I spent the early part of 1994 watching my mom waste away and suffer from what was later discovered as the return of breast cancer. By July, she was unexpectedly and unbearably gone. BAM! And I was hit from behind.
The chance to experience what so many parents experience, or what ecstatic grandparents experience when they wait to lovingly “spoil” a child, was a dream I’d held for so many years. I’d admired watching my mom fuss over everyone else’s grandchildren as she longingly and desperately waited to hold her own.
A year later our son came bursting into our lives and the joy kept me from drowning in the depression I had sunk into after the loss of my mother. My mom was gone and she could no longer answer all the parenting questions I had planned to ask her. I was lost. Even though there were so many things she did as a mother that I disliked, I still ached for her to fill that role..
When I finally stopped crying, I had a terrifying and liberating thought: As a new mother, who was parenting without her mother, I could harness the power of that freedom and make new rules. With that freedom, I began to look into conflict in a deeper manner. I started with discipline and what I had been taught and then extended it to examining the relationship I had with conflict. It was a good thing too, because six years later, when my next son was born, my life really changed and conflict became a regular occurrence.
It’s not that my oldest son did not provide plenty of opportunities to confront conflict, it’s just that he was less in love with it and we saw more things eye to eye. My second son came into the scene questioning and pushing back on just about everything and everyone while having the nerve to be incredibly like-able and enjoyable. On top of all of this, my husband either avoided or exploded during conflict. I had a real team to learn from.
Here’s the deal though… my biggest lessons about conflict came from what I was learning about myself. When I began applying those lessons to my work, my clients started having extreme transformations.
No matter how much you learn about other people during a conflict, what conflict really does is give you real insight into what triggers you, how you manage it and what effect your conflict management style has on your team. Be open to learning all of that.
Commit to using conflict as an opportunity to get to know conflict better and to get to know yourself in conflict better. This is all part of developing a relationship with it. If you are going to get the best out of this relationship you are going to need to go all in.
The First Thing You Have to Do is to Level With Yourself
While this conflict is happening there is no getting out of it and as the leader, unless you inherited it, you likely played a role in causing it. Whether you avoided or ignited it, it is happening on your watch and now you have to not only handle it, but you also need to engage in it with skill.
Be honest with yourself. This is where conflict is starting to teach you about yourself. Do you have the skill level to effectively handle conflict? If not, make a note to yourself to get some real help in upping your conflict resolution game.
Next You Have to Embrace Resistance
Understand that during conflict people are afraid, angry, resentful, confused, unsure and a whole host of other emotions and as the one in charge, they are tossing them all in your direction. Be aware. For them, it is twofold, as much as they want the conflict to be resolved, they also have their own reasons for participating in it.
Arm yourself by embracing resistance, fully expect it. You can then prepare yourself to listen to other people’s perspectives on what is happening on a deeper level. They need their questions answered, their fears heard and their requests validated and until that happens, they will resist your efforts to shut the conflict down. If shutting it down is your natural response, you need to understand why. You need to ask yourself that question and be ready for what you learn about you.
Account For Your Own Actions
You need to prepare yourself to be triggered. Remember how after my mom’s death, I took the time to delve into my own relationship with conflict and how it had been shaped by my upbringing? You too have your own conflict story that has left its own wounds.
During conflict those wounds get triggered by certain people, words and scenarios. You need to develop an awareness of what’s being triggered and the effect it is having on you and you have to keep it in check, because your team is in reaction mode and they need you to be ready to respond rather than react.
You need to remain calm enough to prepare an appropriate response.
If, as the leader, you are confronted with how your actions contributed to or even led to the blowing up of things, consider the possibility that there is truth there and choose to learn from it.
Too many leaders avoid conflict or blow it up. They are missing out on the opportunity to dive in to it and learn some deep and valuable lessons about themselves that can make them the kind of leaders that motivate their teams and change their work environments for the better.
