A founder gets interrupted by their co-founder Mark in a meeting and feels hurt. Instead of reacting angrily, they text him honestly about it and set up a specific time to talk on Friday at 2 PM. The example shows how to contain conflict before it festers.
Chapters
So how do we contain conflict? My fictitious co-founder Mark just interrupted me, uh, 3 times in our all-hands meeting. And so I'm, I'm at the deepest level, I'm feeling deeply hurt because Mark's also my friend, but you know, superficially I'm quite frustrated. And so I'll just stick with the anger. A much healthier way of doing this is for me to hit Mark up and say, hey Mark, listen, I'm having some, some feelings and reactions to, uh, the all-hands meeting. I would love it if we could debug and realign. Uh, I'm looking at the calendars now. Do you think you could meet with me Friday at 2 PM? So what I just did is I contained the conflict. I gave it a time. I gave it a space. Uh, Mark now knows that Matt had some type of reactions to this and he wants to process those with me.