Dear Leaders,
Handling conflicts among people with different personality types is a tough task. Especially if the conflict is between people with contrasting performance levels, then it becomes a sensitive issue that can make or break your organization. In the political realm, this takes the form of conflict between groups with different ambition levels. While you can see politicians debating on the merits and demerits of meritocracy, no politician ever gives you any solution. That’s because politicians get more focused on lip service and arguments than finding solutions.
So what’s the solution for this? Well Dr. Foo has a remedy for you – Practice Conflict! That’s what we are going to do in this activity. Face the problem head-on before it comes. It’s like getting vaccinated and improving our immunity against viruses. You can play the activity solo or as a team.
You will need:
- A timer or stopwatch
- A paper or note
- A pen or pencil
Imagine you are doing a great job at work, exceeding expectations. You may be doing it for real. You may be a valuable resource for your company. But talents or skills don’t always appear resourceful. Imagine a colleague is jealous of you (or perhaps just afraid). In a meeting in front of the CEO he or she stands up and accuses you – That you are being overly pretentious and befooling other leaders in front of clients – You are being detrimental to the team’s performance and growth.
At that moment. On the spot. How will you respond?
This is the challenge for our activity. Now set the timer to three minutes. Write down all the ways or ideas on how you could handle the situation. While doing so, make sure you bucket or categorize your thoughts into GBSM – Good, Bad, Striking, Meh! When times up put down your pen. If you are playing it as a team, then ask people to read their points under each category, while you write it down in a whiteboard or Excel. Let each participant read only the unique points and skip the repeating ones. Try out the activity first without looking at the examples below.
Here are sample solutions or points –
Good:
- You can step-up to be a leader. With better experience in delivering results, you can volunteer to mentor or help people removing any potential roadblocks to their performance.
- You can be more empathetic. You can try to see if there are any skill gaps your colleagues are facing and step up to help accordingly.
- Use critical thinking to see if there are any underlying operational bottlenecks or challenges. Are your colleagues being overloaded or distracted with other tasks?
Bad:
- You may be overperforming, yet might be burning yourself out.
- Averagely performing people may start worrying that they might get overburdened or their targets may become more difficult because of you.
- Underperformers can lose any hope they have when they see the expectation bars being raised.
- Clients may start preferring you over the other leader or other employees. They may even bypass your colleagues to get to you, affecting the team’s morale.
Striking:
- There can be other hidden talents in the average or underperformers.
- People may have be assigned the wrong KPIs or may not be best utilizing their skills. For example, a person good at demand generation may have been put to close deals, do onboarding, or market research.
- You may use this opportunity to address any false sense of security. Your CEO may be relying on you to cover for others. This prevents others from addressing their issues and may overburden you.
- You can analyze and see what type of leader you are. You can refine your conflict resolution skills, be creative or proactive in managing different personality types and performance levels.
Meh!:
- Throwing rewards and incentives at people for improvement is a commonly abused approach. While positive reinforcement is necessary and might work temporarily, it fails to address underlying issues like intrinsic motivation and skill gaps.
- “More meetings, more feedback” is another overused and abused approach. More communication and more cooperation may lead to more coordination but not collaboration. Collaboration comes from comradeship and motivation to look at the problem’s root cause.
- “Let’s do a performance review” is another way to say “Let’s use some bureaucratic quick-fix”. It spooks out people too, especially those in the middle, those who are performing Ok.
How was the activity? Could you and your team come up with some unusual or striking ways to overcome the issue?
Now this is how GBSM works. Generally while thinking or problem solving, we tend to be biased towards an idea or solution. Some thoughts we may like while some we may not. While it is important to think in terms of pros and cons, it is even more important to expand our views to accommodate more possibilities. Thus forcing yourself to think in GBSM (Good, Bad, Striking, and Meh!) helps us avoid emotional biases and expands opportunities. You can try this with any problems you are facing. Can you think of a situation where people can use GBSM to innovate and solve problems? Do share in the comments.