Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you and your team have a hard time making difficult decisions? Do you endlessly spin through arguments but never really get to a good resolution? 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 organizations and in 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. Leadership is a journey. The step we’re gonna take today involves shifting the way we engage in positive conflict, to reach better resolutions to problems. I know some people don’t like the word or even the very concept of conflict, but conflict is actually good or it can be good, particularly when it is the conflict of ideas which can create a healthy tension in an organization.

On the other hand, I think of the conflict of people, the interpersonal stuff that’s friction, and that tends to be very unhealthy, especially in an organization. So what I’m focusing on for this episode is really talking about healthy conflict. So imagine a smallish product company that has several product lines, good distribution networks throughout several regions of the country doing reasonable business, doing well.

But one day the CEO decides it’s time for more and tells the leadership team, Hey, we have a problem. Like we need to make more money. So each of the leadership team members go off to their own teams to think and talk about how to solve this problem that the CEO just posed. So they each do some digging, some research, some thinking, and then they reconvene without the CEO to put together a plan to bring to her.

So the head of sales starts and says, Hey, you know what? This is simple. We just need to sell more product. We have regions we haven’t tapped into. That could easily create a lot of new revenue opportunity, and that’ll just be a straight up linear increase in top line for us. Done. Well, the head of operations manufacturing chimes in and says, you know, it’s not that simple.

What the head of sales is suggesting would actually put additional strain on manufacturing, which is then gonna increase our manufacturing costs, and we’re gonna need to build new distribution points to reach those new markets. All of this is gonna be an additional cost and might actually mean we make less profit by doing that.

So instead, the head of operations suggests ways that they can reduce internal costs and increase efficiency, and that’s gonna result in more bottom line margin through all the existing sales channels that they have. So the head of sales voices concerned that this risks reducing the quality of the products, which could have a negative impact on sales, therefore reduce revenue.

So the head of product then finally chimes in and says, you know what? Both of you are wrong. What we need to do is introduce a new product line into the existing markets. This will attract new buyers and it’ll extend existing customers, both in markets where we already sell. So the head of sales and head of operations chime in and say, Hey, that’s going to be a lot of new cost and research and development and manufacturing and sales materials, and it’s gonna take too long to get to a point where we can really start seeing the return on this investment.

And so finally, the head of marketing chimes in and says, all of you are overcomplicating things. We have substandard brand recognition in several of our existing markets. We should simply invest in marketing and advertising in those existing markets to boost our brand, boost awareness and bring in new sales, small investment to bring results.

Now others start arguing, well, it’s a small investment, a small payoff, and so on and so on. They keep spinning, they’re arguing, they can’t really resolve this. They can’t converge on a solution. In fact, this conflict is leading to paralysis while the clock is ticking to solve the CEO’s request. So this is a simple example of what I’ve seen as typical swirl in many organizations.

I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar where everyone has a different opinion and there seems to be no way to resolve things. Now we want these different opinions as leaders. Everyone in this scenario and in your scenario, likely are bringing an important and different lens into the discussion.

But if you look at this example, you can see that this group is gonna struggle to resolve this conflict. They are just arguing about these solutions. And the problem and why they’re not gonna resolve it is that the conflict is not actually about those solutions. So the principle here is that conflict is rooted in solving different problems.

I think this is one of the most subtle roadblocks in problem resolution, healthy conflict. The conflict of ideas typically actually appears as the conflict of solutions, or said another way we experience conflict when you’re talking about solutions, but the cause of the conflict is that you’re actually typically trying to solve different problems and or are using different assumptions.

How much time do you and your team spend actually debating the problem statements versus debating solutions? So ideally, your team, your organization is structured to bring different skills, different viewpoints, backgrounds together. This is good. You want these different lenses brought to bear, bring divergent thought, which then ideally you converge.

But you can only converge these different ideas, these different solutions, if and only if you’re all trying to solve the same problem. Now in the case of our fictional company, it’s clear that the different leaders are trying to solve different problems and or at least they’re making different assumptions about what can be part of the solution.

Some were focused solely on top line revenue, others solely on bottom line margin. They’re also different scales of investment envisioned and timelines, depending on whether they’re thinking about new markets, new products, and new customers. So when you encounter this kind of situation where there’s a whole bunch of different solutions that don’t seem they can be reconciled, the best thing to do, rather than asserting your solution is to actually ask others how they reach theirs.

In other words. Walk the discussion back to the problem statements. Get a better definition of what people are trying to solve for. Reveal your assumptions, surface other people’s assumptions as well. Ask questions now. Arguably. The whole, we need to make more money is a pretty poor problem statement. It’s ambiguous and it’s creating a lot of churn, but that’s not unusual.

We’re always faced with problem statements that initially are gonna be pretty ambiguous, just a wide range. It’s just the nature of things, what these leaders should have been asking each other instead of going off and just trying to solve. So, hey, how did you interpret that request? Are we trying to reach more top line?

Are we trying to improve bottom line holding, top line steady? Are we trying to improve both? What do we really need to achieve? What guardrails do we have in place for decision making? What assumptions about the business, about the clients, about the causes of the problem are you each making? In this case, we could see clearly there were different assumptions on how much could be invested to make more money and different assumptions on timeline as well.

Now none of these leaders with what we knew in this story are necessarily wrong or right in the path. They pursue pursued, given what they were asked, but they were arguing with each other, telling each other they’re wrong. In spite of no one really having that foundation to stand on. Conflict is rooted in solving different problems.

And you know you’re starting to apply this right when the conflict of ideas instead of spiraling away, starts converging into a single approach. So if you hit a point of churn, like I just described, drive new conversations, find out what outcomes everyone is trying to achieve, clarify what outcomes they should be trying to achieve, clarify the problem that they’re trying to solve.

At this example company, they should have been asking that. How do we resolve these different views? Obviously we think we’re thinking different things. What does the whole more money mean in the request to make more money? What kind of investments are we allowed? Are there guidelines here? What’s the timeline for seeing change?

It’s possible that the CEO might not have even thought of all of that, and so the group should shift from debating about their solutions to the debating and even seeking those factors first. ’cause if you can get alignment on a deeper problem statement, clear assumptions and constraints, the outcomes you are trying to reach by resolving this problem, the team can now shift back to debating resolution much more effectively.

They’ll now have a means of alignment that drives them into convergence. The scenario described what I consider healthy conflict. It was about ideas, not about people. But in this case, it was the conflict of solutions, which is often not a productive form of conflict, even though it’s not unhealthy.

That’s why you need to push the conversation back to the problem statement to make sure the conflict is not only healthy, but productive and moving forward. And ideally, as a leader, you should stay in front of this and try to prevent poor understanding of the problem to begin with. That leads to that kind of unproductive conflict.

Now all organizations and teams will have some form of conflict periodically. In fact, again, by design you should be having different points of view depending on the type of work that you’re doing to have some level of conflict that can get resolved. There’s always problems that need resolution, and so spending energy and getting clarity of what the problem really is, is time well spent.

The more that your team can see that together, you all can take a path from divergent solutions, rooted in divergent problem statements to converge on problem, and then ultimately get to convergence on solution. The more eagerly your team’s gonna embrace the spirit of ongoing problem resolution, there’s gonna be a greater willingness to embrace reality when your team sees the benefit of doing so.

So a certain amount of conflict is natural and again, desired. You should, as a leader, want to hear different ideas, different approaches, different points of view. In fact, you should hire and coach to ensure that this is happening in your organization because better problem resolution comes from a diversity of thought.

And harnessing all the strengths and the different views of your team in a productive way requires railing around clear problem statements to bring those differences together. Now, getting there can be hard. Sometimes you do need to let the conflict of solutions unproductive as it might be to occur, to spin to surface some of the unspoken assumptions and the different thinking around the problem itself.

Just be sure to reign it in before it really turns into paralysis or anger and personal conflict, and bring the discussion back to clarifying the problem. Listen to the discussions, the debate, understand what people are saying, and then help reconverge. So think about what your team gets involved in. How are they interacting with each other?

What type of arguments, discussions, conflict is happening? Do you think in any given situation that they all have the same understanding of the problem that you’re trying to solve? Ask them. Ask people to discuss their assumptions. Ask people what outcomes they’re trying to reach When you see some of this spiraling.

And when you see that happening, how can you get everyone back to that common ground and reset the conversation to become productive? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’ll talk about shifting the way we engage with others by focusing less on having all the answers and more on asking the right questions.