Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.   

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– The Good Fight: Using Productive Conflict with Liane Davey

– Addressing Values Conflicts with John Heiser

– Work, War, & In-Between: Lessons from a Peace Negotiator with Lord John Alderdice

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Michael Morrow-Fox, PhD, is a highly-skilled consultant experienced in health care, education, banking, and non-profit management. Michael has over 20 years of experience in leading technology and human resources operations, and several years of full-time university teaching. Michael uses this background to blend his real-world understanding with current theoretical models, helping clients reach goals beyond their current thinking. Michael’s project management, process excellence, problem-solving, and human performance management skills help companies form truly innovative strategies. He’s a valued member of the ILI team.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Today with us is returning guest Mike Morrow Fox. Welcome Mike.  

Mike: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here again.  

Maureen: We’re talking about conflict management and how do you deal with conflict, knowing that most of us don’t want to. 

Mike: One of the things that makes it so important is those people in general that are comfortable with conflict tend not to be so good with it. People that are most comfortable with conflict bully their way through it.  

Maureen: (Mm-hmm.)  

Mike: The people who are less comfortable with conflict tend to try and avoid it, and that’s where you’ll get the third party asking you to come in and saying, “Can you help me with my team because they’re not dealing with stuff?” Or in some cases, even with my board. And that’s a big issue. So I appreciate it. 

You know, right now collaboration in teams is everything. That’s how we work now as a society with the new way that people work.  

Maureen: As we think about the seven leadership competencies, being innately collaborative is one of those top [00:01:00] seven. And that requires that we deal with conflict.  

Mike: Absolutely. And it requires dealing with a variety of different people. And the importance of it is that if you have somebody that’s negative in your work group, you’re gonna have a dip of productivity between 30 and 40%.  

Maureen: Say more about that. 

Mike: Yeah, Will Phelps did some wonderful research and he actually called it Bad Apple Research, and it’s one of those pieces that came from a great story of his wife coming home from work and he was teaching I think at Wharton at the time, and she said, “It’s been a wonderful week.” And he said, “Really? Why?” 

She said, “Oh, so and so has been sick all week, so we’re getting so much done.” And he thought, “That’s really interesting.” And they did some really neat experiments that they published on the Bad Apple Research, but what they found was that there were three different negative behaviors. 

One of ’em was withholding effort. The other was having a negative tone. You know, somebody who says, “Oh, we already done that,” or “We can’t do it,” and somebody who is violating interpersonal norms in terms of being [00:02:00] disrespectful. 

Maureen: I’m thinking of a client who had an employee who went to HR and complained about her colleagues, like “So-and-so has a heroin habit.” 

You don’t make a false accusation about a heroin habit, right? There are lots of things you can say that they’re not nice to me, but that’s a big accusation.  

Mike: Yeah, you definitely wanna make sure that the norms for your work group, and in particular, if you’ve got somebody who’s very negative in terms of making false accusations, but even just somebody who withholds effort saying, “You guys may want to be here past five, but I’ve got a life” in such a way that it makes the whole group feel undervalued. (Mm-hmm.) If you’ve got somebody who is innately always saying, “Oh, we already tried that, it doesn’t work.” You’ve got those sorts of things going on, what you’ll find is, is that that person can drag the entire productivity of the group down 30 to 40%. 

Maureen: So it’s not just the Negative Nelly person, but that that’s contagious.  

Mike: And that’s a great way to look at it, ’cause the second piece I looked at [00:03:00] was what’s called contagious giving. If you look at the opposite of that, you can take a look at at some of the research on that. And Fowler and Christakis have done some really interesting research and what they found is, is that there is such a thing as contagious giving. 

So on the one hand, if you’ve got somebody who’s negative with the group, they pull the whole group down. 

If you’ve got someone who’s giving, they can pull the whole group up. And when we take a look at Contagious Giving, they did some neat experiments where four people can come together. And we’re not allowed to communicate. (Mm-hmm.) Being able either to take $3 or to give $2 to the group. Now, if all four people give $2 to the group, then everyone in the group gets $8. If nobody gives anything to the group and I give my $2 to the group, I only get $1. And as you go through six rounds of this, if you keep all $3, all six rounds, you get 18 bucks. But if everybody gave their $2 to the group for all six rounds, then they would get 48 bucks. And what they found is, is that when one person was a giver in that [00:04:00] first round and continually gave, the entire group started to give more. When they had groups where there weren’t givers, it wasn’t contagious, but just one giver through round after round, even though nobody knew who it was, it caused a contagion throughout and that was a really good way of understanding the larger research when they find givers in groups and how those groups escalate to be more giving as a group. And so this bad apple behavior is contagious. The good behavior is contagious, and at the end of the day, it’s dealing with conflict successfully that allows you to have the givers escalate and have the bad apples either get themselves together or, or find something that’s a better match for them.  

Maureen: Yeah, I was just wondering if you have a bad apple and a giver in a group, which one’s more contagious, do you know? 

Mike: Yeah, actually I do, unfortunately. It’s the bad apple; isn’t that terrible?  

Maureen: Really? Yeah. So they’re, they’re more like the flu.  

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. And the [00:05:00] reason for that is, is that when you affect somebody’s safety and we’ll talk I think later emotion, some of that emotion, physical Yeah. 

That’s even more emotionally than anything else. (Mm-hmm.) If you make it in a room unsafe for somebody to give a new idea, because they’re gonna get put down for it or feel silly for it. (Mm-hmm.) As soon as you do that, the entire room shuts down. And you don’t need me to quote the research on that. 

Everybody knows that. Yeah. A number of times I’ve had situations, and I bet you have too, where I facilitated stuff and the boss will come in just to be a part of it. 

And as soon as the president comes into the room, dynamics completely changed no matter how open the president is or how well liked or how complimentary mm-hmm, 

it just changes everything because the threat level goes up. So unfortunately when you have a bad apple that you don’t deal with, the threat level goes up within your group and their productivity goes down.  

Maureen: And that connects to the vibrancy research and a lot of the other research that we’ve talked about as well: that yeah, if, if I feel unsafe, and I feel bad about myself as a consequence, [00:06:00] I don’t put forth creative ideas. I may not even put forth any more effort than required.  

Mike: And what David Rock, who’s a neuroscientist would say, is that it’s not only that I make a conscious effort not to, it’s that as soon as I become under threat, mm-hmm, as soon as I start to feel that I’m losing some support… at that point in time, it’s not only that I’m withholding, it’s that I’m not even able to give novel ideas because all of a sudden my limbic system is kicking in and I’m a little bit in fight or flight, and people who are in fight or flight don’t come up with creative new ideas. 

Maureen: One of the statistics Gary Weber gave us in his audio recordings was that the brain preferences negative behavior by a factor of eight to 10 times. So if I have had an experience with Bill down the hall yelling at me, then every time I interact with Bill, my brain is gonna go into the mode of ” How do you stay safe with Bill?” 

Then the limbic system kicks in. I’m in [00:07:00] protection mode and the last thing I am doing is sharing a creative idea with Bill, ’cause I don’t want him to tell me I’m an idiot.  

Mike: That makes perfect sense to me. You know, let’s talk a little bit more about David Rock’s scarf system too. Okay. 

He did a great job of, as a neuroscientist, of really understanding what is it that people need in order to be creative and open and collaborative. And, and collaborative is a key there. And SCARF is an acronym that stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. 

And what he found was that if you affected somebody’s status, their relative importance in the group — I’m a manager, but now all of a sudden we say, “If you can’t hit those numbers, we’re not sure you’re gonna be a manager again” — what he found is that neurologically, all of their effort is going into fight or flight. 

Maureen: That’s that eight to 10 times fear. Right. And I go into protection mode.  

Mike: If I If I end up threatening someone’s certainty, if they can’t predict that things are gonna be similar enough that they can work [00:08:00] through them, I’m gonna have that same fight or flight.  

Maureen: So that means in an environment that is fluid, ambiguous, which is many workplaces, if I don’t have a coping mechanism or a level of comfort with ambiguity, I’m gonna be in fight and flight.  

Mike: Well, maybe, but I think it’s less about your own competencies for it and more for the way that, that we set up a pathway for you to feel certain. So I may have an ambiguous environment. I’m not sure exactly, you know, how I’m gonna contribute, but I know that every day when I come in, Maureen is gonna help me be successful. 

Maureen: Ah, okay. So I deal with ambiguity because I have the support system of my boss or my colleagues or the help desk.  

Mike: That’s right.  

And, And if you’re executive staff or people who are thinking about being executive staff, if people get these visions, you can think about the boss that is supportive and that you know, “Hey, I’m kind of stuck. Can you help me?” And you get the help and support you need rather than criticism.  

[00:09:00] Versus the boss who comes in and says, “Hit the numbers or hit the bricks.”  

Maureen: And we’ve all worked with those.  

Mike: I haven’t. But  

Maureen: You haven’t?!  

Mike: No, I haven’t, but I’ve seen people… really?  

Maureen: Okay.  

Mike: Yeah, I’ve had great bosses., Autonomy, a feeling of control kind of goes with that. 

And that pulls into the A in SCARF. Relatedness, which is an interesting, piece relatedness plays into this as well, but if I threaten somebody’s support of the group, their ability to be a part of things, a feeling of belonging of it, uh, if I feel kind of ostracized from the group as a result of what’s going on, and bosses can do that without really even thinking about it or being completely aware of it. As soon as that happens, I’m in fight or flight.  

Maureen: So can you give an example of that?  

Mike: Yeah, I worked with an employee who was a director and she would constantly say in front of everybody ” You have to do this, this, or this. I need this now and you’re not getting it for me.” And what would happen to that individual is that they would kind of feel like, [00:10:00] “Oh gosh, I’m not getting things done.” And you could watch how the group would kind of separate. So the different employees were like, “Okay, I think I’m gonna get away from Mark because, uh,  

Maureen: He’s a whatever, non performer.”  

Mike: Well, and yeah, so, so she sent a very strong message regularly to him, and we were able to have a conversation. When she changed that behavior, he became more effective and he also became more integrated with the group. (Mm-hmm.) So sometimes you don’t even realize that you’re affecting somebody’s relatedness within the group, but as the boss a lot of times you can really send a signal as to whether somebody is a part of us or not a part of us. 

And then the last one is my favorite one because the research on it is so strong, and that is fairness. And what we’re finding is societally as well as in business organizations, when there is a gap in fairness, there’s a huge gap in performance. And interestingly, the fairness factor is more important actually, than any of the other [00:11:00] factors. 

Maureen: Now, fairness is a touchy one because that’s through the lens of the perceiver.  

Mike: That’s correct.  

Maureen: And so what I perceive as fair may be very different because I’m not a clock watcher or a wardrobe watcher, so I, I don’t care if you show up at the same time. But I do care if you get your work done. 

Mike: That’s why you get paid the big bucks when you’re an executive or a manager, because you gotta pay attention to folks and find out who does feel like things are unfair, and make sure that they understand the fairness and the more that you’re making things fair. 

I’ve been reading a lot recently from a societal lens of what happens to individuals when they see such a gap in income from their income potential to what other people’s income potential is.  

Maureen: So that’s my CEO is making 200,000 times what I make, whatever. 

Mike: Well, it can be, but it’s a very interesting thing ’cause what we’re seeing right now is people underestimate how well off they are. If you’re actually your family income, your household [00:12:00] income is a hundred thousand dollars or more, you’re in the top 20% of all income earners. And a lot of times people don’t feel that way ’cause if I’m making a hundred thousand dollars, I still have house payments and car payments. And I know probably within my group, a number of people who are making 150,000 and as a result, I don’t feel like I’m all that well off, but I’m better off than 80% of everyone else. 

The people who are on the other side of that may have a lot of needs met. They’ve got a television and they’ve got a refrigerator and they’re eating on a fairly regular basis, but they’re under this constant pressure to do their week to week earning in order to keep their family moving.  

And so if you just looked at, well, these people versus a lot of other people have the food, they have TV, they have shelter, shouldn’t they be happy? 

The answer is that in general, the larger the gap in income between individuals — and it doesn’t have to be income, we find that if there are flights and the flight has a the flight [00:13:00] has an area that’s first class, those flights will have more conflict and more issues arise by factor of 60 than flights —  

60  

Maureen: times more?!  

Mike: Yeah. — than flights that don’t have a first class cabin.  

Maureen: What kind of conflict I wanna use the first class bathroom?  

Mike: No, it’s not that. It’s that when people see that in first class they’re getting food and they’re getting care and they’re getting (oh) and I’m dealing with the kid kicking my seat in the back there, i’m more apt to be nasty than if we’re all sitting and having our seats kicked in the back.  

Maureen: Interesting.  

Mike: Uh, but it’s more than that. There’s been some really interesting research with primates and you can go and watch a YouTube right now; if we give a monkey a grape, instead of, uh, a uh, cucumber, then you give the other monkey a cucumber. You’ll watch that monkey go ballistic. They’re perfectly happy with cucumbers until grapes are introduced, but be unfair — give one monkey for no reason a grape and the other one [00:14:00] not the opportunity to get one — and you see dramatically different behaviors.  

Maureen: And again, circling back to conflict, the environment in which we’re operating creates or mitigates the conflict. And I, as a leader, certainly need to then be prepared to deal with it, and also to structure an environment that mitigates as much as possible. 

So creates a sense of fairness as perceived by my stakeholders. ‘Cause the airline probably isn’t trying to create a lack of fairness by having first class. I assume they don’t design that to annoy people.  

Mike: You brought up a a good point that in my discussions with executive teams mm-hmm, 

they talk about as well, and that is fairness is relative. (Mm-hmm.) So how do I deal with somebody’s perception mm-hmm and the relativity of it. And the answer is, it’s really important to ask myself, is it fair? (Mm-hmm.) And a lot of times for a number of your listeners, one of the big issues they’re dealing with is change management. That they’ve got some great tools and technology for their teams. And yet from a change management perspective, [00:15:00] they’re having trouble with adoption. And what has happened to me a number of times is I’ll come in with my change management tools, and I’ll have to go back to the team and say, “Throw the models out the window because your change sucks.” You don’t manage sucky change. You know. 

Maureen: We can, but not very well.  

Mike: I mean, if you go, if you put in a new finance system and it causes three times the work that the old one did, don’t expect your team to adopt it very well. 

Or at  

Maureen: all.  

Mike: Yeah. Uh, so if it is an unfair situation, and you talk with folks and get a sense that it’s clearly unfair, (mm-hmm) don’t think you’re gonna wash over it. The important part of this discussion is, when I’m looking at conflict (mm-hmm), what I’ve gotta ask myself is “How do I address that conflict in a way that doesn’t intimidate, that doesn’t make people feel on edge, that doesn’t really get them fearful and that they perceive as fair as much as possible?” 

Maureen: So that starts with creating a sense of safety, right?  

Mike: It does and I’ll bring you into the crucial conversation stuff. [00:16:00] It’s tremendous at attending to the neurology of conflict. It’s also good at helping people really get through conflict. So the skills that crucial conversations talk about are that number one, they talk about being authentic; going into a crucial conversation, which they define, and it’s a great definition is: if the stakes are high, opinions differ, or emotions run high. Any of those situations, you’ve got a crucial conversation. You’re dealing with conflict in those cases.  

Maureen: One of the things we talk about is being able to surface different perspectives and integrate those. So by definition, it is possible to have conflict, right? 

If you see the world significantly differently than I do, then it’s likely that we could bump into conflict.  

Mike: Actually, creative conflict is phenomenal for the workplace, and I really like Lencioni’s model: Five Dysfunctions as a Team. And what he talks about is, is that at the top of the model is results, but underneath that is a comfort with conflict. ((Mm-hmm.)) That [00:17:00] you create safe spaces for conflict to surface, ’cause only through conflict do people then start to invest and only through that investment do they get accountability and only through accountability to get results. So that’s how the model plays through; conflict is essential to getting results. 

Maureen: Okay. So I think that’s a really important point because most of us avoid it. And yet that’s like avoiding breathing.  

Mike: Well, yeah, avoiding breathing if you want your team to operate at high levels. ((Mm-hmm.)) And you want people to really own the results and put in the types of efforts that you need, so, yeah, absolutely. 

Maureen: Well, most of us say we want that. I, I don’t know that we understand how difficult that’s gonna be for us personally, but I don’t know anyone who says, “I wanna get bad results.”  

Mike: Really the key to leadership in a number of operational circumstances really is to create a team and a team environment where people can surface this conflict, work through it, and then get to the next level. 

Maureen: So that takes us back then to the crucial conversations bit. So even if they’re generative, there’s [00:18:00] still conflict.  

Mike: Absolutely.  

Maureen: Okay.  

Mike: What Crucial Conversations talks about is the way that you deal with this conflict and the way that you model it and guide it for your team. 

So the first thing is, thus, authenticity. The second thing is an investment in dialogue, meaning: We gotta keep talking. If it’s uncomfortable or comfortable, we have to make sure we keep talking because as soon as we pull out of the communication channels, you can’t move any further.  

Maureen: (Mm-hmm.)  

Mike: The third piece of it is to create a safe space, which we’ve talked quite a bit about, and that’s where I think the SCARF comes in, and they give some really good techniques in terms of active listening is one of the great ways that you create safe spaces. 

Keeping your emotions in check and finding mutual purposes, keeping fact-based, and then coming out with a clear plan at the end as to how we’re gonna move to the next level.  

Maureen: So let me go back to a couple of those: keeping my emotions in check, which is easier said than done when I feel like you are completely questioning the way I [00:19:00] make sense of things by virtue of having a different point of view. In some ways it feels like you’re questioning me, not just my idea, but it can feel like I’m under assault.  

Mike: Yeah. As someone who’s leading a team and someone who’s a team member, what I’m gonna make sure is, is that we keep around the topic. We make sure we’re going for a mutual purpose. ((Mm-hmm.)) That this isn’t any one individual being singled out here or there. 

(Mm-hmm.) And that at the end of this, we’re gonna have a clear plan that we can all work, and if we realize that’s where we’re going and how we’re going there, ((Mm-hmm.)) then a lot of times you take a lot of the sting out of it, a lot of the neurological fight or flight out of it. And as a result of that, you can get to some of the real importance of settling creative differences. 

Maureen: You know, I think of a tool, the, the idea that the old David Boem dialogue tool process and where I’ve been, but it requires number two of your making space, right? We raise a topic, how do we deal with X? And [00:20:00] it’s a touchy topic, and each person gives a point of view. And it’s interesting, if you go around the table about three times, at least for me, I forgot what my point was. 

I start to assimilate other people’s points of view. And at the end, unless we’ve got other people who are much more committed to their perspective, just in a very short period of time, people soften up on, “This is mine and that’s yours,” and we innately come up with an ours. Is that consistent with the research or, I’m an oddball? 

Mike: It’s consistent with the research, although what you can find is that there’s a variety of tools that you may wanna look at as a leader (mm-hmm) that help ensure that that occurs. Okay. One of ’em is story boarding. Storyboarding is a great tool and I just taught this to a group at Ohio State, a group of managers that were terrific. 

And what we talked about is, is that with storyboarding what you do is you give everybody note cards and you say, okay, we’re gonna work on an issue. Everybody turn in five [00:21:00] concerns, or five solutions, or whatever on the note cards. And the reason why you do it on note cards is: the quiet people will write note cards, but they won’t say anything. 

You can’t surface the conflict or the new ideas. The people who have a leadership role in the room and the power of leadership, they may take over the room, but when you have people write out cards and send the cards forward, you get all that data in. (Mm-hmm.) So sometimes you just use the techniques, but if you really pay attention to making sure that you’re trying to get this creative conflict to surface, and make sure that you do it in such a way so that people’s status and certainty and relative importance and the fairness is taken care of, and you use some of these techniques where people know that they’ll be in a safe space and that they’ll have a clear plan at the end, and that we’re gonna stay really fact-based as much as we can: you can get phenomenal results and not avoid conflict, but start to really feel comfortable with it.  

Maureen: That sounds like a lot to remember.  

Mike: Well, yeah, it’s not necessarily like a, a math formula.  

Maureen: So I’m, I’m just [00:22:00] thinking I need my check seats on the wall. Okay. Are they safe? Am I being authentic? Am I making time? 

Do they think it’s fair? I, I,  

Mike: I think that’s a great point. And the point is this isn’t memory. What has to happen here is this has to be how I function, how I operate. So that’s why it’s so important that I work with a group or a coach or take the Crucial Conversations course, do a number of those sorts of things, because I’m not gonna be able to go to a cheat sheet and go, well, but wait a minute,  

Maureen: You’re not supposed to do that. 

Now that’s, that’s number three on the list. I actually taught a class and we were doing nonviolent communication, and one of my grad students went home and had, like one of the biggest conversations in his marital life and he’s like, “She didn’t do what she was supposed to.” It may not be the place to start practicing. 

So how do I as an individual and a leader in an organization create the capacity and increase the probability that when something happens, we’re actually gonna do this? 

Rather than go back from a conflict and say, “Boy, I wish I’d done that differently.”  

Mike: That’s a great question, and I [00:23:00] think there’s three different domains that you can look at on a personal level. The first domain is your own developmental maturity. (Mm-hmm.) How strong is your ego? And what that really means is, is that how much am I prone to be defensive versus integrative? 

Maureen: (Mm-hmm.)  

Mike: How much am I prone to be looking at a larger picture rather than the individual piece in front of me? How strong is my ego in terms of being able to pull back from the situation and really learn? And of course that’s coaching opportunity and it’s a, a larger, longer ranger piece, but hopefully everybody’s working on increasing their own developmental maturity as they go through. 

Maureen: But that’s not a week long class.  

Mike: No and it’s, it’s probably tangential to this.  

Maureen: (Mm-hmm.)  

Mike: The second thing is, is that emotional intelligence certainly plays a role in this. And in particular, if you think about emotional intelligence, it’s understanding my impact on other people, modulating my own behavior and being able to have those feedback loops. And again, that’s not a course, it’s not a set of things. But the [00:24:00] larger piece here is to realize something that people don’t like. And that is, that culture really has a lot to do with how people behave. And in particular, culture has a lot to do with how I behave in any given situation. 

So there’s the good news and the bad news with that. The good news with that is, is that if the culture is a collaborative learning organization culture, then people in that culture will behave in a collaborative learning, sharing way. And conversely, if they’re not, even though they’re developmentally mature and have high emotional intelligence, more than likely they won’t behave that way.  

Maureen: And we’ve both coached people who we know would score well on the developmental spectrum and high eq, and yet they’re sent to us because they’re not behaving the way the organization wants them to.  

Mike: There are times when they are not their best selves. 

And they know they’re not their best selves because of the workplace being crazy. (Mm-hmm.) And I’ve coached a [00:25:00] number of people who, on their way home from work, end up saying to themselves, what happened? How am I behaving this way? So if we think about the culture of the workplace as like whitewater running up, then the question is, which direction is it going? ‘Cause you could obviously paddle up a whitewater creek.  

Maureen: I don’t have the skill to do  

Mike: that.  

Maureen: One could,  

Mike: yes, but it’s a lot easier and a lot more successful if you go down. And what most people tend to do without even realizing it, is go with the cultural norms. 

(Mm-hmm.) So if I know the norms of a culture in an organization, I can pretty well determine the behavior even beyond what they did on their DISC scores. (Mm-hmm.) What they did on their Myers-Briggs, all the different things that are going on with them individually. If I know the culture, I can pretty well tell where their boat is going. 

If I’m a leader, what I want to do is control that culture. And so part of this is, is creating a culture where conflict is welcomed. And where conflict is resolved in such a way so that at the end of it I [00:26:00] say, okay, this makes sense. And that little tiny pit I have in my stomach when conflict occurs: I’m okay with it. I don’t get too intimidated because I know at the end of the day, I’m gonna be better, the team’s gonna be better. (Mm-hmm.) And I’m gonna have my status, my certainty, my autonomy and my relatedness all cared for at the end of it.  

Maureen: So that’s back to the SCARF model. 

Everything’s intact.  

Mike: Yeah.  

Maureen: So what’s an example of an organization that has a culture that is learning and conflict-accepting, maybe not promoting, but accepting anyway? 

Mike: And I’m more familiar interestingly with departments in organizations (okay) than I am with whole organizations. (Mm-hmm.) Because a lot of time, yeah, the department will function sometimes even a little bit separately from the organization, depending on the leader. I’ll give an example that I have actually worked in an organization where the cultural norm was pretty nasty, where people back-bit and, uh, made personal attacks. 

It was, uh, not a great culture, but the leaders of [00:27:00] the organization were calm and listening. They modeled how to work through conflict by being good listeners and by making sure that people were cared for and respected. They came back around at the end of meetings saying, “Are you okay with this?” 

They made sure that the plans were inclusive and that people understood the mutual purpose, and I can think in particular of a department that I was a part of in a large organization where that particular department functioned well and surfaced conflict all the time because the leaders of that department, and in particular the chief leader of that department, were very, very comfortable with working people through conflict.  

Maureen: So back to the being authentic, keeping it safe, creating mechanisms to raise conflict and pull emotions out and shared purpose and all the things from crucial conversations.  

Mike: Yes.  

Maureen: So it sounds like it is creating a cultural norm, or the agreements about how we behave in our culture. So our [00:28:00] agreement explicitly with one another, is if something comes up, we deal with it and it doesn’t always feel good. It generally doesn’t feel good when something comes up, but that I’m introverted. I’d really rather not ever deal with conflict. 

Mike: But let’s say too, there’s a difference between it not feeling good, because really most people don’t like dealing with conflict, and it being a fearful space. And at the end of of the day, the largest issue and what your listeners may really reflect on is: The thing that I’ve dealt with most with people that I’ve either coached or with colleagues that have gone through stuff is (Mm-hmm.) people can really understand being demoralized. And so the key is, is that while we’ve had conflict while I’ve seen people have conflict (Mm-hmm.), nobody gets demoralized in it and nobody has to worry about being demoralized. I can always trust through our interactions of (Mm-hmm.) of the last 20 years that I’m gonna walk away and still feel respected. 

I’m gonna walk away and still feel a part of, and I never really feel that [00:29:00] demoralization.  

You know that you’re respected. Absolutely. Know that you’re cared for.  

Maureen: Yeah. I’ve been being cheeky.  

Mike: Yeah. Yes. And that’s how it should be with people who’ve worked together a lot. 

(Mm-hmm.) They should feel like we’re gonna deal with the conflict, not by avoiding it, but by dealing with it. But we know, we have faith, that at the end of the day (Mm-hmm.) we’re gonna be okay with each other.  

Maureen: And I realize that if something comes up that I feel like there is or could be a conflict, I may need to go away and practice these things. 

I’m working with someone right now coaching and I don’t always confront something immediately. I also feel like the other person needs to be receptive. And when that person is in the wrong space, even though they’re paying me for my input, what they really wanna hear occasionally is, “Yeah, you’re right.” 

And when my feedback is not, “Yes, you’re right,” but “How about, let’s consider something else,” i need to have the right language to say, “Okay, let’s go back and revisit something we just talked about.” And set the stage such that I’m prepared and they’re [00:30:00] prepared ’cause in the heat of some drama, may not be the time to raise the topic.  

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. I will say for the listeners, one of the big takeaways from this is to ask themselves, so what is our culture like when it comes to conflict? How does our board operate? Do they avoid conflict or do they deal effectively with conflict and everybody’s excited at the end of it? 

Is our work group uh, do they deal well with conflict or do they avoid it or do they get aggressive and bully through it? And if I have a culture that is not effective with conflict, then it’s really good for me to either work on it myself and figure out some ways to change the culture to get into the right stream or to get some outside assistance, and set that stream. But the neatest thing for me in a lot of the research that I’ve done has really been to take a look at how fluid people are. And the good news is, I can take most people, including myself, I imagine (mm-hmm.) and put them into a [00:31:00] culture that is a giving culture, that is a learning organization culture, and find that my best self comes out even better than I expected. And the same thing will be true of the employees that I end up working with. If I create that learning organization, (mm-hmm) culture, that giving culture, I’ll find that people will surprise me in ways that I can’t even understand. And if that culture is not there, they’re just not open to pull that best self forward.  

Maureen: You know this so closely dovetails with the vibrancy research that looks at: if I don’t feel good about myself when I’m with whoever, you, people, others in my organization, the probability that you’re gonna get my best effort is zero. If I feel dehumanized, demoralized, it’s unfair, it’s unsafe, if any of that stuff is at risk, I go into withholding mode and pulling me out of that once I feel threatened is a whole lot easier than not putting me into it to start with.  

Mike: And I think that dovetails really nicely too, with what a lot [00:32:00] of organizations are working on in terms of engaging employees. 

If you look at the Gallup model, which a lot of things are built off of, they have really four different elements to it. Do I have the support that I need in terms of the tools and that kind of stuff? (Mm-hmm.) to do my job. But then as I go up that model, how do I know what I contribute? 

Really if you want engaged employees, they need to know “I’m important here and I’m contributing something. We do have a mutual purpose and I’m getting to it.” And if I have an internal conflict and feel this isn’t right, I got a way to work it through. 

“How do I know I belong?” is the third component. (Mm-hmm.) And moving up that, how do I know that I’m a part of this group and a valued part of this group? And the fourth one is: how do I know that I’m growing? Am I going to be better next year as a result of being in this environment than I was the year before? I had these programming skills coming in; am I now gonna have programming and change management skills? And those four really are important. And so you pull it all together and you’ve got work groups that end up being 400% more productive [00:33:00] than (Mm-hmm.) than general work groups.  

Maureen: That last statement, 400% more productive: that means that most work groups aren’t those things you described?  

Mike: Unfortunately. And that, that’s what we see is that our engagement scores are nowhere near what we want them to be. 

I would say that if you were really good at setting up an environment where there were givers, where there was creative conflict was welcomed, where you used a Lencioni model and went up that model where there were trust and safety were the first piece of it. If you are in a situation where everybody is treated in a way that they feel is fair or at least help to understand why this is (mm-hmm) viewed as fair, then you’d have an organization that would be significantly have highly engaged employees and be significantly more productive.  

Maureen: That’s a great recap and the only thing I didn’t hear there was you talked at the beginning also about bad apples. So if we attend to the bad apples, either transition them to at least neutral, we make sure we build the givers. [00:34:00] And we create a culture then of constructive conflict and productive conflict. So what was the word from Lencioni?  

Mike: Creative Conflict. 

Maureen: Conflict.  

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.  

Maureen: So creating a culture where I have the safety to build the skills, so I may not go into that culture good at dealing with it. 

And I think the other thing you said that really bears repeating is it’s not gonna be comfortable. I don’t look forward to going to work ’cause I get to be in conflict with people. I look forward to no conflict. And yet when it arises, I know I have the confidence to deal with it and the people with whom I’ve chosen to work are in this with me, and we will all work it through. 

Thank you, Mike for sharing models and tools and insights with our listeners.