Change the Things You Can
Workplace conflict sucks, and the longer it goes on, the harder it is to fix. Here are insights on how to stop it from business, neuroscience, and marriage counselling.
“Perhaps I should leave,” I say. We had discussed Co-Founders leaving before, but this time it took on new momentum. Within days we were telling investors, and within a month I was out.
Years into our venture we spent so much time disagreeing that leaving seemed like the only move.
Changing difficult relationships is hard work, but work can be impossible if you don’t.
Why Change it?
Work conflict is common. As many as 85% of employees experience it according to a 5000 person survey1. Workplace conflict is any disagreement that disrupts the flow of work according to the study’s authors.
Working on over 50 teams in my life, I’ve experienced workplace conflict a handful of times. It sucks. It is bad for our well-being, as well as that of our teams, and our families. It undermines the organization's mission and takes the fun out of achieving it.
There is no simple roadmap to addressing workplace conflict, but there are some useful insights from business, neuroscience, and marriage counselling.
Change the Dynamic
To keep conflict from disrupting our work, we need to address it early. Stanford teams expert Carole Robin argues that small frustrations (what she calls “pinches”) might not be a big deal in isolation. Over time, however, they grow into bigger moments of frustration and emotion (what she calls “crunches”) that are harmful to the working relationship.
To keep pinches from becoming crunches, we can learn from world-renowned marriage researchers, Drs. John and Julie Gottman. They recommend using repair mechanisms to prevent negativity from escalating out of control. Their marriage lab provides a repair checklist that offers suggestions such as how to apologize or express how you’re feeling.
Even with a checklist, addressing conflict is uncomfortable. The first step, as I’ve written here, is to clarify what is happening, so you can decide how to respond.
Change Your Mind
The most important response is to change our minds. As conflict plays out our minds identify patterns that let us react automatically. This helps us make decisions easier but also makes us more close-minded. After years of arguing what seemed like every point with a co-founder, I stopped listening objectively and started prejudging their actions.
Instead of prejudging, we need to live up to the words of long-time social science researcher and academic, Brené Brown, to “extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.” Easier said than done.
Automatic judgements are a real problem if they activate your threat-response system sending you into a state of emotional arousal. With your heart racing and palms sweating you lose a sense of how long you’ve been arguing, say exceptionally harsh things, and struggle to accurately process what is happening. These are the phone calls that end in hangups, the debates where no one feels heard. These are the nights you think about quitting.
Regulating our emotional arousal system in the middle of such conflict is nearly impossible. If you think you’re in this state, ask for a pause, then mentally focus on the physical sensations of your body such as on your breath, not on the conversation you were having. During a 15 minute break for everyone to calm down, I quickly biked to a lake, threw myself into the cold water, and returned to Zoom better positioned to listen.
If you’re experiencing anything like this you’ve got important work to do away from the heat of conflict. Mindfulness meditation has been key to helping me notice my mind's patterns so I can respond intentionally instead of reacting automatically. Therapists, psychologists, and coaches can also help you understand your reactivity, which could be driven by old mental maps. Start-up coach Jerry Colonna calls us to ask “What are the fragments living in us, like ghosts in the machine, that need to be noticed, identified in the body, felt, healed so that they stop playing out in our lives?”
Change it Up as a Team
Such healing is key to healthy relationships and is a lifelong journey. In the interim, changing the structure of collaboration helps. For example, trusted facilitators can move the conversation forward by challenging positions and naming tensions. Adjusting the team can also help. Can you reduce how often you’re having the same debates by changing reporting relationships or reducing role overlap?
As a quick way to gain relief, clichéd team-building events can dislodge habitual associations to work. In one collaboration, a colleague’s coding expertise and my lack thereof made it difficult to have productive exchanges. I began to think that they thought every question I asked was stupid. Meanwhile, they seemed to think I was questioning their competence. When the weather swept in on a weekend mountain climb together, I was able to offer support that they were able to accept. It helped restore my confidence in the relationship and probably helped them see how I cared. This points to the importance of just forgetting the drama and getting down to doing some work.
Change Your Goals
The final change may be the hardest. After years of trying to change a relationship, you may instead need to change the commitment to it. One thing my former co-founder and I agree on is that we probably didn’t need to be so committed to making it work. Changing things earlier could have saved lots of pain.
Sometimes it is fear keeping us in conflict. Catastrophic thinking has us predicting worst-case scenarios with naïve certainty. It took me years to realize that leaving my own company wouldn’t mean failure. It hasn't. I’ve since found meaningful work on teams that restored confidence in my ability to collaborate well. My former company has been acquired and I’ve co-founded an organization with a former investor. Perhaps most unexpected was the way ending the working relationship is restoring the friendship.
I am happy to again consider my former co-founder a friend. We talk once a quarter and I look forward to a visit. We’ll probably not start another company together.
The study by CPP Global (producers of Myers Brigg Study) was completed across 9 countries in 2008. https://www.themyersbriggs.com/-/media/f39a8b7fb4fe4daface552d9f485c825.ashx