Executive Podcast #287: Why Leaders Need to Address Conflict

Chris Goede:
Hey, listeners. Chris Goede here with some bonus business insight before we jump into today’s episode. If you’re looking for the right place to host your next business gathering, conference, or event, look no further than Orlando, Florida. It’s no coincidence that Maxwell leadership hosts our biannual international Maxwell Conference in Orlando. Between its many luxurious hotels, meeting spaces and venues, Orlando is the perfect place for you and your team to gather, collaborate, and grow. Whether you’re traveling for business or bringing your company for a meeting, there’s a reason Orlando is as much a business capital as an entertainment one. And let’s not forget the delicious cuisine at one of the 46 Michelin rated restaurants where your team can kick off your evenings. So before you plan your next business event, check out Orlando, where the possibilities for business travel are unbelievably real.

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining Perry. And I want to continue to encourage you to take these lessons, give them to your team, and then, man, when you have your weekly team meetings, just go around the first five minutes, say, what was your number one takeaway? And begin to have conversations. In leadership development, we hear so many people that talk about how it’s a tool that they use, and so we’re grateful to be able to do that.

Perry Holley:
I got a new coaching client. He was a CEO, and he said, I want you to coach these three people on my team. And I got on, I said, what do you know about the five levels? Well, we were required to listen to your first five podcasts. I flinched. I go, oh, imagine how bad those were.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. As we just talked about before we started, right. We’re on number 287. So first five had to be horrible.

Perry Holley:
I don’t know. I don’t want to go find out.

Chris Goede:
No, it hadn’t been bad.

Perry Holley:
That was their first introduction to me. Hello, I’m Perry.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, good news is nowhere to go but up, right? So you’re in good shape as you’re now starting to coach them. But, man, listen, if you want to download the learner guide and even be a part of that and that learning process, I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.com/podcast. Click on this episode, and you can find the learner’s guide there. Well, we’re going to talk about something today that I’ve worked with leaders that I think run to this, maybe cause it. I think I’ve seen others that avoid it, and then I’ve seen some lead through it really well. And so we’re going to talk about why leaders need to address conflict. They need to address it. And we were talking about an HBR article just recently where it stated that employee conflict resolution will be a must have skillset for managers or leaders in the future.

Chris Goede:
And they referenced in that article a, a 2023 Gartner survey, where it found 57% of managers say they are fully responsible for managing and resolving team conflicts. And so I thought about that for a minute, and I said, what about the other 43%? Like who? And that may be just the. They don’t know what they don’t know. And that’s fine. But if you’re listening and part of our audience, we want to make sure, you know, we’re going to have to address this. And so if you can effectively do that and you can navigate through that, I think that’s going to set not only your leadership at a different level, but I think the team and the individuals that you’re working with, and it’s going to have a huge, huge impact on the culture and in your organization.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, the HBR article referenced that this year, the years we’re in now, that just the amount of challenge and turmoil in the world and crises that are happening and geopolitical issues, labor strikes, climate change, pushback to de high efforts, upcoming elections, half the globe, that just. That conflict is poised to be at an all time high. And so if you have a conflict between employees, between yourself and an employee, but especially between employees themselves, it pulls down both that individual and the whole team, and it can really make for an unsafe workplace. People don’t want to be engaged. They’re afraid to speak up. It’s just all kind of negative. So the question, I guess that, um, do leaders feel like they are trained and prepared to resolve conflict when it happens?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I think that we don’t do enough of this. Matter of fact, let me back up. We don’t even train our people that we’re promoting and putting in leadership positions, leadership skills, and that’s a competency of leadership skills, being able to do this. And so one of the things we have here at Maxwell leadership is we offer a course around that, is, how do we resolve conflict? What does that look like? And if you’re interested in that, or maybe you think you need to send that to somebody. I’m not saying send it to your boss. That might not be the best career move, but you may say, hey, we need to go and take a look at this course. I would encourage you, just visit the website that we talked about, and Perry will mention in closing at the end to be able to learn more about that. But in that course, right.

Chris Goede:
I love this opening kind of exercise that you do and you take people through. And so we sit in groups, right? We’re at the tables, and you say, I want everybody to come to an agreement of the top five movies of all time. And so you go through this and, you know, everyone has a point of view. Again, credit you for your statements in my head all the time, which is like, when somebody says something like, well, I have a point of view, but I’d like to hear yours first. Right. Everybody’s got a point of view. And very rarely have you. Have you seen people agree on all five.

Perry Holley:
Never.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Yeah. Never. And so the point of it is to produce that conflict, right. To drive it at the table, to set some of the training that we’re going to go through. And everybody has a difference of opinion. So my question to you, as you have navigated, facilitated, led leaders, led people through those conversations, is that conflict good? Is it bad? Is conflict conflict in general, good or bad? Like, what are your thoughts and take away from those conversations?

Perry Holley:
I’d say definitely. It depends. It’s funny, on that exercise, I was just walking the tables and listening, and one person says, well, definitely, absolutely. Star wars has to be on that list. And somebody else says, I disagree with that. I have never seen it. And then that caused conflict.

Chris Goede:
How in the world could you. What rock have you been on?

Perry Holley:
And then several other people said they’d never seen it. I thought it was really interesting dynamic of, stop assuming I’m like you, but we’re gonna. We’re gonna rub each other the wrong way. But conflict or disagreement, that sort of thing can promote collaboration. It can improve performance, it can foster innovation. It can build deeper relationships because we feed off of each other even though we disagree. There are things that can help with that. I’ve heard Brene Brown, she actually uses a term they call.

Perry Holley:
She says she wants her team to rumble, and so she promotes active conflict disagreement to say, we’re going to rumble on a topic. So she intentionally wants the team to get everybody’s point of view on the table, and let’s rumble about this. So it is healthy conflict. A lot of what the HBR article and where we’re kind of thinking where leaders need to step in is when it becomes unhealthy. Unresolved differences cause disruptions in the workforce that they decrease productivity, project failure, absenteeism, turnover, all kinds of negative things. If there’s emotional stress happening, so then it needs to be addressed. If people are retching over, we can’t get along, we can’t work together. Our disagreements are so strong.

Perry Holley:
We’ve got to address that. But, you know, start thinking as a leader, maybe before I think about resolving conflict, can I, in fact, avoid. Are there things as a leader I could do to avoid unhealthy conflict? What do you think about that? Can you. Can you. Can you guide people into healthy conflict only?

Chris Goede:
I think you can try. You kind of have me.

Perry Holley:
I don’t know, man.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, like, that was. Yeah, I mean, I think you can try, but, man, can I let everybody in on a secret when there’s people involved, personally or professionally? Okay. Disputes, disagreements, tension is going to happen, and I think it’s not always going to be healthy. I think you can do a better job of setting the team up and leading them to be able to have, like, you think about Brene Brown talking about the rumble. It’s that common language that everybody knows when rumble, we’re going to do it in a certain way. Right. There’s always going to be guidelines to do that. And so I think, you know, two words here is, what is the culture and what is the communication? What does the culture allow and is accepted and wants, and then how do we communicate about it? What is the common language? I love the Bernay example because that rumble word means something to their team differently than what outside people think.

Perry Holley:
And that’s theirs, is both. It’s their culture and it is their culture.

Chris Goede:
That’s right. So if you’re designing a culture, and by the way, let me stop right there, you need to understand this. Your culture is happening one way or another. So we would prefer you design it.

Perry Holley:
You can’t not have a culture.

Chris Goede:
You can’t not have a culture design if you’re designing it. We want to make sure that you’re designing it around some core values, and they will then determine kind of who we are and how we do things. And that goes back to, again, the culture and the communication thing, if you got to do it by designing it. And so I just want to encourage you is we got to have clear and frequent communication, and that will help head off some of the conflict. Okay. But you’re still going to have it. And a lot of times the negative conflict, or maybe some of the healthy conflict comes from really just confusion and a little bit of a misunderstanding. There’s a gap there that we gotta close.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, I love these two words. I think you’re spot on. And that, as you say, core values really drive behavior of the audience, of the team, of the unit, organization. We talk about it when we teach this in our course about cultures defined by three things, how people think, how people act, and how people interact. And so when you’re thinking about, we have conflict going on, have, what are our core values? Do we have values that are directing how people think, how they act, their behaviors, and how do they interact with each other? Maybe it’s also, I think communication is the key to all of that. But maybe we should also distinguish between. There’s a lot written about conflict. We’re talking about conflict resolution, but there’s also conflict management.

Perry Holley:
How do you see the difference? Conflict management and conflict resolution?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So conflict management is dealing with conflict without necessarily resolving the issue. You’re just. You’re managing it. You’re. It’s just, you’re passive to it, you’re allowing it to happen, and you’re just kind of managing them through it. Whereas conflict resolution is working together, still happening, but to create a solution that satisfies the needs and the concerns of both parties. Right.

Chris Goede:
So many leaders will prefer the management, the conflict management side, because it appears easier in the moment, but it does have long term challenges, and it’s going to be. It’s going to be hard and. And it doesn’t go away. It’s going to show back up and it may get worse. And so you need to make sure that you’re working to resolve it. Whereas the conflict resolution, if it’s done correctly, it won’t even damage the trust of even all three involved. Maybe that both the parties and whoever’s mediating that or the leader and that the relationships and the people that you have invested in and built over time, it’s not going. It’s not going to affect them.

Chris Goede:
I often think about, I can’t remember where we learned this from, and you may know where they talk about doing the hard so that it is easier down the road versus doing the easy, and then it becomes hard. And I think what ends up happening is when conflict happens and we manage it in the moment, we feel like that’s easy, and then it gets harder as it shows up versus man. We’re going to get in. That’s here. We’re going to there’s tension. Let’s resolve it. That’s really hard, which I don’t do really well. Like, I have to develop even better learned behaviors than I do to in the moment.

Chris Goede:
Do it, and then it’ll be easier as things like that might come up again down the road.

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Perry Holley:
You and I are similar and our people based pleaser base we want make people happy. We have a we’re strong relationship people. We really major on care, and we’re not so good on candor. We have to really work hard to balance that care and candor that John talks about and to say hard things. I also think another lesson I’ve learned about can I protect the relationship? The connection over the content, no matter what I have to say, whatever works in marriage, by the way, at home as well as in with relationship with kids and family. But it also works at work. Is that no matter what I have to say, no matter how hard that discussion may be, can I protect our relationship? The connection over the content has been a big one for me, but maybe in the last few minutes here we just give a couple of tactics on practical steps. I love you said about protect the trust and the relationship should be our goal.

Perry Holley:
We’ve got to resolve the conflict. And by the way, big learning, many leaders learn this the hard way, is if you don’t address, if you do conflict management and don’t resolve issues, it sends a message that this kind of behavior is okay and you just put another design element into your culture. It’s okay to act this way because, well, it must be. The leader didn’t address it. And so if you allow things to go on or you think they’ll get better over time, they don’t, and it will just begin to fester in the organization and people say, well, it must be okay to talk this way, to rebel this way, to push back this way because the leader didn’t do anything about it.

Chris Goede:
Let me jump in right here where I see that a lot, and it’s a huge problem, is leaders, number one, they don’t naturally want to resolve it. They’re going to manage it. Sometimes they don’t even manage it or address it on their top producers. And so they allow that behavior to keep going because they’re like, oh, he’s our number one individual contributor. He is our number one cost saving. He is. And they allow that to happen. And so to your point, and I just had that thought because I can think right now several different organizations that we’re working with where you’re going to have to make the tough decision to work through that and resolve it.

Chris Goede:
Don’t even manage it. Otherwise you’re going to let that individual contributor go who’s a rock star because it’s decaying the rest of your culture.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, for sure. Well, first invite people that involved in the conflict to sit down with you. Don’t let this go on. But the temptation most parties are going to have when there’s conflict is to be right or to win. And this is not an acceptable outcome is the objective is really to work to find a path forward. So one group’s going to, one person or one group is going to have a thought and the other one’s going to have another thought. Got to build those thoughts together, but we have to do that together. But you’re going to have to fight the desire for one group to want to be right or win.

Perry Holley:
You see, there’s a lot in the public square today in politics and things. I don’t care how bad I burn you, I’m right. And we got to find that the path forward to resolve the conflict.

Chris Goede:
And as you’re sitting down and you’re having those conversations, you have to listen so that both sides feel heard, like, what is it that they’re saying? And then, and then be empathetic to where they’re coming from. I would sometimes hear people say, be empathetic to what they’re feeling. That’s hard for me because I don’t have a whole lot of feelings. Sometimes I become very, you know, logical and I can compartmentalize things in a hurry. It may have had been a conversation last night with Sarah, I don’t know, but, but I really, in that moment, you do have to sit down some. I have to continue to work on myself and listen and let both parties kind of speak into that. And then when you’re doing that and you’re working through that, try to find some things that maybe there is a misunderstanding between the two of you and then maybe there’s some common ground. It may be a little bit of a stretch, but if you can find something, I think it’ll go a long way.

Chris Goede:
As you think about resolving this conflict.

Perry Holley:
Another challenge and temptation is to make it about the people instead of about the problem. And so I just encourage you to focus on the problem and that there are people involved with the problem. But be curious, curiosity. We’ve got a whole podcast on the miracle skill of curiosity. But if you’re curious, as you’re mediating this, be curious. Curiosity keeps you from being judgmental. Curiosity keeps you from telling. It makes you ask.

Perry Holley:
And I thought just keeping everything reasonable, respectful by being curious causes you to know, I’m not judging, I want to know. I’m curious. Why do you learn it goes this way?

Chris Goede:
Exactly.

Perry Holley:
You’re teachable in this and use questions, not statements. And it will to gain further understanding of things and it will open the door to more openness with people.

Chris Goede:
That’s good. Well, as we think about this, I also want to go to something that we talk about as a leadership team often, because I think you do need to have tension. You do need to have conflict in the leadership team. Now, we’re not going to be in complete agreement, but find some areas that maybe you as a team or you and that individual that where that conflict is that you are in agreement with and develop a place to where you can leave that conversation. You guys feel aligned and there’s a plan going forward to help minimize when that tension shows up and you’ve resolved that conflict.

Perry Holley:
And final thought, don’t forget to follow up. Just don’t be silly enough to think that I did it. I had them, we sat down, we talked about it, that it was all handled, resolved and will be wonderful going forward. I think it’s easy to do that because especially my personality was. Enough said. Let’s get that move on follow up, make sure that action’s being taken, that any challenges have been healed, any bad feelings. You know, we’ve got relationships reoccurring to overcome that.

Chris Goede:
One thing that reminded me of with the follow up is I remember a situation I was leading kind of two employees that were at conflict and we were working through some issues. And as part of the follow up, I got them both back together and I said, hey, can you just, what did you hear last week in our meeting that so and so said or thought, and then, hey, what did you hear right? And I go, oh, man, I thought I had this thing resolved, but it is still a big, big gap. And so I love the fact you got to be intentional and follow up about that. One of the things, as I wrap up that I want to share with you is we talk a lot about, and the basis of this podcast is built off of the five levels of leadership. We’ve seen the methodology transform leaders and cultures and organizations around the world. And when I think about it, this is where the importance of doing level two is so important for leaders. This is the foundation. You have to connect with your people.

Chris Goede:
You have to build relationships. You’ve got to get them to the point where they give you permission to lead them. If you don’t do that really well, then when you get into situations where there is conflict and you’re trying to resolve it, there’s not going to be any trust there. They’re going to think that you have a bad motive for it. And even if it goes sideways and they don’t have trust, your leadership credibility is going to be out the window in a hurry versus if you went about it the right way and you built the influence like we talk about, they’re going to trust that there’s something in there that Chris is saying or must be seen, and I trust him. And so I want to encourage you. Just as we think about and we wrap up with the conflict, it all starts back to how you’re increasing your influence and make sure you do level two really, really well. The last thing is, Perry and I, we both teach, and I know Greg Cagle kind of helped develop this course around discovering your authentic leadership style.

Chris Goede:
And in there, we taught a principle called the intent versus perception gap. As you are working to resolve conflict, one of the things I want you to do is develop a common language that you use in these conversations, and we use this all the time. We say, hey, you know, Perry, I know your intent was not to do this, but the perception of the team or the perception of the customer or the perception that I have as your leader is this, can we talk about that, close that gap and close that gap? And as soon as we begin having conversations about closing that gap, that is resolving the conflict. And by the way, the way you’re starting is that by saying, hey, I know your intent was not to do that. You’re already way ahead, because now you’re not managing emotions and intention right out of the gate. You may have to down the road as conversations go. But, man, think about what is the language to say, hey, I know your intent was not this. However, so and so perceived it like this.

Chris Goede:
This is how they received it. Can we sit down and talk about that? And as leaders, you gotta be responsible for closing that gap. And so it’s a great common language for you to use while you’re doing that.

Perry Holley:
Super. Thank you, Chris. And just a reminder, if you’d like to get that learner guide or learn about these offerings that we’re talking about, you can do all of that at maxwellleadership.com/Podcast also learn about our other podcasts in our family of podcast offerings. You can also leave us a comment or a question, which we love. We’re also so grateful that you would spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell leadership executive podcast.