Conflict and Drama In the Workplace

I wanted to come share some thoughts and concepts around conflict and drama. That's why I decided to sit down and talk about this. I believe that conflict and drama are different but are certainly related to one another. Most of us probably understand that conflict is basically a natural result of putting people together. You put people together long enough and then add in a little bit of stress or some busyness, and you're going to end up with some conflict of one type or another. And the thing is, is that under the right circumstances, conflict can actually be a good thing. Ideas, directions, processes, beliefs should be challenged as part of the refining process to making them better. If you think about it, innovation is basically just an idea that's in conflict with the status quo. And under the right circumstances and dealing with it correctly, conflict can even bring people closer together as they work their way through difficult issues. Many of us are probably familiar with the old biblical proverb that says, "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." Well, I can tell you that when you start slapping iron back and forth, you're gonna see some heat, some sparks, some resistance. There's some conflict in there as part of that sharpening process. You show me a leadership group or any group that's really well tight-knit and communicates well with one another, and I'll show you a group that's probably gone through some conflict and learned their ways to make their way through it, which is actually a really, really good thing. Now, how does drama play into this? Well, what happens when some piece of conflict isn't dealt with correctly? When some sort of issue of some kind isn't identified, addressed, or resolved? You take something like that, then you sprinkle in some favoritism, maybe a little gossip, some backstabbing, some passive-aggressive or maybe overtly aggressive talk and actions, then you throw in ego and emotions and people starting to take sides, and now you've got some drama. Now, just to be clear, upstream from all of this drama, what causes it and the resolutions to it should always come back to and try to incorporate your company culture. In other words, the less people are bought into your company culture, the less aligned they are, and the more likely you are to deal with more conflict than maybe is necessary, or dealing with that conflict is more difficult than it should be. So, I want to preface this by saying that the number one way to deal with conflict correctly and to avoid drama is cultural alignment inside your business. But that being said, even companies that have really great cultural alignment amongst their people can still sometimes find themselves with unnecessary conflict that can eventually evolve its way into drama. And that's kind of the piece that I want to talk a little bit about today. I see a very, very common source of drama in my years of working with contractors and being one is the relationship and the interactions between the sales teams and production and administration. So why exactly is that? Well, I think that it kind of breaks down into the archetypes of both of those types of job positions. In other words, your typical kind of caricature of a salesperson versus your typical caricature of somebody who's in administration and production. Here's what's interesting. Production and administration are often very similar type of people. And so that's why you kind of see me saying salespeople and then everybody else is because these two departments tend to have very similar people in them. And so let's think about what your typical prototypical salesperson looks like. Well, these people can be very hard-charging. They can oftentimes move very, very quickly. These people can be singularly focused, and oftentimes that focused, can be a little bit self-motivated or self-driven. These people can be dynamic, a little chameleon-y sometimes because they have to be able to navigate conversations with multiple types of personalities, learning styles, hearing styles, and information processing systems when they're trying to close a deal with any number of different clients. So they can be pretty dynamic. They're generally pretty good with people oftentimes, even though sometimes they might seem a little bit abrasive. And they tend to move quickly, like I said before. And here's the thing, one of the weird things about that salesperson is for whatever reason, they oftentimes aren't particularly organized. They like to run and gun things all the time. And sometimes they're not particularly detail-oriented. Remember, they tend to be very singularly focused. Their job is to close deals, at least in their mind. And so any any details they can gloss over but still close the deal to them seems like a win. Now juxtapose that to our typical people who work in production and administration. These people are generally all about processes. They're all about details. They're all about information. Oftentimes they're very much about the nuances of how things are so that they can account for those things in order to get the jobs and the work actually completed. These people love the term slow down to speed up, or slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So you will oftentimes see those folks tend to try and put the brakes on things because they're trying to gather all of those details in order to make sure that things run efficiently. And for them, the devil's in the details and in the speed. And so you take these two different archetypes and you plug them into one company, you're gonna get some conflict and possibly some drama with the way that these people interact with one another. One constantly pushing and one trying to slow down, or one wanting more information and the other not having it. You're definitely gonna see some issues in that. Not always and not exclusively to sales and the rest of the company, but it's definitely the most common place that I see.