Over this last month, I’ve had the privilege of working with a few high-level leadership teams. Each of these teams are made up of leaders who are responsible for leading their own teams.
Together, we’ve been digging into the 8 step difficult conversations model for navigating important conversations.
Last week, we touched on the role of leaders when others on the team are in conflict.
Leaders are the people who call on me for help. Leaders are also usually the type of people who show up for coaching and for training in engaging difficult conversations. So, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of people responsible for other people.
When I’ve been called in as a mediator, or in the privacy of a teaching room, I’ve heard a lot of beliefs about what the role is of leaders when others have conflict.
Sometimes, I hear beliefs like:
- I’m sure if the issue was big enough, I’d hear about it from my team members.
- People should be able to work out their problems themselves; it’s common sense.
- The behaviours are childish; why are they acting like children?
All those statements are red flags for me. They tell me that the leader in question may not see their role as the person responsible for conflict.
After years in the trenches of work-related conflicts, and after consulting other colleagues who also do conflict work, what I now believe is: As a leader, you are responsible for resolving conflict. You may not necessarily be the one taking all the action – and – you are responsible.
What does that mean?
A few years ago, my colleague Gordon White and I interviewed Mark Gerzon, the President of the Mediators Foundation. He’s also the author of a book that influenced me when I was working on my Masters in Leadership: “Leading Through Conflict: How Successful Leaders Transform Differences into Opportunities.”
Mark has worked with many leaders at various levels of government and beyond and his book suggests the key to leading well is to know the mediator concepts that are commonly known and practiced in my field.
In an ever-changing and complex world, we need our leaders to attend to conflict in a collaborative way. Mediators traffic in collaboration. we help others have collaborative conversations.
Having a leader with a mediative lens would be a leader with these principles in mind:
- Be proactive. This means not letting little pinches build up. It means allowing space and time to connect meaningfully and find out what the rubs are. Some things a leader can do something about. Others might require other strategies. When the little pinches are ignored or not even noticed, they build up to a crunch. Crunches are so much more difficult to deal with yet most people ignore, avoid, deny the existence of the little stuff. Let sleeping dogs lie. Let’s not make a mountain out of a molehill. Let’s not rock the boat – things are going so well. All too familiar and the formula for issues building up to the proverbial crunch. Most of us don’t want to talk about the tough stuff so we need encouragement to do so.
- Be a conflict coach. Leaders often think they need to solve other people’s problems or that they should do so. A mediative leader helps people resolve their own problems at the level closest to whose problem it is. With a mediative, or conflict coach, approach – it’s not up to the leader to resolve other people’s problems. Solving someone’s problem for them is a power-over move and takes the problem out of the hands of those who are closest to it. This can be confusing, as people in the workplace may expect the leader to solve their problem for them. This is a powerful distinction. Instead of thinking of solving a problem for someone, the mediative leader helps by offering support and challenge, tools and skills, to get into the arena themselves and to provide many avenues for dialogue.
- Be conflict systems savvy. People may “act like children” because they are in pain and not acting from their best selves. These behaviours are a signal that help is needed – more attention is required in this area of growing tension. A mediative leader sees their own role as the catalyst for transforming conflict, not necessarily the one who has to solve it. This is leader as mediator – listening for behaviours that might be early signs to pay more attention. In workplaces, there are often multiple factors feeding into the tensions and a mediative leader has a systemic view. The leader thus becomes a change agent. Often conflicts arise from complexity so stepping back to see the big picture moves the conflict from the realm of the personal to the realm of the cultural – or – how we do things around here. The leader is responsible for setting the tone and the culture of the team. A conflict competent culture includes conflict education, conflict coaching and dialogue circles as foundational.
Big picture issues in workplace settings can include:
- Lack of role clarity and/or performance standards, causing confusion, misunderstandings and disparate expectations
- Processes which promote competition and win/lose instead of cooperation
- Limited resources, pitting people against each other
- Unreasonable time constraints such that people feel pressure and stress
It’s the leader who is often in the best position to see these organizational systems issues and to be the one who can possibly do something about it.
There’s one case I was called in to mediate which is illustrative of this role of the leader in conflict.
The mediation was between two employees who were not talking with each other and hadn’t for months. That was not a workable arrangement, so a mediator was called in.
This was before I had realized interpersonal conflict almost always spills over to the whole team and almost always also indicates a need to support the leader to gain the conflict skills to build their own conflict competent culture on their team.
There I was – faced with these two people who didn’t want to talk, despite the fact that their work was life and death work (it mattered that they were not talking).
I met with each of them individually to get a sense of how they saw what was going on and to help them prepare for how they wanted to start the conversation:
- What were their best intentions and mutual purpose?
- What did they want to say – in a way that separated out behaviours from their evaluations of behaviours?
- What did they really want? Deep down, what was the heart of the matter?
Then I brought them together.
The first piece of the work was helping them tease apart the negative narratives each had built up about the other. Separate the person from the problem, Fisher and Ury tell us in their book Getting to Yes.
Only by stopping seeing each other as the problem could they start to get deeper into what was really going on. Before that, they were so distracted blaming each other, that they couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
They discovered they wanted similar things and found their common ground. Soon, a key systems issue emerged: they realized there was no place for anyone in their unit to have private conversations together at work. They had a place the previous year, but after construction and changes in the workplace, there wasn’t one anymore.
They started to recognize a pattern that their own conflicts had built up because there was no designated place for them to gather and chat. They saw an even bigger picture when they thought about their whole team. Everyone was impacted by not having the informality around shared breaks, or quick, private side conversations if needed.
Because they had uncovered this bigger picture issue and one they couldn’t impact on their own, we negotiated to bring in their leader.
At first, the leader was surprised that this was at the bottom of their months of tensions and cold war behaviours. The leader had tried to solve the situation multiple times by asking them to get along, by setting some expectations, and by hearing them out individually and letting them “vent.” This was a leader taking action but none of that had worked.
The employees had needed help clarifying what they were observing and separating that out from the narratives and evaluative stories they built up about each other. They needed help truly understanding each other. Only then could the heart of the matter come to light and could they move to creating robust solutions.
The leader came to realize that there could be more harmony in the workplace, not just for these two, but for the whole team. It wasn’t necessarily an easy fix, but the leader got to work and the team got a gathering space back for the betterment of these two and the whole team.
We can outsource the mediator function, but there aren’t enough mediators to go around. Additionally, bringing in a mediator makes everything so much more formal. Another conflict I was called into in the workplace, the leader looked at me and said: “You know bringing in a mediator is a career-limiting move for me?”
Those were my early days mediating in workplaces. I hadn’t realized as yet that if leaders could be empowered themselves with these mediative skills and mindset, so much strife, pain and unnecessary conflict could be avoided.
Needless to say, there were other two-person conflicts I came across in my career and cumulatively they taught me that conflict is a symptom of something else. What that something else is requires the help of a conflict competent leader.
When a leader can see their role as the person responsible for the resolution of conflict, but not necessarily the one to take all the action, new possibilities open up.
A leader with a mediator mindset is a whole new leader. Such a leader can be
- proactive
- act like a conflict coach
- bring a systems lens to the conflicts that inevitably flare up in the workplace.
Then again, making more mediators is my mission and you know how biased I am!
What do you think?