Crucial Work Skills #7 - Hard Conversations - Your Team Player Style – Creating A Culture Where People Run Towards the Problem

Conflict is hard no matter what form it takes.

We watch organized conflict in sporting events, which can be quite aggressive, and we also experience a subtler form of conflict at work, where passive-aggressive behavior can rule the day.

No matter what your role is on a work team, you will eventually need to be able to work across the company channels and have a plan for dealing with conflict that naturally occurs. Even inside your department, a constant stream of conflicting ideas or personalities necessitates one’s ability to get in and out of a hard conversation.

The consulting firm Vital Smarts out of Utah wrote a best-selling book, Crucial Conversations, over 30 years ago and has trained thousands of employees worldwide. They aim to help companies have a common language for handling the foreseen and unforeseen issues in delivering their goods and services. All their research shows that how people communicate with each other matters in calm and tense situations.

Jim Collins wrote a best-selling business culture book called “Good to Great.” After a massive regression analysis, Collins identified the highest-performing or great companies and their common characteristics. Along with leaders who saw problems like a mirror and successes like a window, getting the right people on the bus was the key to success. It appears that culture matters.

Glenn Parker spent a career developing systems for team communication and collaboration at large companies and then published his work along with a short 18-question survey that allows people to learn what their dominant team player style is and how to work with others once they are aware of how that style impacts how you in a group setting. Parker’s work is helpful to a leader who is inheriting a team and reminds us of Peter Drucker’s simple observations in his white paper "Managing Oneself" that readers and listeners will sometimes struggle to collaborate well.

All this research on culture and team success is important as leaders like Jeff Bezos evangelize their 6-page summary style of communication for two pizza teams, and everyone rushes to emulate what worked for him and assumes it will work for them. We don’t think it is that easy.

You need to have a plan to lead yourself and others, and once you are the leader, you are entitled to run the system you think fits the objectives of the moment.

Our last crucial skill might appear to be an accumulation of these nuanced people skills, which start with having a full tool belt that allows you as an individual contributor to listen with compassion, ask questions with the right tone, be prepared to navigate conflict, state your points of view clearly, and work within the system that has been outlined by the leader.

As a front-line manager, you would seek to enhance these skills by further understanding how your team should communicate and which channels will be the single source of truth (CRM, Slack, email, meetings) as you work together.

Finally, if you are the CEO and are looking to recruit the best leadership team you can, it would appear important that you outline the system you have in place for operational excellence and how you intend to manage and lead the communication mechanisms for building a company culture that runs towards the problem.

Without a plan and a process for identifying Moments of Maximum Influence (MOMI'S), the more people you hire, the more variety you will get in how they handle or avoid conflict. This clutter and confusion will be hard for your early people to define, but they will feel it, and it can crush your morale when you need it most.

An intuitive leader will also be looking for hard conversations that aren’t happening inside and outside of the company and looking to unlock those MOMIs with the right communication topics and skills.

An easy way to tell when meeting with a company is to ask when the right time to have a hard conversation is:

If people look at their feet, you know the answer is never.

If they look you in the eye and say, "Now would be fine," you know you have a winner.

Click here for our full publication on Crucial Work Skills.

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