Recently, I decided to do a small experiment. I wanted to take what I know to be true about conflict management and how to have difficult conversations and see how it fits into what exemplary leaders do.
Kouzes & Posner have studied exemplary leadership for over 30 years. They’ve been asking one powerful question, originally interviewing 1,000 people. They’ve since interviewed over 5,000 people and surveyed over 100,000 people, spanning multiple countries and cultures.
What’s the one question they ask people about their own leadership experiences – as either a leader or a follower (to use the leadership literature term)?
It is:
“What does the leader do when they are at their personal best?”
What Kouzes & Posner discovered is that there are 5 behaviours that come up again and again. They called them 5 Practices. Furthermore, they believe leadership, as identified through these 5 Practices, is a teachable skill.
They believe we all have the capacity to be leaders.
That’s a significant statement, as many don’t see themselves as leaders. Also, we’re not always leaders and there’s a dynamic between when to be a follower and when to be a leader. There are also different orientations to one’s philosophy of leadership.
The key offering with Kouzes & Posner is that they say you can release more of your potential to impact the world. And they’ve codified that over the years.
I was in a position to test their claim when I was given the opportunity to work with the Kouzes & Posner teachings directly for a few years. At the time, I was in a coaching collective, through the leadership company The Leader’s Edge. Together:
- we taught the 5 Practices to leaders
- we administered 360 feedback surveys asking others about the leader’s 5 Practices
- we coached leaders to the 5 Practices.
It was rewarding and for the leader it was also, at times, transformative. I cherish the time I worked with The Leader’s Edge and the other coaches. It was a rich, fruitful and highly inspiring time and methodology.
Eventually, I went further into workplace conflict and landed, eventually, on the realization that conflict starts small. And, because it starts small, we need to know how to engage and transform the small stuff – the pinches.
That’s how I landed on what I teach today about How to Have Difficult Conversations and how to Hold On To Yourself.
So, it was an intriguing thought to me to line up these 5 Practices with conflict resolution and difficult conversations and see what the relationship might be.
I’ll outline each of Kouzes & Posner’s Practices below. See which ones you relate to and how knowing about dealing with difficult conversations lines up! Here we go:
1. Model the Way Practice
The first practice Kouzes & Posner discovered was that exemplary leaders operate in a calm, non-anxious presence way. This requires an inner fortitude and an ability to resource oneself as our own support mechanism in a way that is different, and more solitary, than a follower.
Discretion and being a role model takes on a whole new meaning when one becomes a leader. As a leader, what do you want to stand for? Is it kindness, cooperation, collaboration or pettiness, irritation and frustration?
A leader’s behaviours are closely scrutinized and emulated by followers. So, how they deal with conflict will be watched for cues about how to handle tensions and differences.
In this way, Holding on to Yourself, the book I co-authored about staying cool in hot conversations impacts how we model the way.
Not managing ourselves in the face of conflict has profound impact on those around us. Exit interviews have shown that employees emphasize the role conflict played in their leaving as well as the importance of their leader knowing how to deal with conflict well.
2. Inspire a Shared Vision Practice
This practice is when we can feel ourselves getting inspired by a higher, nobler vision. There is a call to gather around deeper desires. Our deeper motivations are called “interests” in the conflict field. They are what drive us and as mediators and conflict engagers, we spend a lot of time thinking about what everyone might want.
Expressing inspiring interests pulls people together. Having a shared vision can bring teams into alignment.
Having dissent and differences, and not knowing how to tackle them, can break teams apart and move them away from alignment to their vision.
So, again another link: not having difficult conversations skills are a threat to having and maintaining a shared vision. Having the capacity to encourage differences to surface and to engage them in a constructive way, allows for alignment and commitment (see Lencioni’s The Advantage & Five Dysfunctions of a Team).
3. Challenge the Process Practice
You know the good leadership experiences when you feel your leader (or you as the leader) has your follower’s backs. You know they will go to bat for you when required. This means a leader needs to be able to speak truth to power and in an effective way (see Tempered Radical research).
To challenge the process, a leader needs to be assertive with their own boss and others with power in the system. We need to know how to be assertive and empathic to be an effective agent of change and a voice for those you lead. Another book I enjoy captures this as well, called Humble Inquiry.
Without difficult conversation skills, a leader cannot challenge the process or impact change in a particularly constructive or meaningful way.
4. Empower Others to Act Practice
This practice is about fostering collaboration by building trust and promoting cooperative goals. This step also involves giving feedback to staff and receiving feedback effectively. Difficult conversation skills again.
Additionally, when an employee comes to a leader with a people problem, the leader must know how to empower the employee to be able to be more assertive and empathic. That’s the capacity to be a conflict coach and it is so key in an exemplary leader. We need to help their staff when they are suffering.
Conflict doesn’t always mean tension. The root of the word conflict is to “flick with” – it’s to create a spark together. We need to let sparks fly – and we can only do so when we know how to channel the fire within boundaries and containment.
Leaders need to be the wind to their employees’ fire. The wind can extinguish a fire and the wind can grow a fire more boldly. Interpersonal communication skills again.
5. Recognize the Heart Practice
How we acknowledge those who work for us is the practice that brings people alive. How do we intentionally bring appreciation and care into the workplace and culture?
Knowing our own conflict style preferences and that of our employees gives us the capacity to speak to them in their own language. This enables any of the more complex needs to arise in a way that can feel safe for the employee to express. It allows for the smaller items that could be building up to be aired as well.
We need to help people feel safe and connected before they will reveal what is hidden and troubling them in their hearts.
Conflict competency seems to equate to exemplary leadership!
My hope is that you can see yourself in these descriptions.The world needs you and your gifts, for you to grow and to be more than you, perhaps, can even see.
“It always takes a group of people working together with a common purpose in an atmosphere of trust and collaboration to get extraordinary things done.” … James Kouzes and Barry Posner