Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk, that's S-E-E Change Happen dot Co dot Uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going.

Today is episode 95 with the title navigating challenging conversations, and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Michael Dodd. Michael describes himself as a recovering journalist and media communication specialist. When I asked Michael to describe his superpower, he said, being able to ask tough questions in real interviews and enabling people to give great answers. Hello, Michael, welcome to the show.

G'day, Jo. Great to be here on inclusion bytes.

Great to have you. We've been planning this for some months. I'm really pleased we finally got it to happen. So, Michael, you're a covering journalist and you're used to helping people answer tough interview questions. So how does one go about navigating the challenge of having challenging conversations with.

A bit of forethought, ideally, rather than just plunging in and saying what pops into your head. So one of the arts of interviewing people, which is what I had to do when I was trained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to put people under pressure, particularly politicians, but business people and others as well, in media interviews, is to actually ask questions which they don't really want to answer quite often. And these days I'm much more popular because I actually help people ahead of media interviews or ahead of tough conversations they might have to have with clients, with prospects, with even their own people, let alone tax inspectors. And the idea there is to get them to be thinking about things in advance. So they're thinking about the messages they want to get across to the audience, which may be to one asker or it may be to a massive audience. Beyond that, in the case of media, and it's all about thinking ahead, what are the tough questions they're likely to ask? What we call in the world of australian journalism, blowtorch on the belly questions. And if you think about those in advance, it's often a lot easier to get across what's in the mutual interest of you and the asker and any wider audience to keep everyone happy.

So typically in this kind of the world of work the terms of conversations, probably around performance, redundancy, reprimanding somebody for something. And a lot of people, when they become a manager, don't think about this people side. They're thinking it's all sweetness and light, being in charge and everyone will do as they're told. But the challenging conversations is a learned skill and I'm sure you'd agree with that.