Archive for the ‘Team Work’ Category

• miss important information in the other person’s perspective
• push for my perspective rather than listen to the other person
• focus my thinking on a single solution rather than consider alternative solutions
• ignore the other person’s thoughts and feelings

      In short, when I rush, I get selfish.

      When I slow down, I:

• learn from the other person
• listen better
• open my mind to multiple solution paths
• remain sensitive to the other person

      Even though the first approach tends to have a faster conversational pace and often feels faster in the moment, it actually slows us down because it creates new conflicts and side issues that drag out the conversation or hurt our future interactions. Going fast in conflict resolution is actually slow.

      The second approach feels slow because it involves periods of silence, reflection, and carefully crafted conversation. However, it creates an environment where both parties really understand each other. Slowing down heads off future misunderstandings and conflicts. Going slow in the moment is fast in the long run.

      To remember how to slow down in the moment, I focus on giving a SOLID response:

• Stop
• Observe
• Listen
• Interpret
• Deliver

     Studies of workplace behaviors reveal some startling statistics with regard to the impact that conflict has on business performance. One study indicates that two out of three employee performance problems can be traced to unresolved interpersonal conflicts. Another study estimates that the average manager spends something like forty percent of their time addressing workplace conflicts.
     These studies show that companies waste an amazing amount of time because of conflicts between employees. This wasted time translates to lost opportunity, lost productivity, and lost profits. By working to reduce workplace conflicts to the lowest possible level, business leaders can make immediate strides towards improving overall performance and results.

     Here are four specific things that leaders can do to reduce team conflicts:

1. Remove resource constraints

In a quick web search using the term “conflict over resource constraints,” I received nearly 300,000 results. As I looked at page after page, I saw everything from legal disputes over water rights to wars over contested mineral rights. On a global scale, people have always, and still do, argue and fight when they perceive resource limitations.

Is the same true on a smaller scale workplace scenario? I think it is. I have seen conflicts over staplers, copier use, computer access, and room temperature. While some of these issues seem minor, consider the implications. People arguing over access to a computer are not working. Two people engaged in a 15 minute discussion about getting the use of resources critical for their job performance just wasted 30 minutes between them. Multiply that waste over several weeks or months, and the impact on productivity and profits completely overwhelms the cost of a new computer.

When people sense that they do not have the right resources to do their job, they will either stop working or fight with each other. Both results hurt the business.

2. Teach and encourage better communication skills

Helping people to develop better communication skills can make your business more profitable as your employees learn to express their thoughts and feelings in ways that resolve conflicts rather than escalate them.

3. Teach conflict resolution skills

4. Get rid of team members who refuse to cooperate

While I prefer to focus on removing the environmental causes of conflict and helping people develop the skills necessary to head it off or resolve it, I also recognize that sometimes people simply do not have the desire to develop these skills. In these cases, they become a burden to the team, and leaders must relieve their team’s burdens in order for the team to move forward productively. As I learned in the Navy, getting rid of an anchor is often more effective than putting more power into the engine.

     In these troubled economic times, I know of few businesses that can afford to allow the time wasted on conflict to continue unabated. To survive and thrive in today’s high stress business environment, I encourage you to take the steps necessary to implement the. . .

    Four Things Leaders Can Do To Reduce Team Conflicts.

     
     Guy Harris, The Recovering Engineer

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     I am pretty reserved and definitely task-oriented. I care about people, but I expect people to behave logically.  When I work, I focus very intently on the work in front of me. Distractions and interruptions frustrate and annoy me.

     My wife is outgoing and more task-oriented than people-oriented. She likes to move fast. She tends to make decisions on-the-fly and to work in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. She finds it easy to jump from topic to topic or from task to task.

     My oldest daughter is much like me with a female perspective. She is a bit more sensitive than I am, but not much. She recently told me that she often does not like people because they do things that do not make sense. We have a running joke between us that one of us hurt the other’s feeling. (Yes, feeling is singular and not plural.)

     My youngest daughter is a lot like my wife. She moves fast, talks fast, and decides fast. She is different from my wife in that she tends a little more towards the people-oriented side of life. She loves to laugh, have fun, and play. She often leaves clothes on the floor or dishes on the counter because she “forgot” about them in moving on to the next thing.

     I struggle with understanding the three female perspectives on life that live in the same house with me. I struggle to shift mental gears when either my wife or my youngest daughter makes a request of me with an “oh, by the way…” start while I’m working on a project that requires focus.

     My wife struggles to find ways to communicate with me that respect my need to stay focused on my current task-at-hand without interruption. She struggles to slow down and allow my oldest daughter the time she needs to process requests before answering. She also struggles to restrain her frustration when my youngest daughter fails to follow-through on a task.

     My oldest daughter struggles to understand and value her sister’s more light-hearted perspective on life. She has to guard against her own perfectionism when she comments on her sister’s singing. She also struggles with her mother’s intensity and drive when tasks need to be finished in a short period of time. To her, her mother looks angry, and she often responds accordingly by withdrawing from rather than engaging with her mother.

     My youngest daughter struggles to allow me to work without interruption. She finds it difficult to stay quiet or to work without music when I am working on business matters. She can run afoul of her mother with her occasionally too quick wit and mouth. She really gets frustrated with her sister’s performance expectations.

     In a nutshell, that is my team, my family, my work unit. And somehow we have to find a way to make this work.

     We all understand the DISC model of human behavior. We all work to understand each other’s perspective. We work (almost) every day to apply what I have learned professionally to our family dynamic. It’s still hard work.

     How different are we from your family or your business team?

     I would guess, not very.

     We are all similar, and yet we are different. We have different levels of maturity, different levels of knowledge, different levels of skill, and different perspectives on the “right” way to do things.

     Still, we have to find a way to make this work.

     All the knowledge and skills in the world won’t make a difference in the functioning of a family or a team without a desire and willingness to make it work. As one of my mentors taught me, “commitment and compatibility are two different things.”

     As you move forward in your business and personal life, I encourage you to focus more on commitment than on compatibility.

     After all, we have to find a way to make this work.

     Guy Harris, The Recovering Engineer

Misinterpreting other people’s intentions creates one of the biggest challenges I see in much of my coaching and training work. I suppose this is a natural part of human nature. Often, the only frame of reference we have for interpreting other people’s behaviors is our own. As a result, we often interpret their behaviors based on how we believe we would react or behave if we were in their situation.Unfortunately, we often don’t know everything about their situation.In a post earlier this week in Settle It Now, Victoria Pynchon states:

   As I read through some of the blogs I really like this morning, I found two posts that intrigued me. One comes from Victoria Pynchon at Settle it Now (Negotiating Influence How to Help Your Opponents Change Their Minds) and the other is from Diane Levin at Mediation Chanel (The Mind and Magic Conjuring Up Ways to Improve Awareness). They are both really interesting, and I suggest that you take a look. I’ll quickly summarize what I got from them individually, and then I’ll comment on the connection I saw between them.

   As Victoria says in her post, she will have more to say on this topic, and I’m looking forward to reading what she has to say. For now, she points to research that indicates the positive impact that face-to-face communication has on persuasion. Her comment that ”… opposing parties resist sitting in the same room with one another when attempting to settle litigation” really struck me. I have the same experience in workplace situations, people involved in a conflict often refuse to sit face-to-face to discuss it.

   Diane’s post links to How Magicians Control Your Mind in the Boston Globe. This article reports on research done to understand how we perceive things. It’s also a fascinating read (with some great videos). The research shows that we have gaps in our perceptions so that what we think we see may not really be what happened. In other words, our perception may be our internal reality, and it will drive our thoughts and emotions. However, it’s not necessarily the objective truth (what actually happened).  

 To keep things simple, I will outline the connection I saw with a progression of bullet points:

   When I entered my last post , I fully intended to add content to each of the seven communication tips in subsequent entries. As I have attempted to expand on my thoughts from that post this week, I have drawn a blank every time I sit down to write.    The thought that has been at the top of my mind this week is the title of this post – develop an attitude of curiosity. So, I’ll write on this topic for now and save my expanded thoughts on my previous post for later.  My thinking on this topic comes from my recent coaching and training experience. As I work with clients, I see the opposite of curiosity – judgment – driving much thinking during conflict conversations. Here’s how I see the difference between these two attitudes:

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