De-Escalating Like a Pro

Being the youngest in a large family with high energy and an intense value for debate but also for being "right" as often as possible, I learned how to de-escalate emotions at an early age. One of my siblings jokes that I was HR for our family of 7 as far back as she can remember.

The main causes for emotional escalation are:

1. The individual does not feel truly heard/understood.
2. The individual does not feel valued.

I have found that people can withstand disagreement and be open to changing their thought process once they feel understood and valued. Most of us cannot listen from a place of openness when these basic needs have not been met.

When I started waitressing, I worked at restaurants that split tips. Given I was so comfortable with elevated emotions and capable of de-escalating them, I would take all the tables who the other servers felt were hard to please, and it was a rare occasion when I could not appease and even befriend them.

Starting my career in Human Resources felt incredibly natural to me. The one job description I wrote intentionally for myself and pitched to my boss in my career was over the Driver Relations team because I am deeply passionate about helping others feel understood and valued. This team mostly centered on taking driver complaints and had a low level of authority in making company process changes, and I actually asked for the job to be in charge of it. Given my initial position as "youngest child", then as a waitress, I was well prepared to accept a position with a low level of power, but (if the right strategy was employed), with a massive amount of influence across the company.

In order to de-escalate and/or to influence others, you should genuinely care about them and want to achieve the best outcome for everyone involved. This means putting aside your own needs to be heard, understood and valued until you have met those needs for them.

In general, you can follow this process:

1. Let them do almost all the talking, at least at first. If they give you a chance to speak, assure them you care about their problem and want to understand it.
2. Do NOT interrupt, especially when they are speaking loudly or quickly. If you can, take notes on what seem to be the key points of frustration so you can respond to them when it is your turn to speak. Sure signs they are ready to listen are when they are silent, when they begin repeating their grievances but in a calmer manner, or when they have started soliciting your opinion. Ex. "That just doesn't seem right, does it?"
3. Speak slowly, and softly, and with compassion in your tone and words. Never raise your voice. If you speak slowly and softly without compassion, it can come across as condescending. This is why it is important to care about people and take your needs out of the picture. It is human nature to mirror each other. The other party will begin to slow and soften their voice, as well as want to show you compassion.
4. Validate their feelings. You can do this without agreeing they are correct, or accepting culpability. Empathize with their experience, even if you do not believe you would react the same way. "That sounds frustrating!" "I can see why you feel that way."
5. Ask open-ended questions. Who, what, when, why, how questions. This gathers information again showing you care and your willingness to listen. The questions should be strategic to assist your understanding of their perception, and to plan ahead on your strategy to resolve them.
6. Reiterate your understanding of their key issues to both show them you were listening, and to confirm you are correct. This has the added benefit that often people will have released emotions and allowed you to help them regulate, and hearing the problems back they will cross out a few of them as minor ones they can let go. It helps you get to the core issues they actually want to see addressed. Other times, I've had people tell me they are totally over it after venting and validation and do not need to see any action at all.
7. Address the issues for which you already have knowledge that can help fix the issue, or at least explain it. For example, I often had drivers call me upset about their Driver Manager "yelling at them". This was usually in the midst of a list of concerns, but a valid one nonetheless. However, often they were referencing that the DM messaged them in all caps. I knew that many DMs messaged exclusively in all caps and it was not them yelling. This was an easy solve. "I can completely understand why you felt they were yelling. I feel that way when I read all caps too. However, I've learned that often our DMs write in all caps to make the font larger on the small screen from which you are reading and simply to save time because they send hundreds of messages a day." I'd pull up the message and go back through it with them sharing my perception from what I knew about DMs, processes, and simply human nature, without discrediting the way the driver felt about it.
8. List what issues remain, what you intend to do next, and when they can expect a follow-up. If I thought I knew how something would go, I would try and prepare the driver for that expectation and do my best to explain WHY it would go that way. After sympathizing with them, they were more likely to offer sympathy where I would encourage them to offer it.
9. Follow-up when you said you would. Even if you don't have an answer yet, meet the expectations you set for follow-up and set new expectations if you have to. If you are passing the issue to a different person for review/solution, you can still set a note to follow up with the offended party that everything was resolved or tell them to reach back out if they do not have a solution or update by a specific date you believe is reasonable. Do not set up the person who is graciously taking over the issue for failure. Try to set conservative expectations for the offended party so the person solving could hopefully go above and beyond.

9 steps sounds like a lot, but many of these overlap. They boil down to actively listening, genuinely sympathizing, maintaining your own emotional regulation and setting clear and compassionate expectations. With practice, the steps become fluid and automatic. I can count on one hand how many times I have been hung up on or yelled at, even though I have been in extremely high-volume, customer-facing jobs. I would love to help you learn and practice! Our daily interactions with others shape our world. Let's shape a world in which we love to live!