Welcome back in Your Leadership. I'm Chris Lorenzo and welcome to this week's Thoughtful
Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership and leave
us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, we're going to be
going over some listener feedback from our Monday episode. We're in the process of
going over a four episode series over four mondays on the different reasons why a
team might not be high performing, the kind of the dysfunctions that exist that
it may prevent that, and if we define high performing, is just kind
of this sustained ability to deliver results over a long period of time with approximately
the same team, with mostly the same people, that would what we consider
a high performing team. On Monday's episode, we talked about how one of
the reasons that a team might not be high performing is that there is a
a fear or avoidance of conflict amongst the team members and that could you know,
be stemming from you know, people who uh, they're they're afraid of
challenging appear in the room, um for you know, their own lack of
political standing in the room, or um they just they don't want to be
seen as the as the one who's always being the naysayer or or playing devil's
advocate. UM. It's kind of this this lack of psychological safety that says,
I'm just going to keep my mouth shut, And oftentimes that doesn't mean
that those people keep their mouth shut all the time. It means they keep
their mouth shut when it's appropriate, and they open their mouths when they feel
like they're in they're in safe company. Right when we want one on one
with another person, not the person who needs to hear it, of course,
but one on one with another person, and that kind of sows the
seeds of distrust and discontent within the team. UM. On Monday's episode,
one of the really cool things we talked about was that an example or an
exercise that we can do in order to kind of help our teams get through
this UM and this was the the bad ideas example. So if you haven't
you haven't heard this, go back and listen to Monday's episode. UM.
But our our listeners reached out to us after the fact and said, hey,
that was a good example, but we want more. We want to
know more about what we can do to to kind of lower the fear of
conflict or the avoidance of conflict on our teams because we think this does happen
sometimes that we're in a room full of people and everybody says yea, let's
go do this, and then it's clear that they didn't really mean the yea
that they said. And I'm curious what you think about this, len Zoe.
Yeah, I think it's good dialogue to have, and like, I
think, in full transparency, I don't know that you ever get to a
place where there's no conflict. And I think that's the point of why we're
talking about it, is like you actually need conflict, but there is a
way to do it that allows you to be productive. There's a way to
do it that allows you to challenge one another, to discuss ideas, to
push back, and to walk out of the room sometimes saying you know what,
like I don't one hundred percent agree, but this is where we've landed
and this is the decision that we're making. So like I'm going to support
the vision or the strategy of what we're talking about. So I think that
sometimes the idea of conflict, it gets caught up in the you know,
conflict is bad, No conflict is good, and I don't necessarily see it
that way, so I'm glad that we're talking about it. I think conflict
can be very good and should be a part of what you do. And
maybe you call it a different word. Maybe it's healthy debate, right,
maybe it's feedback. I don't like whatever you want to put on top of
that word. I see some of that, not all of it, but
some of that as conflict and healthy conflict where you have an observation of a
behavior that you want to correct or a difference in of opinions. But I
definitely think it's something that's needed. And like I said, when done really
well, people feel good about like they had a chance to express their thoughts
or their their ideas and that they were heard and that it was valued,
and then that whatever the outcome is going to be is going to include that
part of the dialogue or the conversation, and then they're okay with it because
they know sometimes what they're what they're you know, maybe sharing is going to
be the thing that turns out to be, and then maybe sometimes it's going
to be halfway there and sometimes it's going to be the opposite. But like
we know, this is a part of how we want to be able to
make decisions. And if we walk out of a room feeling like maybe we
still have more questions, that we actually ask those questions, and to your
point earlier, we do it in a way that is that is positive and
that is productive. Right. I would say that if you're on a team
and you aren't seeing any conflict, that's a usually a bad thing because it
doesn't mean there's nothing to have conflict over. It means there's a fear or
an avoidance of conflict to be in with, and that isn't a healthy thing.
I'm sure there are some exceptions out there, but very few, especially
on a larger team or on a team where you have people whom they're not
they don't have a relationship outside of work. If it's not like a family
or or a group of best friends that got together to start a business that
kind of thing. If it's just a team that you put together and the
only time they see each other is at work, if there is zero conflict
at all, I would it'd be hard for me to come up with a
scenario where that was always a good thing. I'd be very, very scared
of a situation like that of why that was that was lacking. But when
we talk about, you know, how to work through conflict, the biggest
kind of I think roadblock or hurdle to doing this is this either one one
person's inability to detach their ideas or their suggestions from their own identity, or
another person's belief that they can't shoot holes in an idea because it will be
interpreted as shooting holes in that person as opposed to the person's idea. And
that is what leads to a lot of people kind of avoiding that conflict.
But when they're talking about it, you know, one on one with other
people later on, or they're kind of you know, when you when you
can tell there's discontent, it doesn't mean that they didn't want to. It
means that they felt like they couldn't. And so what I want to ask
you, Lorenzo, is when have you encounter this on a team that you've
had where it got to the point or it rose to the point where you
actually to sit people down and talk to them about, Okay, this this
has to change because this is going nowhere fast and it's going to get worse
unless we kind of just really hash it out. I want to ask you
that, but first I want to get it upward from one of our sponsors,
all Lorenzo. When is it risen to the occasion where you have to
actually sit down with some people and kind of pull rank a little bit and
say, we have to we have to talk about this out in the open,
because this is not going anywhere positive. It's happened, and I anticipate
that it will continue to happen because I think when you are working with leaders
and when you have kind of again this delta amongst leaders that are maybe new
to roll, new to position, new to an element of authority, those
that are not, those that have different perspectives and opinions, like, you're
going to have those moments where sometimes two leaders maybe just cannot figure that out.
And I could think of a very specific example where I had that,
where I had two leaders that were very passionate about the work that they do,
They were very passionate about the team that they led, they were passionate
about the outcomes and the results they that they wanted. And because they were
both very passionate, very opinionated, it was just continuing to be one of
these things that would bubble up like they would. They would, they would
bump heads, they would bump heads, um. And then it was starting
to kind of feel outside of just their inability to kind of get aligned,
it was starting to feel through the other leaders, because each of them would
kind of go back and be like, I like, you know, I
can't believe they said this or they want to do it this way. Um.
And so I pulled the two of them together and I sat down and
I said, like, let me, let's let's work through this. But
I need you to understand that that there are things here that I think that
maybe neither one of you can see, and that you're actually both more alike
than you are different. And so here's actually what I want us to do
right now. I'd like each of you to just write down, you know,
not what maybe is the thing that's annoying you, or maybe that is
the thing that is causing you to, you know, maybe have some conflict
with this person, but I want you to write down what you see in
them that you think that you really appreciate, you know, not maybe it's
maybe it's not the ideas or whatever, but like what you see in them
as a leader that you really appreciate. I want you to write that down.
Um, you know, right now we're gonna start. We're gonna start
there, and they both did, and then I said, cool, now
I want you to read it out loud, and they did. And the
funniest part of the whole situation was that you would have thought that they had
cheated with like like like wrote each other's like words down like that they saw
that the other person was writing down because they were so similar and exactly what
they saw in each other about that they would defend the team, that they
really really cared about people's development, that they would stand up for ideas like
these things. And what was happening is that they were doing it to each
other, not realizing that they both had the same intent and the same reason
as to why they were doing it. And at that point they kind of
looked at each other and I said, yeah, exactly, Like the reason
you two are having conflict is because you're actually on exactly the same page.
You see the work very similarly. Your approach is a little bit different,
but you're both passionately fighting, you know, for the same things that you
want to see within our team. So I'm going to give you thirty minutes
to talk through this, and I need you both on the same page,
and I need you to both understand like I want. I want that level
of passion. I want that level of commitment from both of you towards making
this team better. And then I walked out of the room and they had
their time and it wasn't thirty minutes. I think they were there for like
another hour and a half. But coming out of that, I think that's
what they needed to hear, was that they each needed to hear from each
other that the other person actually respected them. They saw who they were,
they saw the work that they were doing, and they validated that for one
another, and they realized again that they were more like than they were different.
And the cool part of that is that they are very close now,
and you know they now they defend each other when it comes to certain things
that are going on, which I think is the right thing to do,
but but that those are those moments sometimes that you definitely have to step in.
You know, I've always heard that that when you are arguing with somebody
about something, it's important to look at them as a teammate and that both
of you are on the same team, and the opponent is whatever. The
wrong idea is not your opponent is the person that you're talking with. And
if you can do that, if you can take two people who are already
on the same team and instead of getting them to look at each other like
they're they're on opposing teams, each of whom is, you know, pushing
forward their own set of ideas or strategies or agendas, and instead the idea
and the and the goal is to there is there, whatever the results are.
You want these results, You want to be on a high performing team.
And if you and that other person can look at yourselves as teammates and
the opponent is whatever wrong, the wrong way forward is. It's amazing how
much differently people treat each other when they start the conversation from that standpoint of
viewing each other as teammates looking towards a common goal and just having different ideas
of how to get there. When you start from a standpoint of looking at
a teammate as an opponent who has a different goal than you have, it's
really easy to get caught up in this and have it become, you know,
an unhealthy level of conflict, which turns into an avoidance or a fear
of conflict because you just don't want to deal with it. And so,
yeah, these exercises are really important. There's no such thing as a team
that doesn't go through this. So if you as a leader, one of
your responsibilities is to facilitate these kind of moments where they can happen in a
healthy and a productive way, because when the time comes where it needs to
happen anyway where there's there's no avoidance of it, it needs to be able
to be done in a way that that kind of raises the cohesion of the
team as opposed to degrades it absolutely, and with that it brings us to
the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm
Chris, and have a great day.