Episode 254 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: This episode is about resolving conflict and understanding that we don’t all see conflict the same way. It’s an important and really critical skill to develop as you elevate in your career. And you’re likely going to come across a few what we call difficult or intense personalities. So being able to lean into those to adapt well to how different people deal with opposition and with conflict is essential if you want to be effective with a wide range of people.

0:00:28 Ramona Shaw: Here are the two questions this podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role? And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get bigger, this show, The Manager Track podcast will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shah. I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead. So everyone wins and grows.

0:01:04 Ramona Shaw: In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate, and act as a confident and competent leader you know you can be. Welcome to this episode. We’re diving into something every manager faces, but very few truly master, and that is workplace conflict resolution. So whether you’re dealing with team members who can’t see eye to eye or you’re directly involved in a tense situation with a colleague, how you handle conflict can make or break your effectiveness as a leader.

0:01:35 Ramona Shaw: And I’m saying all that as a person who is not naturally inclined to have conflict. To me, in fact, this was a really difficult skill to learn. And to be honest, I’m still learning this. I haven’t mastered it. I constantly find myself trying to find reasons why not to engage in conflict. But it is this discipline and I’m trying to develop because of the tools that I have that help me to lean into it. And then it really just takes the courage to create the space, space and time.

0:02:03 Ramona Shaw: And with that, with every interaction that I lean into the opposition or into the conflict, I hope it is making me stronger and more effective over time. While for some of us this comes more natural, others really have to do the work. Wherever you are on that spectrum, what I’m going to share with you today is really important because we don’t all see conflict the same way. And if you don’t understand what to look at out for in other people and how to observe if they’re in conflict even if you aren’t, and how to then best react to that, you’re going to miss a huge chunk of Information that would allow you to be more effective in your relationships.

0:02:43 Ramona Shaw: So I want to start off with a story that perfectly illustrates how easily conflict can sneak into our workplace. A few years ago, I was working with a tech company where two department heads, let’s call them Alex and Chamin, were making up the departments as well as the names for confidentiality reasons. But they were constantly at odds. So marketing and product rarely agreed on timelines, priorities, or even basic communication protocols.

0:03:08 Ramona Shaw: In one particularly tense meeting, Alex from marketing interrupted Jamie from product and said, once again, your team is changing requirements after we’ve already started the campaign. Jamie shot back, if your team would actually attend our planning sessions instead of asking for last minute accommodations, this wouldn’t happen. And the tension just vibrated through the room. Both of them talented leaders, but the ripple effect of their disagreements made it really hard on the team.

0:03:41 Ramona Shaw: It was this ongoing friction that was starting to cause problems. So what’s interesting, but not surprising is that both Alex and Jamie were convinced that they were both right. They both felt their department was being disrespected, that they had to advocate on behalf of their team members, and both of them were contributing to a cycle of conflict that was completely unnecessary and could have been resolved by better understanding what actually was going on.

0:04:10 Ramona Shaw: But these scenarios where this friction happens are very common. And the ripple effect that then it has on the team members, the overall work environment, how individual members of the different teams now start to see each other, that is pretty significant. And if you add all that up, can get quite costly. Hence, this is why understanding conflict, being able to take yourself out of a conflict situation, to look at it with a bit of distance and then being able to resolve it effectively is such an important skill to develop.

0:04:44 Ramona Shaw: So what causes workplace conflict in the first place? At its core, conflict tends to happen when someone deprives us of something that we value. A norm, a rule, or a desire. It could even be like, I deserve respect, I deserve to be heard, valued, given, credit, participate, be involved. It’s decency. And when we feel other people don’t give us that now, a value is being compromised. So think about it.

0:05:18 Ramona Shaw: How often has conflict started because someone didn’t respond to an email fast enough, or because a colleague didn’t include another person in a meeting that they felt they should have been invited to? You can probably see this. It may not be a big blow up kind of conflict, but these little moments of I can’t believe it, and the eye rolls and the frustrations, or maybe because someone took credit for work that let’s say you contributed to and you hear it and it’s just hate it, Right? So these moments of stress and conflict happen a lot now. In each case, there’s this deprivation again. Respect, maybe inclusion, recognition, all of that is part of it.

0:06:01 Ramona Shaw: Now, the second major source of conflict comes from what we at ARCOVA call blueprints. Those are our expectations of how we think things should be, like a blueprint of reality. But when the reality difference from our mental model, our mental blueprints, and we’re attached to those blueprints, then conflict arises. When I want someone else to do something or show up a certain way, or for my boss to do the kind of things that I expect of a leader, and then they don’t do it.

0:06:38 Ramona Shaw: Now I might be in conflict. My boss actually may not even know that’s what what is happening. Here’s really the key insight to this. It’s rarely the facts that create the conflict, but our interpretations of circumstances and whether we like them or not. So let me give you an example. Two employees received the same feedback from their manager. Manager says this report needs more data to support the recommendations.

0:07:10 Ramona Shaw: The first employee thinks, great, my manager is helping me make my work better. I’m just learning something right now. Thank you for the feedback. The second one thinks, oh my gosh, my manager doesn’t trust my judgment and is micromanaging me and they don’t like the work that I do. I can’t really ever satisfy them and be good enough. Same facts, exact same words spoken, different interpretations. And you may think, sure, but I’m sure there’s a backstory to that. There were other instances that led to one person seeing it as a growth opportunity and the other person seeing it as a personal attack.

0:07:49 Ramona Shaw: Yeah, maybe. But there’s also this personal interpretation involved. The one who sees it as a learning opportunity. They will just ignore the fact that it could have been personal. They will not consider that because it’s irrelevant to them. The one who thinks it’s personal will ignore all the facts and all the signals that the manager also wants to give feedback and wants to help them make their work product better.

0:08:16 Ramona Shaw: So there could have been a backstory, but the essence still is the same. Same message received, different interpretations. Now, before we go further, let’s make an important distinction between conflict and opposition. This distinction is crucial for healthy teams. Conflict is that emotionally charged situation where we feel things are personal. My boss is micromanaging me, doesn’t trust me. They never think I can do anything right.

0:08:44 Ramona Shaw: They don’t believe I’m good enough persons, all me. It’s personal opposition, on the other hand, is tension over tasks or projects. It’s not about people involved. Hey, we missed the deadline. What’s going on? This is frustrating. This is difficult for us to then achieve our milestone. What happened in this situation? Someone dropped the ball. We have to figure this out. Those are focused on the task.

0:09:10 Ramona Shaw: And these kind of conversations are not particularly bad. They often cultivate accountability, they bring visibility to problems, and when it’s even opposing opinions, hey, we should do A. No, I disagree. We need to do B. A is not considering all these other aspects. I strongly believe B is the right approach. The other person says, no, I don’t see it that way. A is the right approach, that is opposition.

0:09:37 Ramona Shaw: Those situations are actually healthy. There’s a lot of research around this of what makes high performing teams be high performing. What are the differentiators between mediocre teams and high performing teams? Healthy opposition is one of them. The ability to engage in such dialogues, in such conversations or even confrontations while staying in this solution oriented mindset and not letting it get to a personal conflict.

0:10:07 Ramona Shaw: So think about how some of the best ideas emerge when team members respectfully challenge each other’s thinking. Like when a junior engineer questions a senior architect’s design choice and ends up identifying a critical flaw that saves the project. So as leaders, we don’t want to eliminate all tension, we just want to ensure it stays in the realm of productive opposition rather than destructive conflict.

0:10:37 Ramona Shaw: And so it is on you to almost as a leader for your team, set the guardrails and decide when are we going from healthy opposition? What I want to cultivate in that space, I want to create, but within the guardrails to ensure that this doesn’t move over into conflict. And it sounds somewhat easy, but the challenge is that line between conflict and healthy opposition is blurred and isn’t the same for everyone on your team.

0:11:02 Ramona Shaw: So understanding that we see conflict differently, we respond to it differently, means to really pay attention to what might be going on, to get to know your people, to understand what are their triggers, how do they show up or not show up when something isn’t going well for them, when they’re being frustrated. I’ve heard from numerous clients, things such as, I got an email from my boss this morning, maybe at 8 o’clock and I saw it and I literally wanted to go back to bed, I wanted to do nothing else all day, or I was eating lunch, had a good day, and suddenly I get this email from a peer who sent something to my boss without first talking to me, and I flipped. Now, I was professional enough to understand I don’t send an email back, but internally I was boiling.

0:11:56 Ramona Shaw: And so for the rest of the afternoon I couldn’t really focus on anything else. If you can resonate with this, if this is something that you’ve experienced before, then you also understand the emotional cost of being in conflict and the productivity cost than not being able to focus and actually get work done. So as a leader, you obviously want to learn that about yourself, but also pay attention to what’s going on with your team members. What do they do when these situations happen and how do I realize it and can intervene when I crosses that line from being healthy? Opposition to conflict.

0:12:34 Ramona Shaw: Now, one tool to address this. When you’re in a situation where you’re realizing something just triggered me, but you’re not directly talking to another person, they’re over there doing their thing, you’re over here boiling. One tool to help you personally get out of this sort of conflict situation is a model that I called self inflicted tension. And it’s based on a framework by the Arbitrary Institute.

0:13:00 Ramona Shaw: It helps us understand how we often perpetuate conflict without actually realizing it, and hence why at Arkova recall this self inflicted tension. So picture a four box diagram. In the first box is the hey, they do the actions others take. They send emails without involving me or without including me. That’s what they do. In the second box, it’s how do you interpret those actions? I feel undermined. I feel like they’re stepping on my toes. I feel disrespected.

0:13:38 Ramona Shaw: I don’t feel valued. So those are the things that tell us how you interpret someone else’s actions. Now in the third box or the next question for you to ask is what do I do? How do you respond? Based your interpretation? I send a snappy email back, I cut them out of communication that I send out, I disengage them, I withhold information. What is it that you do as response to that? And then the fourth question is, when you do those things, what do they see?

0:14:15 Ramona Shaw: So other people also interpret your response just as you are interpreting their response. And it leads them back to box number one, which is what they see for them. It’s how I see it. I see that they’re withholding information, that they’re not including me in emails. Right? So we see how the two behaviors create a dynamic almost like a dance. So let’s walk through this with a real scenario. Let’s call this client Tanya.

0:14:45 Ramona Shaw: Tanya had a new hire, Raj. What Tanya notices is that Raj missed the deadline for an important client deliverable. So they do. They missed the deadline. I’m frustrated. We talked about it so many times. I can’t believe that they missed it. It’s going to be looking bad on me. I have to not take the blame and explain myself and fix it. They don’t listen to me, they don’t respect me, they’re not paying attention or even oh my gosh or I made the wrong decision with hiring them.

0:15:14 Ramona Shaw: So this is the response to box two. What they see. Tanya interprets this as Raj again being careless, not prioritizing her expectations. The list goes on. So Tanya may conclude he doesn’t respect my authority or does not take this job seriously. So then what does Tanya do? This is box 3, or question 3. Tanya responds by implementing strict check ins, asking for daily progress reports, reviewing emails that Raj wants to send to clients, checking in on all their deliverables on a regular basis, making sure every deadline is captured by Tanya and Tanya checks in on those so that this doesn’t happen again.

0:15:57 Ramona Shaw: What does Raj see? Raj sees Tanya as a micromanager who doesn’t trust his abilities. And he thinks she’s power tripping and not giving me any autonomy here. And then this leads us back to box one, where Raj starts to work less efficiently because he feels demotivated by the micromanagement. Which in turn confirms Tanya’s belief that he needs close supervision and she might have made a mistake hiring him.

0:16:25 Ramona Shaw: So can you see how this cycle perpetuates itself? But the truth is much different. Raj missed the deadline because he was taking extra time to ensure quality was high and there were no errors in it. And he misunderstood the priority level. He didn’t understand how important that deadline was. He thought, it’s okay if I set it a bit late, but at least it’ll be perfect now. Tanya was acting out of concern for the client’s satisfaction, not because of distrust. Right. The Battania wanted to really make sure that this doesn’t happen again to this client, regardless of why the delay occurred.

0:17:02 Ramona Shaw: But their interpretations created a conflict cycle that was entirely self inflicted. So this is something to pay attention to with what you own in conflict, you’re part of the dance, so to speak. So this is a bit about conflict, how conflict shows up, but how do we actually break these cycles? So it starts by understanding our own conflict response styles. Research shows that people typically demonstrate one of three behaviors when things get tense.

0:17:35 Ramona Shaw: Some of us are assertive. So we lean into the challenge, and we want to talk things out right away. And then once we’ve talked them out, we actually feel pretty good about things. Others are accommodators. They try to preserve harmony. Sometimes at our own expenses. We give up things just to make sure that conflict smooths over. We’d say, okay, we do it as you want. Yes, you’re right. And then the third approach is deanalyzing, which means to slow things down and to try to understand all angles before proceeding.

0:18:09 Ramona Shaw: And so these are three different styles on how we may engage when some conflict occurs. And it’s a lot easier to resolve conflict when people match each other’s behaviors. So if you’re dealing with someone who asserts themselves, but you are naturally someone who wants to analyze, you’re like, okay, this is the problem. Let me go figure things out. Let me go think about it. Let me go look at the database, or let me go look at what really happened. And then once I know, then I can come back.

0:18:38 Ramona Shaw: You might need to temporarily shift your approach and match their directness initially before moving the conversation to a more analytical space. Like dancing. Again, you need to meet your partner where they are before you can lead them anywhere new on the dance floor. If you don’t, and if you withdraw in order to figure things out, the person who wants to assert they’re gonna feel like you leave them hanging, and you don’t actually care.

0:19:05 Ramona Shaw: Because what they need and what they demonstrate that they want to do is they want to talk it out and figure it out together. Not you go off, do it yourself. Similar with someone who’s accommodating. They may not want you to accommodate. They want you to speak up and let them know how you see it in order to resolve it. That’s their preferred approach. So think about what your preferred approach is. When something happens that you don’t like, when you sense stress or friction, and then also start paying attention how people around you navigate conflict.

0:19:39 Ramona Shaw: This is something that we discuss in more detail in the Leadership Accelerator, where we also take the SDI assessment that covers this framework and gives us indication of how we go through conflict with those three sequences in mind. It’s a really powerful assessment for individuals to build awareness, but also for teams to better understand how they all operate during stressful times or when things don’t go well, and how to engage effectively with each other in order to de escalate.

0:20:13 Ramona Shaw: Now, another crucial concept is understanding that conflict typically progresses through different stages of escalation. Right? There’s not one way of having conflict. No, conflict escalates. So in the beginning we might be a little bit annoyed, then we start to get agitated, and then we might get angry. But initially conflict starts to bubble up when we get a little annoyed. Right. This is where it begins and it’s also where it’s easiest to resolve it because we’re not yet angry.

0:20:41 Ramona Shaw: But once that we further progress down that path, it becomes difficult because the more someone is emotional, the less they’re willing to see the other side, the less they’re able to actually distance themselves and look at the problem and stay problem focused. Because now when emotions run high, intelligence runs low. Emotions take over these things. To give you an example here, I saw this play out with a client in the healthcare sector.

0:21:09 Ramona Shaw: There were two nurse miniatures, let’s call them Barbara and Denise. And they started with a simple disagreement over staff scheduling. Wasn’t a big deal, but it was unaddressed and they kept happening. So it started to turn into frustrations and it started to feel to one person that there was some favoritism involved. Now I am not just a little annoyed, I’m agitated about the whole situation. But yet still no one engaged in the dialogue. Nothing happened. Each of them were thinking about it and ruminating on their own about what to do or what to say, but no actual conversation happened.

0:21:45 Ramona Shaw: The leader, also their manager, also didn’t get involved, although heard about the issue but thought, no, I’m going to let them figure it out. But this would have been one where the manager should have recognized, hey, they’re not talking and it’s getting worse, I need to intervene because the longer I wait, the harder it’s going to be. So eventually this kept escalating and they were barely communicating except through formal emails with their directors and so forth, or where they were ccing each other with very polite, formal, but nothing else. Not addressing the problem.

0:22:18 Ramona Shaw: But what’s important is to recognize that even if to one person, let’s say Denise, this wasn’t a big deal, but the other person felt like, no, this is a problem. Even if you realize, hey, someone else is getting angry, I’m not, but someone else is getting angry, then be the one who engages in the dialogue versus thinking that they’ll have to come to you because obviously they’re the ones with the problem.

0:22:40 Ramona Shaw: That is not leadership. Leadership would be to notice something is going sideways and to address it heads on, be really direct about it with the attention to resolve it. Now, if they’re really angry, they’re likely not want to go hear Your thoughts. The first thing to do in those cases is to really tune into their feelings. Make sure that they understand that you hear them, that you hear them, that you can see what’s going on for them.

0:23:07 Ramona Shaw: And only later can you then actually share your perspective. Once that initial conversation has taken place, they’ve calmed down. You’re reorienting the conversation around solutions and then you can share more about your perspective. So as we’re wrapping this up, I want to quickly recap. Opposition is useful. Conflict, personal, not healthy, not useful. There’s a good part of conflict and friction that’s actually self inflicted. Where if you take on that leadership mindset and the idea and really owning the fact that we have a lot of self leadership and that leadership of other people starts with self leadership.

0:23:44 Ramona Shaw: Use that self inflicted tension framework to look at what do they do and how I interpret that and then what do I do in response and then how do they interpret my response and how can I break that cycle? So this is not turning into a vicious cycle. That just makes it worse. What do I need to say? What do I need to do? How do I need to interpret their actions differently in order to turn that back around?

0:24:10 Ramona Shaw: And then when there is friction, you’re observing others or even yourself, remember that we’re not all responding to it to the same way, that we have different approaches, accommodating, analyzing or asserting. And that conflict usually escalates over time. And the sooner that we notice it, whether it’s us or them, and get involved to resolve it, the better and the easier to do. Now there are more frameworks around conflict resolution, which we all dive into in our programs at arcova, including the Leadership Accelerator.

0:24:41 Ramona Shaw: And now, as always, I want to end this podcast episode not just with having shared information and maybe helped you see something or learn a tool you weren’t aware of before, but also encourage you to self reflect. What is your go to approach when it comes to conflict or tension? Are you analyzing? Do you want to figure out what happened? Do you tend to accommodate to reinstate harmony or do you want to talk things out?

0:25:04 Ramona Shaw: And then second question, what do people around you tend to? What do they tend to do? What is their response when something isn’t going well and how could you meet them better where they’re at on the dance floor? To go back to that analogy. Okay, with that said, let’s wrap it up. This was part two of this brief series around styles. We talked about communication styles in a previous episode. We’ll link to it in the show. Notes the two go together. Communication styles and conflict styles so we talked about today and conflict resolution overall to help you better engage and communicate with people when things are going well, but also when it gets tough.

0:25:48 Ramona Shaw: Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll be back with another episode of The Manager Track podcast next week. Bye for now. If you enjoyed this episode, then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out @archova.org/masterclass. The second resource is my best selling book, the Confident and competent New how to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role.

0:26:20 Ramona Shaw: Check it out@archova.org/books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.