Early in my coaching and consulting career, I worked with three sets of business owners who were each going through a kind of business divorce. I was brought in to help them solve the problems at issue, but in each of the three cases the partnerships dissolved.
At the time, I felt like a marriage counselor, although none of the business partners were actually married or linked romantically.
So, I started to look at information about marriage and divorce to see how it could help my executive coaching. (I am an intellectual magpie; I’ll look at anything as relevant to coaching; from cooking competition shows to my granddaughter’s picture books.)
After all, we sometimes spend more time with the people we work with than with our spouses or partners. Drs John and Julie Gottman have studied couples for decades, and started the Gottman Institute in Seattle. They can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, which couples will stay married, and which will divorce.
One of their concepts that I use all the time is the idea of an unsolvable problem. In short, they suggest that happy and effective partnerships can succeed even with some big problems that can’t be solved. If the couple can skillfully deal with the problem.
The Gottmans label an ongoing difference in attitudes or lifestyle between two people in a couple a “perpetual problem”. One person is an early bird, the other is a night owl. One person has a difficult parent with boundary issues, or the two people in the couple have radically different ideas about financial or child raising issues.
Having an unsolvable problem in and of itself isn’t a mortal wound to a relationship. It only becomes grave when the couple get gridlocked. Briefly, that means that the conflict becomes worse over time, you can’t find common ground and it causes so much conflict that every aspect of the relationship is negatively impacted.
This applies to work conflicts as well. I’ve seen work relationships dissolve in rancor over something I considered to be minor. I’ve also seen business partners with strong skills weather storms that would have sunk most relationships.
Which brings me to the first two questions I often ask my clients when they are dealing with a conflict.
Is this a solvable problem?
Is it solvable by you?
Last week I talked about three different kinds of conflict; rupture, disagreement and difference.
The goal with rupture is, where possible, to work through it and get to repair. With disagreement the goal is to come to some middle ground. When stylistic differences are the source of the conflict and a middle ground isn’t possible, sometimes it’s just about accepting that other people are different and sometimes that can be really irritating.
When facing a conflict in your orbit at work, ask yourself those questions. Is this a solvable problem? Is it solvable by me?
Often, when a boss is especially unskillful, it is clearly a solvable problem. People can learn how to not scream and yell at work. They can get therapy or coaching or anger management or something to help them more effectively regulate their emotions.
However, if I’m working for the abusive yelling boss, I can’t solve that problem. I can go to HR, I can try to get another job, but the solvable problem – the boss learning emotional regulation – isn’t solvable by me.
This is one of those really basic concepts that surprise most of my clients. Leaders often think they should be able to fix problems, that good management means there are no unsolvable problems on your team. That’s not true. In fact, one of the skills of a strong leader is understanding which problems aren’t solvable and turning their attention to something they can impact.
Question number three comes from a premise I strongly believe, which is that everything makes sense to the person who does it. That enraging behavior that someone does at work makes sense to the person doing it. If you can understand why it makes sense to them, it will be easier for you to address it or accept it, depending on which is the wiser course of action.
“Why does this thing they are doing seem like the best course of action to the person doing it?”
Get curious, with yourself and with them. Few of the irritating people at work are actually narcissistic monsters – although they do exist – so trying to understand the rationale behind other people’s actions can be useful.
The fourth question is “are there any cultural tropes or narratives at play here?”
Who is allowed to be angry and how they are allowed to show anger are culturally fraught topics. While a brief paragraph here can’t do the subject justice, please be mindful that women, people of color and especially women of color are held to an entirely different standard about anger than white people; having it or expressing it. Before you engage with another person in a conflict, whether you are a participant or a manager, stop and try to understand what baggage they are bringing to work around anger. Get curious about what baggage you are bringing. Would you have the same reactions if the person in the conflict were an able bodied, cis straight white man?
We also need to be mindful of the phenomenon of “white woman’s tears”. This is a situation where a woman of color has a conflict with a white women and the white woman starts crying. Even where the white woman was clearly in the wrong, white managers and coworkers will leap to the defense of the white woman, because she’s crying. Many white women have been socialized to expect that when they cry, people, especially men, will respond to comfort and console them. White men have been socialized to comfort a white woman in tears and back down when she starts to cry. While crying at work can, of course, be genuine, I have seen white women turn on the tears with an expectation that they will not be held accountable just because they are crying.
The fifth question is for when you are sideways about something at work and you suspect your response is not congruent with the action that precipitated your response.
If a small thing set off a big emotional response in you, ask yourself the question “what does this remind me of?”
In my group of friends in college, some of us often ate and cooked together. When we scraped together enough money to go out to a restaurant, most of us would lean over and sample one another’s dishes, exchange bites and generally approach mealtime as share and share alike. One friend carefully guarded his plate. “I’m the oldest of six kids,” he said. We knew not to touch his plate. And he knew enough about himself to understand that a childhood in a large family with financial insecurity made sharing food with his college friends something very different for him than it was for the rest of us.
Most of us carry something like that, some guarded place or woundedness, and work situations can remind us in an uncomfortable way of that sore spot. Sometimes we’re not really upset at the manager who is giving us appropriate feedback, we’re reacting to years of harsh criticism by an obsessed parent who pushed us to excel in the sport they played. Once you know that, you can recalibrate your response to be more congruent with what is actually happening. You are getting professional feedback from your boss, which is her job, and it’s bringing up some old memories and feelings that you will process later with a friend, or when you’re journaling at the end of the day.
Conflict is an inevitable part of working with other people. Correctly managed, conflict can build relationships, improve work outputs, strengthen teams and become an opportunity for learning and growth. These questions and approaches that I’ve outlined today really boil down to a few principles. When conflict arises, be curious, compassionate and kind to yourself and others.
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