This is another in our series of previews of the material inside our knowledge base. We have mindset material to help owners, managers and mentors understand key concepts and communicate them effectively to their Teams; Team-facing training material that directly shares important knowledge and expectations; and hands-on tools like conversation scripts, meeting agendas, decision trees, worksheets, and other methods to help you organize information and triage your ongoing process toward change and growth.
"The person who says they know what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think." —Mortimer J. Adler, "How to Read a Book"
The Conflict Buster helps you process a situation into an outline for a conversation and a group of lists to help you execute that conversation as effectively as possible.
I'll say before you read this that often just beginning this exercise is enough to get you to pick up the phone, write an email, or walk across the hall.
So if you're reading this with a pressing need, it's well worth taking a crack at the Conflict Buster now. The result matters more than the process.
But reading this article can help you come to terms with why conflict is a part of business, why navigating conflict is a large part of the value leaders bring, what the risks of unaddressed conflict are, and what to do about it.
The Crowbar of Peace
The ConflictBuster is like a crowbar: simple, unadorned and perfectly suited for its purpose. Its purpose is leveraging your natural instincts so that you never avoid a conflict again.
Why focus on busting conflict avoidance? Because avoiding conflict in conversations we don't want to or know how to have is a problem everyone has had at some point. And going into conflict with guns blazing to protect yourself emotionally is how one gets the reputation for being capricious and inconsistent, damaging our credibility, and thus our capacity to lead.
And make no mistake, a big part of why leaders get paid more is because it's their job to navigate and handle conflict and make things come out right.
What Conflict?
If you reverse-engineer the demands of leadership, you get a pretty good list of the types of conversations that people like to avoid:
- When we must develop understanding, buy-in, or agreement with others
- When we must align motivations with vision
- When we must set or reinforce expectations
- When we must confront someone or disagree
- When we must assign new or onerous duties
There's a lot of pressure in all those "musts," and these conversations can become complicated by emotions if we aren't able to lay out a reasonable plan of action.
Anytime we feel, even on a subtle level, that we stand the risk of being tongue-tied, inarticulate, or caught without a good answer — many of us will avoid such situations almost instinctively. And that instinct is a good one. But it's an instinct that says "pause to prepare," not "avoid this conversation forever." The ConflictBuster gives you a solid method to seize on this instinct and maximize it.
Conflict Avoidance Up and Down the Line
The time and effort spent avoiding tough conversations can become ridiculous, and the rot that results from unaddressed conflict can be disastrous. People stop cooperating or stop talking altogether, they act without explanation or outside standard norms and processes, they leave jobs, and more. The risk of having no plan for dealing with conflict is recklessly high.
If owners and managers can't confront team members until it's too late, that causes turmoil and turnover that doesn't need to happen. When the team believes it's not worth the reaction to share information with owners and managers, insidious problems can creep in and have dire consequences.
Mastering Conflict
If you've never taken a look at conflict resolution as a skill to be improved, you're in for a treat, because it's not an exaggeration to say that becoming methodical and purposeful in your approach to navigating conflict will dramatically change your life.
The ConflictBuster, like all of our tools, was meant for people who want to skip to the back of the book and get the benefit without too much delay; we do the learning and lay out the process, you fill in the blanks.
ProTip: Brainstorming
Creativity 101: write first, then judge. Don't even try to rank or prioritize until you feel you've exhausted your list. Try to list 3–5 items that you hope will come from the conversation and 3–5 results you hope will not happen. You may find yourself coming up with things you imagine that you or the other party will say. Write these down. The magic is in being honest, putting your thoughts into words, and seeing them in print for the first time.
Red Zone: Goals and Concerns Overview
Steps 1 and 2: Worst-case and Best-case
Best and worst case are here to help you put a scope on the issue. By listing what you hope will happen and what you hope won't happen, you put limits around your mental process and begin to focus your intentions on having a real live conversation.
Step 3: What are you avoiding saying, hearing or answering?
This item asks you to rip the bandaid off and name the thing you're intimidated or stumped by if you can. You are choosing to take the issue head on. This step is often as far as you need to go.
Step 4: Relationship details
How to get through to this person. Approaches and areas to avoid. If you're new to planning and pre-scripting your conversations, this item may raise an eyebrow, but it's a key step in being considerate and effective to have learned from past interactions.
Yellow Zone
Step 5: List items that require more information
This is where you take the goals uncovered in the Red Zone and map out the areas you know you're light on information. Whatever remains unknown after steps 5 and 6 can be brought to your conversation as areas of curiosity or direct questions.
Step 6: Gather information and write down your answers
Summarizing is a key step for organizing thoughts into effective language. After completing step 6, take a look at the Red Zone and see if your goals have changed.
Green Zone
Step 7: List your talking points
These are the things you want to ask and say, worded clearly, carefully and considerately.
Step 8: List your questions
You ask questions for two reasons: to gain information, and to establish shared ground and common understanding with the other party.