Transcript—Leading Through Conflict and Difficult Conversations
Debra Zabloudil: Hi, everyone. This is Debra Zabloudil. I am the president and founder of The Learning Studio. And today we're here to talk about leading through conflict and having difficult conversations. This is the primer for our four-part microlearning series on conflict and having difficult conversations. And we're really going to sort of have an overview today on some of the things that we'd like you to think about as it relates to conflict and in those tough conversations that can come out of conflict or arise for other reasons, but they somewhat go hand in hand.
Debra Zabloudil: This quote, “Where we all think alike, no one thinks very much,” by Walter Lippmann is one that I believe really gets the point across on how important it is that we have disagreements in business and personal life. It is not that if we brush conflict under the rug, that everything is great. It is not that we shouldn't expect disagreements. They happen everywhere in life. They happen in our personal life. They happen in our professional life. They happen in politics. They happen in religious institutions, corporations, educational institutions, government agencies, et cetera. So we cannot avoid conflict. It's how we deal with disagreements and conflict that really separate us and make us good leaders or poor leaders in some cases.
Debra Zabloudil: So the fact that we don't want people necessarily to all think the same means that we are encouraging differing points of view. And when we encourage differing points of view, there will be disagreements. So we have to not only help ourselves understand how we can work through those disagreements, but we have to help our teams as well. And one of the ways to do that is equip them with a little bit of introspection, equip them with ways that they can work through situations where there is a disagreement and have those really difficult conversations.
Debra Zabloudil: I'd like to introduce here the Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument. And as we look at this, we have five different styles. This is actually an assessment that one can take, if interested, but I find it interesting because it really speaks to five primary styles. It doesn't mean that you will always be one style and you will never veer into another one. It doesn't mean that you are the same style in your personal life as you are in your professional life. Sometimes people can operate very different with conflict personally than they do professionally. And it also means that you might change over time. Your conflict style may not be the same now as it will be in 20 years or as it was 20 years ago.
Debra Zabloudil: But for the sake of understanding what these styles are, I just wanted to give you some definitions. Competing is you're basically satisfying your own concerns at the other individual's expense. I think we all know people like this in the workplace that are very competitive. They want to win, and they want to win at the expense of just about anything else or other people's feelings or bettering a relationship or really keeping a team whole. So there are situations where we want to use each of these styles, but being a competitive person, we have to sometimes temper our competitive nature when we're in situations of conflict. Because this is a high stakes situation when we're in conflict. We have to really think about what our own tendencies are and then is that going to work best for us in the situation at hand with the person at hand?
Debra Zabloudil: Then we have collaborating, where we're trying to find a win-win solution that completely satisfies both parties.
Debra Zabloudil: We've got compromising, where we find an acceptable settlement and pretty much each person is giving up something to get to that settlement.
Debra Zabloudil: We have avoiders who just sidestep conflict. Almost every time I teach a conflict course, there are a lot of people in this area. So if you find yourself as someone that's not really comfortable yet dealing with conflict, you are not alone, but, really, avoiding conflict is not necessarily going to mitigate conflict, it's not going to make it go away, and in some cases it only helps it grow and fester.
Debra Zabloudil: Accommodating are those folks that attempt to satisfy someone else's or everyone else's needs at the expense of their own.
Debra Zabloudil: So let's go back to this grid and let's take a look at it again and look at the X and the Y axis. When we're talking about different styles, let's start up at competing, which is high on the assertive scale and low on the cooperative scale. What that means is we are assertive, but we may be trying to get our way or to win, if you will, at the expense of bettering a relationship, at the expense of a project, at the expense of maybe your organization's needs or what student needs or the results of something that you're doing in your lab. We are a competitor above all else.
Debra Zabloudil: Then we've got, right below that, we've got the avoider. And, again, as I said, many people find themselves in this area and sometimes wrongly think that if they avoid a situation of conflict, it actually works out better for them and it works out better for the situation because the conflict will go away. But we know that rarely happens. It rarely happens that if we have a situation of conflict, by simply avoiding it, not talking about it, not doing anything, does it go away.
Debra Zabloudil: We then have on the lower right, we have the accommodator. The accommodator is the person who will bend over backwards for the mission, for their boss, for their colleagues. But what often happens with accommodators is they will give and give and give until the point that they are frustrated, they feel put upon and they become resentful. So that's not usually the best mode, not usually the way we want to work.
Debra Zabloudil: In the middle we have compromisers. Many of us have been told throughout the history of our lives that we should compromise when there's a conflict or a disagreement. But when we compromise, we're both giving up something, if there's two of us. If there's three of us or four of us, maybe we're all giving something up. We're not really getting our way so we're walking away feeling like, “Well, I didn't lose everything, but I lost something. I didn't get everything to my satisfaction.” And maybe we can't, in some cases, but collaborating is really one of the best approaches because what it means is maybe we're taking out a clean sheet of paper, and we're saying, “Rather than your way or my way, we're ticking down a list of things that I demand and you demand. We're looking at this issue or this challenge in a whole new way.” We're taking out, again, that clean sheet of paper. And we're saying, “If we both put our heads together, how might we develop a solution that is going to work for both?” That can be very, very powerful.
Debra Zabloudil: Sometimes people will say, “Well, what is the best conflict style?” And it really depends on the situation. It depends on the individual that you're encountering. If you know that you are someone who avoids conflict and you're going into a situation with someone who is highly competitive, you may need to move yourself into a more assertive role than you have previously, or that you typically do, or you could get steamrolled right over. If you are someone who accommodates often and you're walking into a situation where someone is compromising, you may end up giving more than they do. So really having a sense of self is always important in leadership. But when we're in high stakes situations, such as conflict, it's even more important to really take a look at ourselves and say, “What is my go-to style? And is that style appropriate for what I'm walking into? And what is that other person's style? And how might I adjust my style walking into a situation of conflict in a way that won't fan the feathers of this conflict, but will actually help bring us to a really positive resolution?”
Debra Zabloudil: So really interesting things to think about. And I don't think you can ever go wrong by really looking at yourself and thinking about how you might do better. This is from Entrepreneur magazine and it's “Six Strategies To Resolve Conflict At Work.” And I think they're all really good strategies and they can be good strategies whether you are the person in conflict or whether you may be mediating conflict between two employees, perhaps, that report to you or that are in your department or in your lab or in your academic division.
Debra Zabloudil: So the first is to embrace conflict and that is not to embrace it that we love conflict and we want more conflict to happen in the workplace, but really to embrace it in the sense that we know it exists, it sometimes can be very healthy for an organization to go through situations of conflict, because if we come out and handle it right and come out well the other side. We're usually better off. We've usually aired something or we found a different solution that might be better.
Debra Zabloudil: We are opening lines of communication, and we want to make sure those lines of communication are open. Again, if you're the person in a situation of conflict between you and that other person, or if you are mediating, it can be really getting the lines of communication open between the two people that are in conflict. What is it that we're here to talk about? Do you both have the same perspective? Sometimes we're in conflict and we are really not even sure what we're in conflict about. So really setting the stage and level setting and saying, “What is this conflict really about? What is this difficulty about?”
Debra Zabloudil: We want to listen carefully. If there's ever a time to really embrace listening, it is during high stakes conversations. So listen more than you talk. Really mindfully listen, rather than think about “Boy, when they're done saying this, I'm going to make sure I say 1, 2, 3.” But really put aside your agenda, put aside your anger and listen to what that person is saying.
Debra Zabloudil: Finding agreement. This is so important. And it may be we agree to disagree, if that's possible. There are some situations where it's not possible. And we have to understand that in some situations we do actually have to find an agreement that we can both live with. But the agreement could be, “Let's try it this way and come back and have a conversation about it in two weeks or four weeks.” Or it could be, “Let's do it your way, but let's also make sure that you are reporting back to me,” say if it's someone that is on your team. But we have to find a way forward so it needs to be some level of agreement. And I think when we bring a situation up, if we don't agree on process, do we agree on the goal? So if we can pull the situation up to a higher level, can we find agreement there? If we don't agree on the goal, can we agree on the mission? We have to find a place of commonality and we can start to build from there.
Debra Zabloudil: We need to provide guidance. And that guidance might be not me providing it to you if we're peers, it might be both of us guiding the process, or if I am a leader and I'm moderating something between two individuals, it might be me providing guidance to them on how to move forward.
Debra Zabloudil: And then being quick to forgive, and really to think about the fact that we need to move on. We are not going to do anyone any good if we hold grudges. We need to think the best of people, that really they do want to do their best. They might have had a different perspective on something than we did. We've come to an agreement. We've made a plan. And now we should move on and not let that grudge happen and not carry that into the future. That is going to be the best thing for you, the relationship and the organization.
Debra Zabloudil: So with that, I'd like to end this quick video and let you know that we have three coming up. One is managing conflicts with colleagues. Another is leading a team in the midst of conflict and the final is providing difficult feedback. I will be interviewing members of the APS community on all three of these topics and look forward to seeing you there. Thank you for your time.