I’m back (with opinions)I’m back, b$tches!! I had a baby one time and then the newsletter habit was out the window. But I love writing (and even more, I love hearing back from you). So here we go. I hope this one hits for you. People who run teams and businesses tell me conflict is the bane of their existence. Across all workers, it eats up about 3 hours per week. For managers and HR, it’s way more. As much as 40% of their time. Forty percent of a 40-hour work week is… 16 hours. That’s a huge chunk. And most of that effort looks like this: meetings where you listen to people talk about one another, trying to come up with solutions on your own, reading minds, then having the same conversations with the same people all over again the next week (or day!). No wonder people get the Sunday Scaries. But this is why we have to do conflict differently. And by different, I definitely mean better. When someone comes to you with their conflict, the only way to actually get it off your plate is to talk to them about it first. And in this case, talking looks a lot more like asking questions and listening to the answers. You don’t need to have a solution. In fact, when you craft the solution yourself, it usually solves for the wrong problem. Here are some real solutions clients tried before I came in: Told two people who kept having conflict that they could only talk by email, so there’d be a record of what was said. Decided this group should only meet with HR present, so there would be a neutral witness. Offered to act as a liaison between the two, to reduce the amount of direct communication they’d have with one another.
Um, what? All of these were presented as good ideas. Somehow. When people can’t get along, taking away opportunities for them to talk to one another doesn’t improve things. It makes them worse. The less people talk, the more they become mystified by one another. And when you’re mystified, you fill in the gaps. About intentions. Personality traits. Motivations. Whether they’re “good” or “bad.” When you don’t really know someone, you’re far more likely to assume the worst about them and the best about yourself. The divide deepens. See where I’m going? Look at highly polarized politics right now. Each side is so wrapped up in their beliefs about the other (most of which aren’t grounded in fact) that they barely consider the other side human. If that’s not the vibe you’re trying to recreate at work, good news. There’s another option. When conflict shows up, your job isn’t to fix it. It’s to ask questions about what it would take for that person to talk to the other person directly. Not alone. With a neutral, trusted person there. The goal is to slow it down. Get it out. And remind everyone that they don’t have the whole story. Because they will disagree again. But if they understand more about what drives one another (not less), they can disagree differently. And better.
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