This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Jess Lee: Ways to Resolve Leadership Conflicts" (created 2012-11-28). The excerpt is a multi-speaker discussion (labeled SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B, with Jess Lee indicated by the title) about resolving strategic and interpersonal conflicts among founders, directors, and executive peers. Participants describe practical tactics: present a unified front, time-box experiments to test competing strategies, encourage stakeholders to prioritize the company/shareholder interest over personal agendas, position the CEO as the hinge between functions, and create interlocking objectives to reduce passive-aggressive behavior.
So to repeat the question for Jess and for me, how do we deal with resolving conflict and tensions that exist between founders and other directors and maybe founders too?
Yeah, I mean we've definitely had sets of strategic disagreements at the company. When it's between the founders, like it's harder because you both have to be there, right? If it's from a new executive you're going to hire, you can actually screen for a lot of those things like if they say, 'Hey, I think the direction of the company should be this,' and you're like, 'Wait, wait, wait, wait, we don't want to become— we don't want to carry inventory and ship stuff to our Polyvore members.' You can screen for that ahead of time, but when it's with the founders, that's a little bit more difficult. So we— at the end of the day, I think you have to be on the same page to the rest of the company, right? So you have to have a unified front. One thing we've tried is— and this doesn't really happen that often, but like, what's an example? Maybe how when we were earlier days like how we were going to make money, we sort of set a time window on these things like, all right, we don't necessarily agree about whether we should sell virtual goods to our users or do brand— sell advertising on the site, but we're going to pick one and that might be influenced by who's actually going to spend the time to work on it. And then give ourselves a window to prove that out as in that— within that window of time. That at least there is an agreement around that and then after that point you can go back and like, all right, we totally failed at this, like what do you want to do now, let's go back or let's continue, you can sort of reevaluate it, but to give yourself that framework I think is one way to solve it.
Yeah, this is one of the areas where I think you can learn, hyperlearn conflict resolution. There is all sorts of ways to study how one does it and in my experience, there's all varieties of conflict, but they end up shaping your daily existence because those are the things that stress you out. And the first step always in conflict resolution, my experience is you got to get people focused on the right goal or agenda. And you can find situations where people let their self-interest get in front of the company interest, that's easy to spot. And that happens with directors, where directors say, look, I'd like to sell the company or not sell the company, and you have to say, okay, you have to think about the shareholder here as a third party. This is a bit of the Rawlsian moment of disinterest and saying, okay, pretend like you could be anybody. What's the right thing for the company? And getting someone to focus beyond themselves to that higher good can really be an antiseptic for most of the problems that emerge. The bigger issues in conflict, I think, come up between executives that are peers. And this is a routine problem where engineering wants X, product wants Y, sales wants Z. And a lot of what we do in working with the CEO is to help them be the hinge between those executives. And there's this moment that occurs in a great executive team where they feel shared interlocking objectives. And when you see that, it's like a soccer team moving in perfect flight. You say, something special happened here. So it's rare. And when you don't see it, you say, OK, well, you guys got to get on the same page. And it's very clear from this board meeting, you've got conflict that's— being talked about, but a lot of it not talked about, where there's passive aggressiveness. And so by trying to get the foreground more clear and saying, these are the things we're committed to beyond ourselves, here's how I have to be successful by making that other person successful, and here's what they have to do to make me successful, they're interlocking dependencies, you start to move above the two individuals going at each other's throat. But it sort of defines our existence, and so there's not a single answer I can give other than you can study it and study it aggressively, and I think it serves you well.
