When a client tells Nicholas Mukhtar an employee is threatening to quit, his first question is usually whether anyone actually asked the employee what they wanted, not about compensation or workload.
“Did you, as the employee, sit down with the business owner and explain what you actually want, and give them the opportunity to meet you there?” Mukhtar said, describing the question he poses to clients on both sides of a workplace dispute. “Most of the time the answer is no.”
Mukhtar’s consulting practice spans corporate executives, family offices and business owners across industries, and he says the pattern repeats regardless of sector. Two employees will come to him with a problem, and his first move is simple. “Did you just sit down and talk about what was bothering you? Did you actually put a plan in place?” he asks them. “Communication is key on any team.”
He traces part of the breakdown to how differently people now communicate day to day. Social media, texting and screens in general have made people more reserved about direct conversation than previous generations, which compounds workplace friction that used to get resolved face to face. “I kid you not, that seems to account for 90% of the problems I encounter,” Mukhtar said. “People just need to talk.”
That advice applies as much to family businesses and partnerships as it does to employer-employee relationships. Mukhtar sees the identical pattern between business partners who’ve stopped talking directly and started assuming the worst about each other’s intentions instead. The fix he recommends is the same one regardless of who’s involved: schedule the conversation rather than waiting for it to happen naturally, since in his experience it rarely does.
The advice sounds simple because it is. Nicholas Mukhtar’s point is that business owners consistently skip direct conversation in favor of assuming they already know what an employee wants, or assuming an employee wouldn’t get what they asked for if they asked, not that communication is some novel management technique. An employee who wants to know if there’s a future at a company and a business owner who wants to know why an employee seems disengaged are often one direct conversation away from finding out they agree more than they thought.
Mukhtar applies the same standard to himself when advising clients: he doesn’t guess at what’s driving a conflict before asking directly. That discipline, more than any specific management framework, is what he credits for resolving problems that had sat unaddressed for months before he arrived.
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