I recently traveled to Montreal with my family and we had dinner at a great bistro called Vallier. As the waitress handed us the check and said goodbye at the end of our meal, she asked how much longer we were staying. Upon finding out that we were leaving in the morning and this was the end of our stay, she said, "Oh! Well, thank you for choosing our city."

I was on the phone with a client recently who is in a leadership position in which their primary focus is the performance of their people. The performance issues my client was articulating came down to a simple list, which I've flipped into the positive below.

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.

Goals — those specific, measurable achievements that you can check off your list and relish in the accomplishment of. Why bother setting them? What's the point? 

I'm going to tell you something you might not believe. The purpose of having a goal is not to achieve that goal. 

What is the purpose of a goal then?

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.

At any point in your meeting, are the participants in the meeting clear on the “who, what, where, when, why and how” of the meeting? If you can cover these, your meeting will be much more inclusive and much more likely to succeed. Let's go through each.

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?