Conflict is Inevitable. How You Process it is a Choice.
Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash
A 6-step method for turning a tension into a teaching moment that empowers your team.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from entrepreneurs is, “Why can’t my people think for themselves and make their own decisions?”
I think the answer is threefold: they’re not empowered, some feel they can’t be heard over their louder colleagues, and they rely on gossip and politicking to voice their tensions. Conflict and tension are unavoidable in groups of two or more people. Handled correctly, tensions can help your company identify and work through roadblocks.
As a leader, your task is to create a work culture in which your team feels empowered to resolve these tensions. The alternative is to let gossip and ill-will take their course until it reaches your ears, at which point you may already have a serious division within your team.
Now, I’m not going to use this article to advocate for principles and practice of holacracy overall. You can read all about holacracy here. But I do want to offer a very useful tool I picked up from holacracy for managing productive tensions in a business.
Holacracy defines a tension as the gap between the current reality and a potential you sense. For example, let’s say I have a tension with the printer constantly running out of paper and not being refilled. I can propose a meeting or use a scheduled meeting to “process” my tension and offer a way to keep the paper flowing! (Every tension processing meeting needs a “proposer.”)
It doesn’t matter what my seniority is. As the proposer, I’m responsible for who attends the meeting and it’s agenda. If my proposal is for Liam to change the paper since he sits next to the printer, we follow a six-step agenda led by a facilitator:
I explain the tension and my proposal;
Each person gets the chance to ask me a clarifying question (not a “Law & Order” leading question) that I can answer until questions are exhausted;
Each person gets the chance to react to the proposal to the whole team — I can only take notes, no comments from me except for “thank you”;
I get a chance to use what I’ve heard to amend or clarify my proposal, or in some instances, I might decide to stop right here and go back and re-work my proposal;
I ask each person if they have any objections to my proposal;
If no objections then I get my way! (basically).
I have found that nine times out of 10 nobody objects and the proposal goes through. The beauty of it is that by requiring 100 percent participation, the loudest and most confident voices don’t get to put up a wall of sound that intimidates the quieter, thoughtful ones.
It also makes people take responsibility for their problems, which gossiping does not do, and allows them to propose a way of working through it that best meets their needs. That’s a pretty good definition of empowerment.
As the leader, you still get to make the final call, but you’ll obviously want to wield that power judiciously. If the leader vetoes everything in sight, people will stop processing.
In fact, a savvy leader may choose to push back on objections to a low-impact proposal that is obviously flawed but from which the proposer refuses to back down or compromise, allowing the proposal to go through. If the proposer refuses to take the feedback offered by the members and it fails, the leader can use the outcome as a learning opportunity, for nothing teaches leadership (even of ourselves) more than failure.
And this is really the whole point: with empowerment comes accountability — to ourselves and to each other. You can follow the holacratic steps to a tee or adapt their spirit to your own culture.
I’d love to know how you empower your team to step up and become better decision makers at your company.
Sincerely,
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!