is inherent pain in feeling misunderstood, and then there’s the unlikely but possible HR repercussions if an employee were to complain about a hard conversation gone awry.

To address these potential issues, it can be powerful to state your intention or preempt a defensive response, as a sort of preamble to your main message. This should be a quick half-sentence to help prime your listener to receive your message.

Listening. We know it as one of the most high-impact yet under-used leadership skills there is. So let's explore the question: what makes listening so damn hard? We all know how satisfying it is to be deeply listened to and feel understood. We all know how it feels to be dismissed or disregarded. It's obvious that listening well is valuable. Why aren't leaders better at it, and how can we practice?

Are your group or team conversations truly reflecting the full range of thinking happening inside the heads of those in the room? It needs to if you are to truly harness the collective intelligence potential that is greater than the smartest people in the room would be alone. (And this is not a given, by the way.)

There is one question you can ask that will help you actually hear the truth right then and there from the people who have information or perspectives that you can't yet see.

I recently offered to help a community group I'm a part of to prepare for an upcoming meeting that promised to be potentially divisive. Having facilitated groups in dialogue and decision making for years, I knew how to approach this in a way that would address both the human need for the inclusion side of things, as well as the tactical, how-do-we-move-forward side of things.

I received a "thanks but no thanks" response to my offer. I didn't trust that the reasons given for not wanting my support were the real reasons, even if the real reasons remained unconscious to the decision makers.

Even though being inclusive is a popular leadership trait these days, there are still reasons that leaders don't ask for input. Whether you're a leader feeling hesitant about seeing what everyone thinks of your idea, or you're an individual contributor wondering why your leader never asks, here are my thoughts.

Most teams have experienced a moment in which a team member throws a wrench into the conversation. A "yeah, but" kind of offering. It might be a warning of what's to come, the lingering dissatisfaction with a past decision, or simply an alternative perspective of the topic at hand.