Why Conflict at Work is a Good Thing

 

When Gabriel visited headquarters from his Milwaukee office, everything seemed great. Members of the team welcomed him warmly, invited him to lunch, and had his workstation set up. Gabriel would be there for a week to transition the team to a new software platform to track their hours, request vacation days, check benefits, find employee discounts, and access health coach advice.

By the time Gabriel finished onboarding the whole team, the “great” office seemed anything but.

He noticed the unusual team dynamics right away, after choosing Jackie, the executive assistant, to go first.

She was nervous from the start, asking if he was sure she should be the first one. Her anxiety made it hard for her to concentrate and the meeting took much longer than expected. Soon he learned why, when he had the operations manager, Evan, on deck. Evan made two comments about the fact that the executive assistant was first, instead of him. Gabriel was confused—did he do something wrong?

When it was Shayda’s turn the next day, she barely spoke. Instead she sat silently with her arms crossed with an air of annoyance. What Gabriel didn’t know was that Shayda had wanted to be trained on the first day so she could leave early for volunteer orientation at the women’s shelter. No one informed him of this, so he went ahead with his training in a room so tense that the air could be cut with a knife.

On Friday, Gabriel joined the team weekly meeting, to be available in case there were any questions about the platform. The meeting took two hours, and only a few people talked, not acknowledging anyone else’s comments. In fact, Evan was constantly asserting his authority, saying things like, “I’m the one who makes the decisions here,” and “Don’t waste my time with ideas I already told you won’t work.”

There was no energy in the room, the topics covered were shallow and boring, and amazingly—after two hours—absolutely nothing was accomplished. No problems were solved and no decisions made. Gabriel walked out wondering what was the point of that meeting and what is wrong with this team?

What is Wrong With This Team?

Gabriel felt mired in conflict. Yet the conflict was completely unspoken. During his time there, he never heard a single confrontation out in the open. Yet it was obvious conflict was buried under the surface. If they aren’t willing to bring their perspectives or ideas to the table (unless they already know everyone agrees), how will this conflict ever be resolved? It was undermining all of their progress, and killing morale. He was excited to get back to his office, where sometimes the discussions were difficult, yet their relationships were a lot easier and certainly more productive.

Conflict is a tricky thing. When you boil it down, conflict is just when one person’s wishes and desires are different from another person’s.  It’s the emotions that conflict evokes that can make situations seem explosive and make people uncomfortable, since conflict is often associated with “being in trouble”. The idea of conflict can bring up feelings of defensiveness, anxiety, anger, guilt, fear and more. For that reason, it is often avoided at all costs.

The reality is, productive ideological conflict is a good thing, and avoiding it in attempt to preserve a false impression of harmony can backfire. Just look at Gabriel’s experience…

So let’s talk about the importance of conflict, what teams that welcome and avoid conflict look like, and how we can start embracing conflict in our own teams starting today.

Great Teams Welcome Conflict

CPP Global’s Human Capital Report on workplace conflict shows the positive outcomes reported by those who experienced workplace conflict.

·         41% of respondents report better understanding of others

·         33% experienced improved working relationships

·         29% found a better solution to a problem or challenge

·         21% saw higher performance in the team

·         18% felt increased motivation

 

Teams That Welcome Conflict, and Teams Who Do Not: What Do They Look Like?

 

That study is clear—conflict is good for teams. But what does it look like? Here is a snapshot of what teams who don’t welcome conflict look like, compared to teams that do.

Teams That Don’t Welcome Conflict

·         Create a culture where back-channel politics and personal attacks thrive

·         Have boring meetings

·         Ignore topics that are important for success, but are controversial

·         Waste time and energy with posturing

Teams That Welcome Conflict

·         Take and use the ideas of all team members

·         Have energetic, interesting meetings

·         Quickly solve real problems

·         Minimize politics

·         Do not fear putting critical topics on the table for discussion

What Happened When the NBA Avoided Conflict

Looking at sports teams is a great place to learn about teamwork. Yet in this scenario, the NBA isn’t showing us how to be an awesome team—it’s showing us just what avoiding conflict can do.

It was not a secret among the inner circles of the basketball world that Donald Sterling, L.A. Clippers owner at the time, had potential to create PR catastrophes. One example would be his prior multi-million dollar lawsuit with the Department of Justice for driving minorities out of his apartment buildings. Yet even the NBA commissioner pushed Sterling’s problematic issues under the carpet. Why? In order to avoid conflict.

This blew up in their face in April of 2014, when a recording of Sterling making racist statements about players was made public causing NBA unrest, threatened boycott, and a PR disaster.

Sound familiar?

Does avoiding conflict sound familiar to you? Maybe you notice your team is not making progress, or you feel that politics trump all initiatives at work. Or maybe it’s you who is avoiding conflict, harboring resentment for your team, and not reaching your potential. Here are some tips for welcoming conflict at work.

Three Tips for Welcoming Conflict at Work

1. Remember Everyone’s Opinions Matter

·         Everyone on the team should be able to express their opinions without the fear of retribution

2. Move Away From Finger Pointing

·         Work toward perceiving, understanding and respecting where others are coming from

3. Appreciate that Workplace Conflict is Inevitable

·         Disagreements at work are a given; avoiding them won’t make them go away

·         Don’t hit the roof when you realize the team isn’t working well together; accept it

·         Remove yourself from the situation and analyze how this conflict might benefit the team

 

So let’s go back to Gabriel’s experience where back channel politics plagued the office. The executive assistant was a distracted, nervous wreck knowing that she was seen as “below” the operations manager, yet had been taken to the onboarding session first. And she was right; Evan was fuming because he wasn’t able to assert his superiority by being chosen first. This anxiety-inducing dynamic will continue to exist unless one of them is willing to address the conflict, or one of them leaves the organization.

Shayda also chose not to cause a conflict by asserting that she needed to leave for volunteer orientation at the women’s shelter. Instead, she was tense, miserable and resentful. If she didn’t fear conflict, she would have made her request known, and probably had the opportunity to go to orientation.

The meeting Gabriel joined was also an example of a team that avoids conflict. Nothing got accomplished because no one was comfortable speaking up to share their ideas. And Evan was so busy asserting his authority that he wouldn’t take advantage of the skills and creativity of his teammates. This constant assertion of dominance, coupled with the stagnating results of those avoiding any type of conflict, led to a pointless meeting that nearly put Gabriel to sleep.

Imagine how lively the meeting would be if people were willing to cause potential conflicts in order to solve problems, share ideas, and get things done? Their progress was and will continue to be stunted unless they stop avoiding a perfectly normal byproduct of teamwork—conflict.

How do you feel about conflict at work? Do you face it head on or avoid it? If you avoid it, what makes you the most uncomfortable about conflict?

 

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

 

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Prove You Care About Employees With Feedback

 

Do you truly care about your employees? Do you really want them to improve? If yes, prove it by giving them feedback.

Yet feedback is not just for managers to give employees. Employees also give mangers feedback, and feedback can happen between peers.

Today I am focusing on the manager to employee feedback. And here’s why: Feedback is extremely important in an employee/manager relationship. Just take a look at these statistics*:

1.    Companies that intentionally give feedback have 14.9% lower turnover rates

2.    40% of workers are disengaged when they get little or no feedback

3.    Positive or negative, 82% of employees appreciate receiving feedback

4.    Of highly engaged employees, 43% receive feedback at least once a week

5.    65% of employees say they want more feedback

6.    27% of workers say the feedback they get improves their performance

7.    42% of Millennials want feedback every week, yet 83% of Millennials say their manager’s feedback isn’t meaningful

8.    92% of people think negative feedback is effective at improving performance

As you can see, feedback improves performance, lowers turnover, and perhaps most surprising employees want it! Yet giving feedback can make managers uncomfortable. What do you say? How do you say it?

I’ve got you covered with this step-by-step guide to giving effective feedback, developed by Shari Harley.

Let’s take a look at Harley’s guide and then run through an example scenario.

Eight Easy Steps For Giving Feedback

 

1.    Introduce the conversation so feedback recipients know what to expect.

2.    Empathize so both the feedback provider and the recipient feel as comfortable as possible.

3.    Describe the observed behavior so the recipient can picture a specific recent example of what you’re referring to. The more specific you are, the less defensive he will be, and the more likely he’ll be able to hear you and take corrective action.

4.    Sharing the impact or result describes the consequences of the behavior. It’s what happened as a result of the person’s actions.

5.    Having some dialogue gives both people a chance to speak and ensures that the conversation is not one-sided. Many feedback conversations are not conversations at all; they’re monologues. One person talks and the other person pretends to listen, while thinking what an idiot you are. Good feedback conversations are dialogues during which the recipient can ask questions, share his point of view, and explore next steps.

6.    Make a suggestion or request so the recipient has another way to approach the situation or task in the future. Most feedback conversations tell the person what he did wrong and the impact of the behavior; only rarely do they offer an alternative. Give people the benefit of the doubt. If people knew a better way to do something, they would do it another way.

7.    Building an agreement on next steps ensures there is a plan for what the person will do going forward. Too many feedback conversations do not result in behavior change. Agreeing on next steps creates accountability.

8.    Say “Thank you” to create closure and to express appreciation for the recipient’s willingness to have a difficult conversation.

Seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, reading a handy guide and actually talking to a person have different levels of complexity. Each employee/manager relationship is unique, and the characteristics of that relationship will paint every conversation. However, following the guide will help the conversation stay focused, organized and neutral. Let’s take a look at an example.

Play-By-Play Example of Giving Feedback

Pierre is a remote worker who lives in a different time zone than the corporate office. While he delivers excellent work on his projects, he often won’t update his team on his progress, leaving them with an entire workday without knowing where they stand on the project timeline.

Despite being asked by the project manager multiple times to send a quick status email at the end of his workday, Pierre doesn’t remember. Sometimes he has to be emailed three times before his status is communicated. This causes stress for the team and holds back progress while the project manager waits for his update in order to inform the team on next steps.

It’s time for Pierre’s manager to intervene and try to improve the situation. In other words, it’s time for feedback. Let’s take a look at how to provide Pierre feedback based on the eight steps detailed above.

1. INTRODUCE THE CONVERSATION

First, Pierre’s manager should arrange a time to have a conversation. This conversation request can be made via email, phone call, or chat, depending on the usual mode of communication in this employee dynamic. His manager should let him know that she wants to discuss making the team function better, and how he can aid that effort.

2. EMPATHIZE

Pierre’s manager should communicate empathetically about his situation. In this case, she would say something like, “I’m sure it’s difficult to work in a time zone that isn’t aligned with the majority of the team, and that the inevitable early mornings and late nights must be tiring. Plus, I understand that not having your team around you in person can make quick and efficient communication challenging.”

3. DESCRIBE THE OBSERVED BEHAVIOR

Now it’s time for Pierre’s manager to be specific. She may say, “Last week DeAndré requested an update before you ended your workday so that the team would know if you were able to fix the reported bugs in the new website functionality. He needed to know because he had a call with the client early the next morning and had to provide a project update and discuss allocating resources for the next work cycle. However, the update wasn’t provided.”

4. SHARE IMPACT OR RESULT

Pierre’s manager would now go on to explain specifically the impact this particular behavior has on the project and the team at large. For example, “Because DeAndré didn’t receive your update, he had to cancel the client meeting with very little notice. Now the client is losing trust in the team, and we may not get future work from them. If we don’t get future work from this client, which is quite large, we won’t be able to meet our goals, and will have to scale back the team.”

5. HAVE SOME DIALOGUE

Now is Pierre’s chance to talk. Yet he might not feel that he can, if he feels he is in trouble and is retreating. That means his manager needs to create an open environment for Pierre to share his perspective. She can do this by asking open-ended questions and truly listening. For example, “What gets in your way of giving a status update at the end of your day?” or “How can I support you as you keep the team informed?” or “How do you feel about the project, in general?”

6. MAKE A SUGGESTION OR REQUEST

A skilled manager will be able to provide their employee with an actionable plan. Perhaps Pierre’s manager can suggest he set a reminder alarm for the end of his workday alerting him to the fact that he needs to send an update. Depending on the situation, the manager and employee can be creative when developing a solution.

7. BUILD AN AGREEMENT ON NEXT STEPS

After making some suggestions, Pierre’s they should settle on one plan of action that they both agree to. They should also set a meeting in a few weeks or a month to follow up on his progress for status updates.

8. SAY THANK YOU!

No matter how well the conversation goes, it’s important to acknowledge your employee’s willingness to have the conversation. For example, “I know your day is already full, so I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today.”

These eight steps should set you up for a positive and productive relationship with your team members. And don’t forget, feedback isn’t always negative. Make a point to give positive feedback—and when you do, be specific!

Do you have any tips for giving feedback? I’d love to hear. Let’s share experiences.

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send us an email, or find us on Twitter.

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Three Ways Learning Agility Can Help Your Career Growth

We have a guest blog this week about a fascinating topic: Learning agility. Thanks for David Hoff, co-author of Learning Ability-The Key to Leader Potential.

Learning agility is finding yourself in a new situation and not knowing what to do – but then figuring it out.

Why would that be important? In an organizational context, if you are promoted from one function to another or from an individual contributor to a manager role, how do I know you will be successful? The answer is that I don’t, because you’ve never done the job before. The research says if leaders make that decision without the help of an assessment process, the odds of the person being successful is 50-50 – essentially the flip of a coin.

What is the cost if the coin lands on the side of being unsuccessful? It depends; the range is anywhere from one to three times that person’s fully-loaded pay, including compensation and benefits. That’s an expensive coin toss!

Most organizations use a performance management system to give employees feedback on their performance and to equitably distribute merit increases. The output of this process is supposed to be a development plan, which describes the key objectives a person should achieve in the coming year and the areas he or she should begin to improve.

Some companies put additional time, effort and money into critical jobs and/or high-potential employees. There are different definitions of high-potential employees; a common one is a person with the ability to be promoted two levels above his or her current level. An example would be a manager with the ability to be promoted to a vice president. You can’t spend significant additional dollars on everyone, so who gets this extra time and attention? That is the $64,000 question.

One answer is to spend time on the most learning-agile person. But how do you determine learning agility? That question has stumped people in the talent management field for some time. My favorite response is, “Those who can learn on the fly.”

How do you operationalize that definition? What would I see a learning-agile person do? How would I teach someone to? Be more learning-agile? These questions are where learning agility becomes more complicated.

Researcher Scott DeRue, from The University of Michigan, established a model that identifies speed and flexibility as the two most important factors determining learning agility. Learning agility is about being able to digest a large amount of information quickly and figure out what is most important (speed). DeRue defines flexibility as the ability to change frameworks to help you understand how different things are related or connected.

DeRue also made a distinction between learning agility and learning ability. “Ability” means the cognitive ability or “smarts.” Ability is important to a point, but then, smarter is not necessarily better. Earlier, I noted that learning agility is being in an unfamiliar situation, not knowing what to do and figuring it out. The ability takes you to a certain point. Then, agility becomes more important.

DeRue says there are both cognitive and behavioral components to learning agility. The cognitive ones – the “hard wiring,” if you will – are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The behavioral ones are more learnable, because if you do the things described by the behavior, then you are demonstrating that part of learning agility.

Another researcher, Dr. Warner Burke from Columbia University, confirmed what DeRue described and found seven additional dimensions of learning agility. He embraced speed and flexibility; his research also identified experimenting, performance risk-taking, interpersonal risk-taking, collaborating, information-gathering, feedback-seeking and reflecting. Burke also developed a test to measure learning agility; his work led to a valid and reliable tool with years of research to support its results. This is a huge step beyond the 50/50 coin flip to determine who we develop and promote.

Here are three tips for using learning agility in your work:

1. In the future, people are more likely to be hired less for what they “know” and more for their ability to figure out what they “don’t know”. So get curious about what you don’t know as a way to make a difference in your career.
2. To increase your flexibility (one of the learning agility dimensions), take the opposing point of view (from your own position) during a discussion. Support that contrary position as strongly as you would your original position.
3. When seeking feedback (a dimension of learning agility), seek to understand what the other person is saying by truly listening. Defensiveness gets in the way of learning agility.

Want to learn more about learning agility? Reach out here.

Why Leadership Training Fails

It happens all the time. Senior leaders seek leadership training to strengthen the leadership team. Yet they don’t know exactly what will make their individual leaders better in their roles.
Some will base their leadership training on the flavor of the month, such as emotional intelligence. They have heard in leadership circles how powerful emotional intelligence is for leaders, so think training in that capacity will improve their individual leader’s abilities. And while that might be true, it might also be true that a particular leader is actually not lacking in emotional intelligence, and there are other skills that would maximize the results of their training. This is how leadership training fails.
For effective leadership training, we must know what the leader needs. This need should also be aligned with the organizational vision and mission, which requires foundational work. And in order to do that work, competencies must first be established.

The Foundational Work Needed for Leadership Training to Succeed

Sometimes referred to as ‘KSA’, competencies are the things people need to know (knowledge), do (skills) and have (abilities) to be successful in a specific role. Competencies can be grouped into technical, foundational and leadership areas. They are defined by specific behaviors that describe what that competency would look like if someone were using it effectively. These behaviors are often laid out across a proficiency scale so the employee can clearly assess her current behaviors and understand what behaviors are needed for the next level.
Some examples of competencies are problem-solving, conflict management, technical skills and speaking up. While some competencies will be applied to every employee, others are role dependent. The CEO of a large organization likely won’t need to have specific technical competencies, and a coder on the tech team likely wouldn’t need to be competent in sales communication.
Once competencies are defined, the next thing to do is identify five clearly defined proficiency levels. For example, for problem-solving skills, level one might be, ‘asks questions and looks for information to identify and differentiate the symptoms and causes of every day, defined problems’. Level five might be, ‘anticipates problem areas and associated risk levels with objectivity; uses formal methodologies to forecast trends and define innovative strategies in response to the implications of options; and gains approval from senior leadership to solutions of multi-faceted problems".

After competencies and proficiency levels are clearly defined, the next steps are:

1. Determine the expected proficiencies by job position.
2. Assess the employee’s competencies using a standardized process, on a regular basis. Competing an assessment will help the leader know which competencies to focus on for future leadership training.
3. Facilitate career conversations with employees to match organizational needs, career aspirations, and current employee proficiency to a leadership development program.
4. Track progress using accountability measures in the leadership development training.

Read in depth about each step here.

Using this process will prevent your leadership training from failing. You seek training because you are invested in your employee development. If you’re willing to make that investment, it’s worth doing all the foundational work necessary to get effective training that elevates your leaders.

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