11

Quelling Conflict

Resilience is based on the ability to embrace the extremes—while not becoming an extremist.

—Gary Hamel¹

Among our clients are leaders of the most elite businesses in the world, but they sometimes call us in over the most elemental of problems: People fighting over a decision. Often a top-executive team has begun a dialogue to solve a divisive and paradoxical problem—only to regress to shouting at each other. Insults fly, trust drops. We can often guess the root cause when we get the phone call: They have unwittingly let the contradictions of paradox spark a personal feud.

An example: We received a phone call from a CEO who had hired an executive as a change agent. The new man was charged with guiding a hidebound culture that valued control, consistency, and closure toward one that championed innovation, agility, and responsiveness. The CEO complained, however, that the change agent had run amok, shaking people's trust with uncomfortably fast, reflexive, and creative behavior. The change agent, in turn, complained that the CEO was trying to pressure him into getting in line behind the cultural behaviors he had hoped to transform. We ended up in the middle of an emotional spat.

Another example: We received a phone call from a CEO who had launched a new business to replace an old one. The old business produced a flood of cash, the new one not a trickle. The old-business leaders raved about their sales and loyal customer relationships, while the new-business leaders raved about their new technology, new industry, and their role as leaders of the future. The new-business leaders unfortunately couldn't resist: They floated jibes that made people in the old business feel put down, second class, and producers of products on the road to obsolescence. We again ended up in the middle of a fight—along with the CEO.

The truth is, people who are fighting in organizations—however professional they profess to be—don't restrict themselves to the issues. In many cases, they begin thinking and acting as if their rivals and nemeses are deluded and wrongheaded. They may seethe at their adversaries' barbs and misdirection. In no time they begin telling themselves things like “Don't let the idiots get you down.” They believe they are fighting the fight their job requires. They are good soldiers. They fully intend to win out over the idiots, as they have many times before. They are not losers.

However much leaders talk about win-wins, when caught off balance in the ambiguity and contradictions of paradoxes, they often default to behavior that suggests they think of business as a zero-sum game. Although they may engage in dialogue to gain alignment, they let emotional issues hijack the conversation. Indeed, although dialogue should help everyone figure out what the group is for, personal conflicts drive people into focusing only on what they're against—and they're usually against each other.

This is a time when you need another tool for advancing the decision process—conflict management. On skilled executive teams, the contradictions of paradox don't necessarily lead to conflict. Leaders recognize paradoxes and the related contradictions early on. But on many executive teams—like the ones we've just introduced—people either don't recognize paradoxes or ignore them as they focus on perceived personal slights. Leaders can prepare to deal with this barrier to decision making with conflict management. Even if you cannot see the sparks of conflict in time to snuff out the fire, you can help people move to the real paradoxical issue fast enough to assure a timely decision.

The Value of Conflict Management

Personal conflicts that stall decision making in the face of paradoxical problems are more common than many leaders would like to let on. The reason is simple: In the vast majority of organizations, leaders lack one critical characteristic of a high-performance team: putting difficult issues on the table. Organizations today stress team play and consensus. Conflict is seen as a weakness. So leaders pretend to get along, even when they seethe inside. They bury conflict, which smolders slowly and persistently. That is why complete leaders prize the skill of conflict management.

When conflict flares up, you may not even know the root cause at first. You may think you have to sort out a set of opposing values, differences in long- versus short-term thinking, divergent views of priorities, a mismatch of loyalty to stakeholders, or some other personal belief or behavior. But the truth is that contradictions give rise to the conflict, as people cling to a preferred solution to paradoxical problems with no right and permanent answers. This was true of the CEO who brought in the change agent. It was also true of the CEO trying to launch a new business.

At such times, you need to draw on the third of the three elements of a complete leader: guts. Chapters Six through Ten discuss how leaders need the head and heart to devise ways to solve paradoxical problems. This chapter turns to the courage to use conflict management to defuse disputes and break the paralysis that stalls decisions. The contradictions of a difficult paradox may have sparked disputes, but personal differences fuel them. You have to have the courage to put issues on the table and then manage the conflict that inevitably arises.

Ironically, the most common spark for conflict, obvious as it may seem at this point, is failing to recognize paradoxes in the first place. Oblivious to paradox, people let self-interest and preferred loyalties deflect their attention away from wrestling with key contradictions. They get caught up in interpersonal frictions that escalate the conflict. Nobody distinguishes between resolving the contradiction and resolving the conflict. But this is like getting caught up in a food fight—arguing over who threw the first drumstick—and leaving underlying tensions unaddressed. You have to have the wisdom to see through the noise of the conflict and call a paradox a paradox, essentially our message in Chapter One. You have to separate personal issues and business contradictions.

The way you perceive the clash you're facing isn't just an issue of semantics. It governs your advance toward a final decision. If you perceive a debate as a personal, verbal war, you and your adversary react like hostile parties, committed to winning and walking off with the spoils. If you perceive the debate as a dialogue to find an appropriate resolution to a paradox, you and your adversary mutually see an opening to put down your weapons and smoke the peace pipe, finding a reasoned, equitable way to gain alignment. You see that the conflict is a sideline skirmish—albeit a skirmish you may have to play to some denouement.

As we've found repeatedly in our consulting work, when leaders grasp this point, you can practically hear a huge sigh of relief from all involved. To repeat in a different way, when you're talking about contradiction, you're talking rationally about difficult core issues, without personal emotions. When you're talking about conflict, you're talking about personal issues in which people have personal stakes and get personally emotional. Note another difference: You can resolve personal conflicts permanently. You can never permanently resolve any contradiction, as the opposing forces remain and require permanent management.

So contradictions by themselves are not—and do not create—conflict. It is the people facing contradictions who manufacture the conflict, whether intentionally or not. Conflict is disagreement that seems as if it can only be resolved by one faction or person winning. Paradox, on the other hand, involves two or more opposing positions that must be managed without losers and winners. This isn't to say that conflict won't come up when contradiction has to be managed. It almost always does. And it's not a sign of failure. It's inevitable when people work together, especially in matrix structures, which almost by design force people to walk on each other's toes. But you can then use conflict management as a tool to prevent interpersonal quarreling from swamping a rational decision process.

As we mentioned in Chapter Three, if you're rewarded by your organization or driven by your constituency to advocate for one position and fight the opposing one, the step to seeing the paradox behind your conflict may not come easily. In professional service firms, for instance, there's always an ongoing fight for who owns and serves the client. It may be well and good for a firm to encourage client sharing, but if managers are rewarded based on how many billable hours they can charge a client, they will probably find themselves in conflict with other managers who are eager to bring some of that billing into their group. Leaders need to read such situations to discern the paradox beneath. They can then use the energy attached to spirited disagreement to fuel a higher-level discussion on resolving the contradictions.

A variety of side issues trigger conflicts when the real issue at hand is resolving a paradox. One is that a proposed solution may threaten to make some people feel rewarded and others punished. Another is that the solution may threaten to undermine people's ability to perform their role (as finance person or business-unit leader). A third is that an attractive alternative may lead to one person controlling the outcome, leaving a colleague feeling powerless. Still another is that a resolution may seem to reaffirm one person's set of values and violate another's.

The change agent we mentioned earlier seemed to violate the CEO's values. The old-business leaders we mentioned believed their roles were threatened and demeaned. The executive we called Ron in Chapter One tried to control the way regional salespeople managed a new marketing campaign. People on the receiving end in such situations can become indignant and vengeful—and cease to collaborate on efforts to manage the paradox at hand.

Consider the example of two leaders we will call Tim and John, two banking client representatives in the same district, focused on high-net-worth clients. John and Tim argue over how much information they will share about their sales districts. As a private banker, John believes he leads a team with deep client expertise and that the client focus his team brings requires them to build relationships encompassing confidential financial planning. As a commercial banker, Tim feels that everyone in the district banking team should provide the maximum amount of information about their clients and their needs, and that many of John's private clients who own businesses would benefit from what the commercial bank offers. John doesn't see the point of sharing information unless the private-bank team identifies a client need—at which point he will make a referral to Tim.

On the surface, it may appear as if they just don't like each other or they are fighting over functional turf. However, at the heart of the conflict are the opposing goals of transparency versus privacy and enterprise versus business unit. Tim believes that greater transparency improves a team's functioning. John, on the other hand, has his own way of dealing with his clients and feels it would be a violation of trust for him to spell out the details of what his clients disclose to him in confidence. Tim believes that the bank owns all clients, and that key leaders should have access to relevant information about all bank clients.

Who's right? They both are. What they are trying to resolve is a conflict stemming from the contradictions of a paradox, two equally valid principles regarding information sharing. How they resolve this conflict—this interpersonal tension—will determine the degree to which they are able to establish a collaborative working relationship. Neither realizes that their relatively straightforward disagreement is more complex than it appears—that even though they are taking opposing positions, both are right because transparency and privacy both are valid and reasonable stances.

To rise above such partisan positions requires consciousness and will. Whether to help yourself or help others, you need to be aware of the negatives of becoming mired in conflict and the positives of identifying the contradictions of true paradoxes that have no single, long-term answer. And you need to have the guts to raise the question, even when forces in the organization may encourage a conflict. Every competitive leader likes a good battle, but inside an organization, complete leaders keep their eyes on the long-term, productive work of resolving contradictions, even as they do the emergency work of putting out the fires of personal conflict.

The Practices of Conflict Management

Many authors have written about conflict management, but in our experience, we have found six practices especially useful in helping leaders resolve conflict stemming from paradoxical problems:

• Recognize roles
• Acknowledge others' views
• Bring people into the same room
• Invoke the customer
• Start at the point of agreement
• Use a system of conflict management

Just to be clear, we are not talking about conflict as it refers to disagreement over how to handle the tasks required in managing a well-understood paradox—tasks like interpreting facts, debating alternatives, devising policy, and so on. This task-based conflict is a good thing. Research shows it often leads to deeper and more deliberate decision making. One study even found what might be called the “Goldilocks effect”: A moderate level of task conflict on work teams stimulates the most innovation—more than too little conflict (which causes inactivity) or too much (which causes a slowdown in processing and evaluation).²

We are referring instead to conflict in relationships, or personal clashes stemming from differences in style, values, preferences, and loyalties. These conflicts are the skirmishes on the sidelines of the main event, not the main event itself. No doubt, you've witnessed or been part of a conflict that escalated in ways that hurt your relationships and the ability of your team to get things done. You were so confused, angry, or resentful—or two people who reported to you reacted in one of these ways—that it was impossible to see beyond the conflict and manage the underlying paradox. When you focus on how another person is treating you, you fail to break through to the real work of paradox management.

Practice 1: Recognize Roles

The first practice for defusing a conflict is to recognize the roles people are playing. Ron Heifetz, co-founder of the Harvard-Kennedy Center for Public Leadership, advocates depersonalizing conflict by understanding how people often respond to roles rather than personalities. In such instances, leaders can remind people that roles are the primary catalyst for their negative feelings. This sometimes helps them step away from the personal response to an unpleasant exchange and view it with greater objectivity. The disagreement on an issue may persist, but considering the dispute in larger terms can provide the emotional distance to glimpse the paradox behind the dispute.

Consider the conflict between Sally, the head of finance for one of the largest companies in the world, and Josh, a business unit head. Sally, who sees herself as responsible for creating a world-class global finance organization, wants to upgrade the finance person who works in Josh's group. She suggests one of her global finance staff—someone she likes and thinks would do well working with Josh's team. Josh resists her suggestion, preferring to name his own finance person, someone he knows well and who has experience working within his business unit. (Complicating matters, Sally and Josh see themselves as competitors for the CEO slot a few years down the road.)

Though the decision seems straightforward, Sally and Josh have a number of heated exchanges. They can't resolve their different views on the subject and finally appeal to the CEO to make a decision. This is the point where we were called in to help resolve the conflict, and we could see that each was most concerned with fulfilling the responsibilities of the roles assigned to them. In other words, they were arguing from the point of view of their corporate positions. Josh felt the business unit had the right to make the decision, and he needed someone who understood the business unit's needs and financial planning system. He also needed an individual with an aggressive, short-term focus on the numbers required to deliver the results for his business unit.

Sally felt the corporation had the right to make the decision, and she needed a finance person who would fit with her mandate to build a world-class global finance function that would be more strategic and better serve the long-term interests of the organization. She thought Josh's candidate lacked the broader organization perspective and the ability to understand the type of finance talent needed in the future for a changing organization in a challenging industry.

A tug-of-war based entirely on one power center vying with another ensued. Beneath this conflict, however, both executives were missing the basic paradox: how to serve the opposing interests of the enterprise and the business unit. While they were arguing about who owns the talent in the company and who gets to manage it—very common conflicts in companies today—the paradox was a more complex right-versus-right issue. The upshot? With our pointing out the role conflict, and asking Sally and Josh to take a step back and consider what the finance requirements for the organization were for the next five years, the two executives found common ground.

The question was really this: What type of CFO would the company need in the future? What kind of finance person would help Josh's business unit achieve the results he (and the company) wanted as well as help the enterprise grow in the way the CEO intended? Josh and Sally both realized neither of their candidates fit, and instead they should look for someone who could do both—help Josh achieve his short-term business results and have the potential to provide the company with the financial acumen it needed in the future. With the conflict over roles defused, they agreed they needed to search outside the company to find the right person for the job.

Practice 2: Acknowledge Others' Views

This second practice is the simple tactic of acknowledging other people's views. When people feel their point of view is being ignored, they become entrenched in their positions. As basic as this problem may seem, people get surprisingly angry when they believe nobody cares enough to hear them out. When leaders spend enough time listening to show someone they do care, they can quickly defuse situations and allow both sides to be more thoughtful and adaptive.

This doesn't mean we suggest you help people collaborate by just listening. Allowing people to air their views, as in noncritical brainstorming, works poorly. Give-and-take is necessary. We believe some groups miss this fact. In a study that asked three groups of participants to suggest ways to alleviate traffic congestion in the San Francisco area, the group that brainstormed with strict instructions not to criticize one another's ideas offered fewer innovative ideas than the group with instructions to debate ideas as they came up. The brainstorm group fared little better than a control group, which received no instructions at all on how to conduct its discussion. In total production of solutions, the debate group produced significantly more ideas than the brainstorming group. The conclusion? “The basic finding . . . is that the encouragement of debate—and even criticism if warranted—appears to stimulate more creative ideas.”³

So acknowledging people's views in a discriminating forum remains imperative for moving swiftly toward innovative decisions. Shweta Kurvey, an executive we work with, encourages her employees to consider both sides of the equation by asking questions. “It validates and acknowledges what they [the team members] feel,” she says. “Can you help me understand the pros and cons of the approach?” By expanding her teams' views through the use of questioning, Kurvey can better manage paradox by both recognizing people's ideas and allowing her teams to consider differing viewpoints.

Practice 3: Bring People into the Same Room

The third practice is to bring people face to face to build trust. This may again seem awfully simple, but many leaders don't use it often enough for a number of reasons: the fear that putting feuding parties together will make matters worse; the scientific-management mentality that eschews messy conversation for analytic decision making; the logistics of getting people in different divisions, offices, or countries into one room; and the trend toward virtual meetings. Although face-to-face encounters can be challenging to manage when heated conflict has already erupted, you should consider them absolutely necessary to build trust between feuding parties.

Once you get people in conflict into a room, you can facilitate the building of trust by asking the following questions: What's right about each of your positions? What are we both trying to accomplish? What is our overarching purpose? Ask questions that help people find mutual interest and alignment. The majority of people are capable of gaining alignment if they are face to face and a paradox-savvy leader grounded in establishing trust facilitates the session.

One leader we know at a professional services firm routinely fired off e-mail notes criticizing the work of his people and colleagues. He would sit at his computer late at night and create these brilliantly crafted analyses of what others were doing wrong. The missives became legendary in the firm, referred to as Sandergrams (fictitious name). Though he was a high-level leader, he relied on giving feedback this way for several reasons, but mainly because he was an introvert, intimidated by interpersonal conflict, unable to confront people face-to-face. He found e-mail correspondence safe.

The problem for a leader handling conflict this way is obvious. First, he created a culture of fear in which people dreaded receiving a Sandergram. Second, one-way e-mail communication is the worst way to resolve complicated differences of opinion because in most cases it exacerbates conflict. We worked with him to eliminate the Sandergrams and get people with whom he had a conflict into the same room with him. They then talked through their differences, relying on the give-and-take normally required to achieve understanding and ultimately a resolution. He became anxious and fearful before every conflict-resolution session. But in the end, he was able to resolve differences in a much healthier way.

Practice 4: Invoke the Customer

The fourth practice to help break an angry deadlock is to bring in or bring up the customer. Given that everyone's purpose is to create value for customers, invoking customers and their unmet needs can put everyone's gripes and grudges in a new light. While this can be done in a variety of ways, the most effective is often meeting with customers—getting customers and people from outside marketing or sales functions in the same room. In most companies, many insiders have never met a customer face to face. With customers in the picture, people feuding within the corporate family can then better see their joint goals, set partisan issues aside, and see the contradictory forces of the paradox they need to manage.

Think back to the GlaxoSmithKline executive trip to Kenya discussed in Chapter Four. Though all executives differed in their viewpoints upon departing from London, they found common ground as they talked with prospective customers in the challenging health care environment in East Africa. The experience helped executives who were battling over various decisions talk about their disagreement in new ways that reflected their observations of serving people too poor to pay developed-world drug prices.

Practice 5: Start at the Point of Agreement

The fifth practice is to start the discussion among warring parties at the point of agreement. Instead of having the same old argument a hundred different ways, seek confirmation where you can find it. Agreement might be over team purpose or a particular organizational goal. Finding congruence or alignment—what Mickey Connolly, mentioned in Chapter Ten, called “areas of intersection”—gives people confidence they can work out other differences. Connolly notes that people typically look for intersection in their view of results. But many times this is where conflict is fiercest, and people need to back up and look for more basic areas of agreement—typically, related to larger purpose. If the team can agree on “where we're headed,” it can then have a more effective discussion on “how we'll get there.”

At BlackRock, the world's premiere asset management firm, the chief investment officer in one of the businesses has nine portfolio managers reporting to him. Each has a different set of funds with a different set of issues. Invariably, their businesses have different needs that can often bring them into conflict, or at least drive them to run their businesses independently. The CIO believes, however, that the funds have enough in common that they create more value as a community than alone. So he brought the team together for a conversation about what they shared and how to achieve similar goals without sacrificing the autonomy that all needed to run their businesses. They all then recognized the value of bringing in the best talent through a strong recruiting program. They also recognized they had more power if they went to the talent market together rather than separately. So they agreed to beef up their recruitment efforts, coordinate their plans, and combine forces—an initial bridge to iron out additional differences.

Practice 6: Use a System of Conflict Management

The sixth practice is to understand people's personal preferences and behaviors when faced with disputes. The Center for Conflict Dynamics has developed a model for identifying constructive and destructive responses to conflict that can be useful in the hand-to-hand combat that sometimes accompanies efforts to resolve a paradox. The center divides responses into active and passive, both of which are required when managing paradox (Table 11.1). Its assessment tools and developmental suggestions are beyond the scope of this book. But the classification of responses shows that people all come at conflicts differently. It also shows we can equip ourselves with a range of techniques to reduce the probability of differences devolving into interpersonal conflicts. Or if they do, to taking the wasted emotions linked with differences out of the dialogue and staying focused on the task.

Managing paradox requires the use of both active and passive techniques depending on the situation. The key is that leaders must understand and favor constructive instead of destructive factors. For example, leaders need to be sure to keep people in the game who might otherwise avoid conflict by retreating to their offices. They also need to help people maintain their focus until they get at the underlying paradox rather than constantly capitulating in hopes that the conflict will go away.

Table 11.1. Responses to Conflict

We know one leader who went overboard in his efforts to placate his boss, and as a result, lost the respect of his people for not dealing with the contradictions of the larger paradox. Another executive we worked with couldn't understand why people were afraid to give her bad news, even though every time they did she flew into a rage. The conflicts she created by her behavior prevented progress in collaboratively managing paradox.

The creators of the CCD model encourage people to understand their “hot buttons,” the types of people and behaviors that can upset or irritate them like no others. Some of us get our buttons pushed when an individual is untrustworthy, unappreciative, self-centered, or aloof. Being aware that these traits can spark a fire and developing strategies for managing them can help defuse a situation and move the conflict from the personal focus to the real issues of the paradoxical problem.

In one of our engagements with a big accounting firm, we brought people from tax, audit, and consulting practices together using the CCD model. We were trying to find a common purpose, look at ways to resolve differences, and increase everyone's revenue. The model helped everyone understand the many ways to resolve conflicts and view their hot buttons. When someone acts in an unpredictable way, or abrasively, what impact does this have on you? It can elevate emotions so that you don't even see facts to resolve the conflict at hand. The model helps reveal how business issues can become personal issues. In turn, it helps leaders nip the turn toward the personal in the bud.

Leading Beyond Conflict

Conflict won't go away; it will always be a barrier to decisions on paradoxical problems. People simply don't instinctively look for ways to reconcile two valid but opposing positions. Instead, they look for rival leaders who block their ambitions. That's human nature. Even if people do dimly understand they're walking into a personal-conflict trap, they walk anyway, fearful of losing if they go backwards. They are unwilling to sacrifice their personal position. This happens even if they sense the larger, long-term upside of compromising and yielding to another point of view. Of course, this same pattern appears in homes and communities. Consider the furor that arises in community after community about what food will be served in school cafeterias.

Unfortunately, the sequence of events often runs this way: The paradox presents contradiction, the contradiction is interpreted through the lens of human self-interest as a clash of personal interests, the clash enflames emotions. If you're the one to intervene, you try to keep combatants from beating each other up, and you focus on cooling things down. But beset by an atmosphere of wrath, stress, and confusion, you are expected to resolve the conflicts with biblical acumen. Are you ready with the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job?

In companies, the hostile atmosphere, the need to satisfy vocal constituencies, the expected speed of decision making, the stress—they all act to drive leaders' focus away from the opportunity. You then have to get all parties to step back and see the conflict from a utilitarian perspective. And that poses the challenge: To advance the decision process, you have to transcend the conflict. That's what we helped the CEO and the change agent do. That's also what we helped the leaders of the new business do. Without the added tool of conflict management, collaborating to solve paradoxical problems would not be possible.

With this chapter, we end our discussion of the five tools for managing paradoxes. By using scanning, scenario thinking, stakeholder mapping, dialogue, and conflict management, you will be well equipped to engage your head, heart, and guts to serve as a complete leader. In the next chapter, we cover one element that remains to help you jump over the line: self-development. If you want to manage paradoxes adroitly, you need to look inside yourself to spot weaknesses that block your full transformation to complete leadership.