Cameron Herold compares handling workplace conflict to marriage, where avoiding it creates fake harmony. His five-step approach: address the behavior not the person, move quickly once emotions cool, say what happened and how it made you feel, ask how they see it, then ask what they need from you.
Chapters
Well, just like a marriage, a business has conflict, and the key is to work through that inevitable conflict. Conflict in your marriage really shouldn't destroy the relationship. It's a way to get deeper to truth. And if you handle conflict in the right way, like I'm going to teach you, it can actually be very powerful. In fact, Pat Lencioni, in his book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, talked about one of the big dysfunctions is companies that avoid conflict and they have this artificial harmony. So I'm going to give you a crash course on how to deal with conflict. First is to address the issue. Not the person. It's not the person that's an idiot. The person maybe did something wrong, or the person maybe broke a core value, or maybe the person let you down. So the key is to race to the conflict, deal with it very quickly after you've let your emotions subside a little bit, address the person and say, hey, when you did this specific thing, this is how it made me feel. And put your feelings out on the table. What I need from you is, and explain how you would like them to deal with it going forward. And then say, how do you feel about that situation? Situation. Because you've dealt with the specific versus general, you've dealt with the issue, not the person, you raced to the conflict and you did it in that core way where you got your feelings out, they really have nowhere to hide other than to say, darn, you're right. I really feel bad about that. This is what I'm going to do in the future. And then you can kind of flip it again and say, what do you need from me to coach you through that so that we get better at this particular problem? I go a lot deeper into this skill of conflict management as one of the 12 skills in my Invest in Your Leaders training. Go to investinyourleaders.com and you can sign up. You, the COO, anybody in your company who manages people. This is one of the 12 skills. I go into it for about 10 or 15 minutes as well as the other 12 skills. It's about 6 hours total in the Invest in Your Leaders training. We'll see you on the inside. All right. If you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book, The Second in Command, for free, go to cooalliance.com/freebook. That's cooalliance.com/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today.
