From our observations of today’s most successful companies, we see that they have built sustained success through the work of strong leadership and high-performance teams.  These companies have transitioned from a less vertical and hierarchical organization—rolling the decisions and the work needed to be done downhill through layers of management—to a more horizontal organization, where teams consisting of empowered employees guided by forward-thinking, innovative managers drive the business to reach and exceed its goals for profitability and service.

While the way forward in business clearly involves this more horizontal approach, it’s not without its own attendant challenges and opportunities.  We’re talking about human beings, after all, and on any given day, we’re as susceptible to conflict as we are to highly-attuned collaboration that sparks the next winning idea.  Thus, conflict resolution, built from the twin foundations of trust and understanding, is critical to keeping groups of people performing together at their highest possible levels.

In last week’s post, we discussed some of the ways that managers and team members betray the trust of their colleagues and undermine the understanding required to move quickly and effectively through inevitable confrontations and conflicts that will arise at work. In today’s article, we’ll take a look at successful strategies for leveraging these twin foundations of trust and understanding for the benefit of everyone on your team. 

Stand and Deliver

Let’s start with the most important element of effective conflict resolution—stepping up!  The best leaders read situations quickly and recognize conflicts within their teams early on, and rather than avoiding them,  they step into the fray and put their leadership and problem-solving skills to work.  These managers view each conflict situation as an opportunity for all parties to grow and learn.

In this positive spirit, great managers and team members build trust and understanding even in the heat of resolving conflicts. Meeting conflict head-on, while always communicating a self-sacrificing, “for the good of the team” mentality, can earn you the distinction as a person of character within the organization. People see that those who take on disagreements and problems early on, and effectively prevent them from becoming bigger issues down the road, have a huge impact on the engagement and productivity of their teammates, and thus the profitability of the company.

Active Listening

Another key component of resolving conflict through trust and understanding is availing yourself to listen more and speak less.  Focusing on listening enables us to read situations more quickly, eliminating the element of surprise as imminent disagreements or issues are coming at us. Not only does active, focused listening help you build the understanding needed to begin resolving a conflict quickly and effectively, it also projects to the other party that you’re engaged in such a way that you’re considering the importance of what they need in the moment.

Practicing focused, active listening during interpersonal conflict slows things down and helps everyone involved gain better perspective, especially with their respective abilities to step into the shoes of those with whom they disagree. Slowing things down and getting everyone’s interests, wants, and needs out in the open and heard by all parties involved has a cooling effect that moves the resolution process in the right direction.

Consensus or Compromise

The ultimate resolution of any conflict comes from achieving either consensus or compromise.  Consensus involves everyone’s agreement, while compromise has the interested parties giving up some of what they need in order to achieve harmony for the team.

In order to achieve consensus or compromise, we must seek and find common ground among the people involved in a conflict. We define this common ground by first getting a good sense of what’s important and what’s not important to both parties.  As we talk out the possibilities for reconciliation, we must get ongoing confirmation of the perspectives and wants of others while clearly presenting our own perspectives and wants.

If we’re truly sincere in our ongoing affirmation of what those around us need and want from their work, we can reach consensus or compromise without damaging our relationships.

Again, effective conflict resolution is all about working on those foundations of trust and understanding. The good news is, if you approach people with sincerity, truly seeking a resolution that fits everyone’s needs, you’ll build even greater trust and understanding even while in the midst of conflict.  That is the ultimate reward for having the courage to step up, listening to others, and considering their needs. Everyone emerges from the heat of the battle tested, yet even more confident about the integrity and loyalty of those with whom they live to fight another day.

From our observations of today’s most successful companies, we see that they have built sustained success through the work of strong leadership and high-performance teams.  These companies have transitioned from a less vertical and hierarchical organization—rolling the decisions and the work needed to be done downhill through layers of management—to a more horizontal organization, where teams consisting of empowered employees guided by forward-thinking, innovative managers drive the business to reach and exceed its goals for profitability and service.

While the way forward in business clearly involves this more horizontal approach, it’s not without its own attendant challenges and opportunities.  We’re talking about human beings, after all, and on any given day, we’re as susceptible to conflict as we are to highly-attuned collaboration that sparks the next winning idea.  Thus, conflict resolution, built from the twin foundations of trust and understanding, is critical to keeping groups of people performing together at their highest possible levels.

In today’s article, we will outline some of the ways that managers and team members can betray these foundations of trust and understanding, undermining their efforts at achieving optimal performance.

Confrontation Avoidance

In a team environment, there is simply no way to avoid confrontation. Confrontation or conflict is a natural and healthy part of the human existence.  It’s going to happen, and you have to address it. 

Yet many of us allow negative situations to fester, and we do it for a variety of reasons. Due to differences in personal styles, we can be prone to defining some of the people we work with as difficult, rather than focusing on the situation or differing viewpoint that causes difficulty within the team. As we define people as being difficult and fail to reach constructive dialogue with them, we obviously fail to build positive relationships through trust and understanding.

We can also be uncomfortable sharing critical feedback with others.  When given in the right spirit and with the right motivation, all feedback—both praise and criticism—is crucial to driving others to better execution.  In providing constructive feedback to others, your intent is to keep the team and its goals and purpose in mind, rather than personally insulting people.

Finally, many of us are guilty of thinking that problems will go away on their own. While this can be true in the short-term, people have long memories, and even if the team gets past a conflict, the failure of leadership to address these issues when they surface sets up a future that certainly lacks trust and understanding.

Lacking Sensitivity

As with our personal relationships outside of work, we must always be sensitive to the needs of others—this is the two-way street aspect of any relationship.  Yet too many of us fail to build trust and understanding with our team members, because we have not established our personal credibility or failed to manage the negative perceptions that others have of us.  

As we’ve stated before, today’s managers must not adhere to a “my way or the highway” personal style.  This is especially true of those who can be too direct in their dealings with others.  Many people respond to this directness of approach and language as a personal attack, and this reaction exacerbates the situation rather than solving it.  We must recognize and be sensitive to the other person’s needs, how they deal with pressure and negative situations, and use methods of communication built on that understanding.  When we come from a place of understanding, this builds the trust that we can use to reach a conflict solution quickly and effectively.

Another way that people can fail their colleagues, damaging these foundations of trust and understanding, is through sarcasm.  Many of us think of sarcasm as “just joking around,” but when it’s deployed in a conflict situation, many people react negatively.  Conflict resolution deserves a serious, sober approach.  The more we take our people seriously, avoiding the device of sarcasm, the more they can trust us and better understand the dynamic needed to move forward.

Failure to Adapt

Again, building trust and understanding as a means of driving effective conflict resolution in the workplace is predicated upon leadership having the right frame of mind versus allegiance to a particular personal style. In short, today’s leaders must adapt to the needs of their people.

Failure to adapt to the needs of others is symptomatic of a difficulty in understanding their perspectives.  When you fail to understand where people are coming from as they approach a situation, it’s impossible to find the common ground necessary in resolving problems.  All too often, we fail to place the needs of others, and of the company itself, ahead of our own desires. We turn out to be the real problem, becoming overly sensitive and taking things personally. 

Today’s challenging business environment, in which companies must constantly evolve and improve to survive, much less sustain a high level of performance, demands the best of us as we build and grow our teams.  This dynamic demands that we take positive measures on a daily basis, demanding of ourselves a willingness to compromise and adapt, take others seriously, and meet our team members where they are as people.

In our next post, we will discuss some of the positive attitudes and behaviors that lead to better outcomes for conflict resolution, built on the twin foundations of trust and understanding.

In our last post, we began exploring the concept of empowering others, a foundation of effective leadership. Sound leadership is a hallmark of successful businesses, and at the core of this leadership is an ethos built around optimizing high-performance teams.

We outlined some of the pitfalls of managers who fail in their efforts to empower others, such as not understanding the strengths and contributions of those who work on their teams, micromanaging projects, failure to spread mission-critical and enjoyable work in an inclusive way, and perhaps most important to the empowerment equation, failing to share the credit when the team achieves wins and successes.

This week, we’ll lay out some examples of foundational, positive behaviors that separate great leaders from the pack via the concept of empowering others to achieve excellence.

Delegating Decision-Making Ability, Not Just Tasks to Perform

The notion of power itself centers on having the ability to set a professional course for yourself and others through the power of decision-making.  Much ingrained in our society is the idea that when we rise through promotion to a position of leadership, we acquire an earned power of decision-making. Thus, it’s hard for us, sometimes, to share responsibilities and decision-making with others who have not earned this distinction.

But in today’s modern business environment, where success is largely predicated on high-performing teams, we must be willing to shake this old paradigm and share our power with those on our teams.  While managers can’t delegate their authority in many matters, such as hiring/firing and disciplinary situations, they can push decision-making ability down to the lowest optimal levels that make sense.

By lowest optimal levels, we mean that if you have a subject-matter expert on your team, you should delegate the decisions that fit within the wheelhouse of their professional expertise and perspective.  Having the ability to make these decisions empowers that person beyond just giving highly-respected counsel, and they tend to rise to an even higher degree of greatness when they feel responsible and accountable for making the call for the team.

Encouraging Others to Resolve Problems versus Following Prescribed Solutions

Conflict and disagreements are natural problems that arise as people work together. People come to shared work with many different sets of perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, and interests, and as workdays or projects play out, these differences will inevitably lead to both constructive and destructive conflict.

Managers often are too quick to pull the trigger when a conflict exists.  As the leader of the group, they naturally feel it’s their responsibility to resolve conflict and to maintain positive working relationships.  They are judge and jury for their teams, and they prescribe a solution when different team members are at odds over a business matter or a clash of personal styles.  Rather than making a decision in favor of one side or the other, or even forging a compromise, managers should lead their employees to resolve their differences with each other without intervention.  The role of the manager becomes that of a coach or advisor, seeking to build up the parties in a way that enables them to better understand each other and reach resolution quickly.

When executed properly, the result is much greater than simply getting everyone to follow a prescribed solution that often reaches the lowest common denominator. When people solve their issues without intervention from above, they tend to buy in to the resolution more quickly and actually use it as a form of empowerment, yet another way to make decisions and have greater control over their own destinies.

Creating an Open Environment for Questioning Established Norms

To effectively empower their people, leaders must create an environment of openness. Having an open-door policy for employees seeking feedback is a minimum requirement in today’s business climate.  However, having this minimum requirement does not empower employees.  To empower others to achieve excellence, leaders must fearlessly open the gates of understanding by removing any barriers to openness, even if that means an employee needs to question established work processes and systems.

Nobody wants to hear “that’s the way we’ve always done it, so stick to it.”  Businesses grow and achieve greater heights of success when they innovate.  No company has changed for the better without having an empowered employee taking on the behaviors of leadership and daring self and others to question the status quo.

We’re not advocating a culture of complaints, blame and excuses, but rather a culture of feedback and continuous improvement, where leaders and employees seek out and welcome feedback.  The point is that people need to be able to question the norm when they see fit. Leaders should welcome these questions and reasons for questioning without any detriment, perceived or real, to the questioner. A great mindset to adopt is that when someone questions your team’s way of doing things, they are doing it because they want the team to achieve more.

Allowing Teams to Set Goals Consistent with Those of the Organization

We have seen many examples of how leaders empower their people, and some of the most successful organizations even delegate goal-setting to their respective teams.  In this framework, leadership and senior levels set the course based on the interests and expectations of various stakeholders, especially owners and customers. Everyone wants to grow, but these goals are typically tempered by an executive view that defines sustainable, manageable growth.

The role of managers in these types of organizations becomes that of a facilitator, as they advise their teams on factors to consider when setting their individual and team performance goals, ensuring that these sub-sets of goals within the company align with those of the organization.  Again, something special happens when people are given guidance and allowed to set their own course within a guided framework—they become much more highly engaged and productive and they do it with efficiency.

Instead of spending time setting and communicating goals in a top-down approach and then watching and waiting as individuals and teams reach buy-in stage, shift gears and have  the buy-in stage early as individuals and teams create these goals in a bottom-up approach.

People ask quite often, “What’s the single-most important aspect of organizational strength?”  While our first instinct is to answer, “It’s products, customer service, or it’s people,” when it comes down to it, leadership  is no doubt the biggest driver of a company’s success with regard to managing profitability and maximizing productivity.

A Harvard Business School study identified the four greatest drivers of personal and professional success:   attitude, knowledge, intelligence, and skill. The study’s leaders concluded that attitude was the single greatest driver, accounting for 93 percent of an individual’s success. What exactly is attitude?  Attitude is what drives the leader and employees along the spectrum of bad to great, things like commitment to the cause, common purpose, organizational fit, personal values and interests, and relationships with their teams.  And while many managers are good  at managing process and systems, and even some are pretty decent at knowledge and skill transfer, their greatest impact lies in their ability to shape the contributions and attitudes of their people through leading them.

Managers lead in many  ways and there are multiple leadership styles, but what it comes down to are four key components of leadership – building trust, expanding their influence, effective communication, and motivating others.  Let’s first talk about the foundation of leadership – trust. Trust is one of the fundamental virtues of great leaders and influences the amount of discretionary effort your talent will expend to meet business goals.  If you expect your team to go above and beyond, they have to believe you would do the same for them.  It’s that simple.

Leaders build trust in several ways.  As we’ve discussed previously in this space, managers must be sincere and understanding in their dealings with others. Also, they must be open and honest, and keep their promises. Being predictable is key—your people should always know where you stand, even if they don’t agree with you.

Other ways that leaders build trust include keeping the confidence of those who reach out to them in sensitive situations, and be open and accessible to their people.  These two concepts obviously go hand in hand. Finally, managers forge trust through setting high performance standards for themselves and those on their team, and, in turn, demonstrating character and concern for others along the road to high performance.

Managers exert their influence in a variety of ways, and for many people, they taken on a manager’s influence by seeing that person as leading by example.  Having a willingness to roll up your sleeves and dig in to the work alongside your people is a great way to influence them by showing instead of telling. 

Managers also build their influence in other ways, such as finding out what others need from them and providing it, in addition to making a concerted effort to take interest in their team members.  Leaders should seek to understand the differences in all of their people, and this understanding should promote more empathy and less judgmental behavior. Furthermore, leaders should work extra hard to understand their audience and reach them where they are, monitoring the tone and pace of conversations, in addition to body language.  And just as they need to be predictable in where they take their stands, managers should be consistent and keep their commitments.

Communicating is, of course, incredibly important for leaders.  Managers who want to become great leaders should focus on three simple components—honesty, openness and understanding. We’ve talked quite a bit about this subject in other articles on this blog, but you can’t discount the importance of effective communication. When people know that you are steadfast—consistently open and honest—so that they always know where you stand, you have a high level of trust driven by their best interests and what’s important to them—they can’t help but have better attitudes about you and what the company is trying to accomplish.

Having the ability to motivate others to maximize discretionary effort is very important for you, your team and the business.   However, before you can motivate others, you must have a high level of trust, understand what factors are most important to them, and adapt your communication style to them.  Without trust and understanding, you cannot effectively influence, motivate or lead.  (Work on linking this paragraph with the previous) But most people do have some external drivers of their own motivation. Some need recognition, while others need reward.  Still others need you to constantly feed their fire, by adding personal development, continuing education, or greater responsibility in future tasks. And when you know a person’s greatest motivational drivers, you simply act upon these with that same honesty and integrity, with their best interests in mind.  It’s quite rare to see a highly-motivated person with a bad attitude.

In conclusion, if companies want to effectively manage profitability and maximize productivity, they can look no further than leadership development. When managers become leaders, they transform employees into followers who, in turn, become leaders themselves.  Investment in leadership development, when executed properly, can create an ongoing cycle of excellence, feeding into so many other successful aspects of a business.

Today’s successful, respected managers understand that developing relationships at work is critically important to their individual and team’s success.  Unfortunately, one of the attributes we see in poor performing managers is a lack of caring about their peers and direct reports and, more importantly, a streak of unconscious arrogance regarding their own abilities to “read” people.  This whole context—the notion of reading people—is out of place in today’s business world, as we now know that working with people is a continuous process of understanding them, not just some kind of gut-check assessment upon the first meeting or review session.

And understanding your people at work—your colleagues, direct reports, and your own managers—is, as we discussed in a recent blog post, one of the core foundations of building high performance teams at companies, along with trust and openness.  High performance has a direct correlation with employees’ ability, no matter their role, to develop relationships and earn credibility, whether that credibility lies with their supervisors, colleagues, or the people who report to them.

If managers and employees are seeking to improve their performance through strengthening relationships at work, then they need to ditch the reading people mindset and get down to the harder work of really understanding them.  And in order to gain this understanding, they must focus on the journey, not certain events along the way, like a certain project, recent mishap, windfall, or performance reviews.

Understanding people is a process, and the process is defined by multiple interactions and perceptions on the part of the people involved.  To begin our process for understanding others, we must first understand ourselves.  As people, we tend to understand ourselves in terms of the things we value, our own strengths, skills, and positive attributes, as well as what we see as our own shortcomings, flaws, or liabilities.  For example, you may see yourself as gregarious, creative, and driven—all fantastic traits. But you may also recognize that you are a procrastinator, lack confidence in high pressure settings, and tend to be defensive when others don’t immediately warm to an idea you think is your most brilliant yet. Thus, you’ve distilled yourself down to these three positives, along with corresponding negatives.

Once we understand ourselves, it’s much easier to see how we can understand others and develop relationships accordingly.  A natural law of attraction—speaking purely in the professional context here—is that we will gravitate toward people, more specifically toward characteristics or behaviors that mirror or complement our own.  This is what separates the good managers from the arrogant ones, the ones who assume they are great at reading and influencing people.  Good managers are willing to engage themselves in the introspection required to have a baseline understanding of themselves—in both relaxed times and high pressure situations, as well as individual work and collaboration with teams—to have that same understanding of others.

What it boils down to, ultimately, is that managers must seek to understand their own greatest strengths and weaknesses, and then seek representative qualities in their employees that provide either amplification of the things they like about themselves or provide a nice counterpoint to the manager’s own weaknesses.  For those arrogant managers, even admitting they have a weakness is a huge first step to better understanding.

So, if you’re an extrovert that tends to be very expressive, but lacks an analytical perspective, you may uncover, through listening and observing, a team member at work who mirrors your extroversion, chooses fewer words, and leans heavily on information-gathering and analysis to make decisions.  In the end, to defeat the unconscious arrogance that’s so rife in management in many companies, managers must be challenged to have humility about their own abilities, re-contextualizing reading people into understanding them, knowing themselves first, and then listening to others to gain perspective on their value to the team and organization at large.