Seth Dobbs (he/him): How well do you and your team embrace conflict? Do you embrace it all too eagerly? Or do you find yourself or perhaps your team members avoiding it? Do you understand the relationship between healthy conflict and trust? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the principle driven leadership podcast where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations and, and coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take today involves getting a deeper understanding of what conflict is and why it’s important. Now I think the conflict is a really interesting word.

People interpret it in many different ways. And so as with many leadership terms, I want you to gain a productive understanding of what conflict is, particularly in the context of principle driven leadership. Now some folks fear, conflict, the word can sound harsh. It can be interpreted as meaning arguing or even worse,

, it can imply some kind of interpersonal friction. And some embrace conflict all too much. I actually once interviewed someone who talked about having an attitude of “who can I piss off today”. That’s not really productive. So I want to flush out these two concepts, conflict-avoidant, and constant confrontation, in a bit more detail, and then offer a third more productive approach.

So first let’s start with Xavier, a conflict avoidant leader. Xavier is a mid-level operations manager at an equipment manufacturer. Smart, reasonably well-liked and suffers from an aversion to conflict, often actually displaying a palpable discomfort when faced with differing viewpoints in a meeting. Now within his team, the folks that he leads, this behavior often manifests and results as minimizing opportunities for group discussions. He has regular team meetings. But really more to give one way readouts of information with no real opportunity to discuss concerns, to raise challenges, ask questions, and so forth. He can be a little more willing to discuss things like that in one-on-one meetings, but really still avoids getting too deep. And this results in a lot of unresolved questions and different viewpoints that don’t get settled. And overall, just a general lack of collective understanding of his team’s mission. Now, similarly when meeting with his peers, and his boss’s leadership team, he keeps his opinions to himself. Maybe will float an idea out occasionally, but backpedal at the first sign of difference of opinion. He tells himself in this case that he’s doing his part by not making waves and going with the flow. Now, regardless of which of these kinds of environments he’s in, he’s actually limiting the organization’s ability to innovate and be creative.

And in fact, may be contributing to stagnation. His peers are missing out on his insights. And he’s teaching his team not to challenge each other. This is incredibly limiting, and just restricts the various teams ability to face challenges and adapt to changing circumstances. And forward motion is stifled through ultimately some form of mediocrity. That’s because a lack of trust is there to share different points of view.

Alright, now let’s look at Yolanda. A mid-level product manager at a consumer packaged goods company. Where Xavier is conflict avoidant, Yolanda can be thought of as a constant confrontation leader. She prides herself on embracing the concept of leading through conflict. But not only does she encourage argument, she actually seems to relish in engaging her team in perpetual debates and disputes. Now, some of her team members told me that there was no item, no matter how routine that couldn’t actually be made contentious. Yolanda saw this as the way to drive continual improvement. The team were all for spirited debate, but at the right time for the right reasons. And some started holding back over time, their opinions, their ideas, because it was exhausting to have every, even little suggestion subjected to attacks. Yolanda also went on the constant offensive with her peers, questioning everything. Now to be clear, I’m all for questioning and challenging.

But again, this became such a negative pattern in Yolanda’s case that her peers started “accidentally” omitting her from key discussions. And so while I think Yolanda positively intended in that she felt she was getting the best out of her team with this approach, this leadership approach actually has unintended consequences. And her team started finding itself, just embroiled in these never-ending disputes, that eroded productivity and team cohesion. And in this kind of environment, team members might actually become disillusioned as their opinions are overshadowed by the incessant clashes and invaluable resources are squandered on unproductive arguments. It’s pointlessly exhausting and actually led to some departures in Yolanda’s case. And as for her peers, they unfortunately were not benefiting from her insights, which she had some very excellent ones. Because they felt that getting to them wasn’t worth the price of constant argument. So in Yolanda’s case, forward motion was stifled through constant friction and team member disconnect..

So here’s the thing. The second core principle of Principle Driven Leadership is that leaders resolve problems. And conflict resolution is core to problem resolution. A healthy organization is one that embraces conflict, and has the ability to work through and resolve it. In this context, conflict needs to be both necessary and productive. Meaning that first you’re trying to resolve differences that are necessary to resolve in order to move forward on a better path than what is currently visible. And second that you’re resolving conflict in a productive way that continues to move your organization forward. Both in the immediate sense of specific conflict being resolved and in the broader sense of reinforcing positive behavior. So as seen with Xavier. Avoiding conflict will simply prevent your team or organization from being at its best. It sabotages forward motion by not allowing you and your team to really address the things that are in the way of you reaching your desired outcomes. And instead by avoiding necessary conflict, your team will ultimately just be spinning their wheels.

Now Yolanda again, had no problem with engaging in conflict, but not productively. When you look to create conflict over everything, you dilute the value of conflict. And end up overwhelming your team leading to a lot of unproductive use of time. And interestingly, in this case, exhaustion can set in and ultimately lead your team to become conflict avoidant. But in both cases, I think there’s often an underlying issue of lack of trust. Xavier may not have trusted people or perhaps even himself, to handle different opinions and so avoided it. And with Yolanda’s team

it looked like people couldn’t trust to have their thoughts simply heard. And so they often avoided expressing their thoughts and opinions.

Now your team will reach its greatest heights by building trust so that they can embrace necessary and productive conflict. Forming teams with diversity of experience and thought is ideal for innovation and for ensuring that all bases, all kind of thinking are covered in your process. You’ll want these different people to engage with their different lenses, to bring their expertise and their best ideas. And then make them better through productively engaging with others, by making clear to them what an ideal resolution looks like and how it enables forward motion.

As I discussed in Season One, conflict is often rooted in solving different problems. And in a diverse team, everyone is identifying a problem through the lens of their expertise by design that’s good, but you, as the leader need to center them on clear outcomes so that they can then bring these different points of view and resolve the same problem together. Now to be clear,

this is not simply a democracy or a path to compromise. And in fact, compromise can sometimes reduce the quality of your results. Ultimately you, as the leader might need to synthesize all the different points of view and make the final decision on how to resolve. Of course with clarity of desired outcomes and future vision, your team should be able to resolve on their own most of the time. And in fact, creating this clarity of future vision of outcomes in your team is the scaffolding to building the trust needed for conflict. That is, the trust that everyone has the same outcomes in mind.

So let’s look at a conflict resolution leader. Zola. A mid-level manager at an electronics manufacturer. Zola is adept at fostering an environment where diverse perspectives and viewpoints are embraced. In fact, she considers this approach key to the success of her organization. And she understands that effective leadership is about more than avoiding conflict or perpetually seeking confrontation. It’s about sharing different ideas to achieve shared goals. Her meetings are marked by open and respectful dialogue. Colleagues actively encourage healthy debates and they challenge each other. They welcome dissenting opinions and they understand that it’s through these exchanges that the most innovative and effective solutions can emerge. Her peers and management also see how she makes a difference in the meetings that they attend with her. She can often be quiet, but when she does raise a question or a challenge or a point of view, they pay attention because they understand she has a real concern that she believes needs resolving

and that’s why she speaking. And by doing all of this, she actually helped foster better discussions, even when her management was running the show, even when she’s just sort of a participant. And over time, Zola’s team started to achieve remarkable results and were able to leap frog some of their competitors. Because they enjoyed a true culture of collaboration and innovation. Again, this approach is not rooted in compromise. But rather in the art and skill of leveraging diverse perspectives to chart the optimal course forward.

Enabling safe, structured conflict is essential to creating a culture of problem resolution. You can’t truly resolve problems without having some form of conflict. And unresolved problems means you’re not reaching your vision. You’re not achieving any kind of forward motion..

Now over the years, conflict has become one of my favorite topics in part, because for a long time, I thought I didn’t like conflict. But what I actually don’t like is meaningless confrontation, friction, expelling energy, and so forth. And trust is essential here in making it successful. If you and your team can’t trust each other enough to disagree, how can you trust that you’ve really reached the best approach? And worse,

when things around you keep changing as they do, how can you trust that you and your team are going to be able to navigate the change if you can’t actually talk about it? As a leader, I love the notion of bringing conflicting viewpoints, different background and experience, expertise to create something greater than one viewpoint alone could deliver. And I believe that’s essential to good leadership. So framing conflict with a clear vision, a clear definition of forward motion, ensures that you have necessary and productive conflict to move things forward.

So I want you to think about: what kinds of discussions are you avoiding? Are you shying away from necessary conflict or on the other hand, you seek every opportunity for debate? And is there a way for you to dial that down? Do you feel that whatever approach you’re taking is bringing you productive conflict and true forward motion? And what changes can you start making today to embrace necessary, productive conflict with your team.

Thanks so much for joining me, please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it and send your thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. And I’ll address a few of your questions and comments towards the end of the season. 

And join me next time, where I’ll talk about a key skill set for conflict: navigating difficult conversations.