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Lean in
Conflicts can burrow and become endemic to an org and that’s when you people talk about politics of work. These are often aggressive or passive aggressive conflicts that have deeply rooted inside a company and caused it to be either unpleasant, inefficient, or maybe even both. So as a leader, when it came to conflict resolution, I leaned into it. As soon as I heard about a conflict, I went right in and tried to see what was it about. And that’s not a natural tendency of human beings. If, for human beings, there’s a conflict that’s not directly affecting you, you may say, “Let me get to that next week. Let me see if they can work it out by themselves and I’ll look at it next month.”
Those kinds of human instincts of, I just want to stay away from conflict, I don’t have time, it’s mentally taxing, actually are going to cost you more time and energy than if you attacked it right away because conflicts never get better. They age like milk out of a refrigerator. If milk’s out of the refrigerator, you want to go there and put it back in really quick so it doesn’t spoil.
So my philosophy on this was, as soon as I saw a conflict, I would, without knowing what it was and without taking sides, I’d get the two people who were having the conflict on the phone right there as soon as I could and say, “What’s going on? Everyone, calm down, tell me what’s going on,” and then try to work it out. Lean into conflict, lean into the hard problems and you’ll have fewer hard problems over time if you do that.
Air it out
When we’re doing this conflict resolution, remember that humans more than anything in the workplace and at home want to be heard. They want to feel like they’ve been listened to. And so, you have a conflict, it’s often because they feel either the other person’s wrong about something or they’re at least not being heard, they’re not being given the chance to explain. Because there are scenarios in a business where you have two groups or people that disagree, someone has to make a decision, but let’s air that disagreement so that we have full understanding of what people think.
You may disagree, but we’re going to commit that we made a decision and we’re going to go forward on this. So disagree and commit is totally fine. If you don’t give voice to disagreements or conflict, then it gets buried in an organization and it bubbles up in ways that you couldn’t possibly predict. People quit. People find another opportunity. They start sabotaging work from that person they don’t like because they think it’s a divisive situation as opposed to an issue-based decision.
So giving air and sunlight to these disagreements and making it okay to have them, to make a decision and to move forward and to look back on that decision and see who was right and be okay with that, are all part of a technique of transparency in your organization that makes it work like a better oiled machine.
Lighten the load
Let’s talk about leaders themselves. If they’re doing this type of work which requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and emotional investment and sorting out emotional issues, it does take some energy, uncommon energy if you do it well and you do a lot of it. So how do you make sure that you don’t run out of that energy?
The best answers that have worked for me is finding others on the team who want to be leaders in the future and having them take on elements of that, not only so they can learn, but to distribute sort of some of the emotional energy that has to be spent to make any team work. That happens almost naturally sometimes. You’ve heard this notion, this person is my right-hand man or my right-hand woman. Why do people have that? It’s well, because so not only can they share their own observations with someone and bounce them off them, but also so that person can maybe solve some problems, too.
You never want to have every problem just pyramid to the top and everything hits there. You want that problem solving and that emotional intelligence to go down in your organization as far as it can. And the other thing you do is sleep all day on a Sunday. You have to recharge somehow. Whether it’s some sport or rest or some other activity that’s not work-based where your mind can rest without thinking about these things all the time.