#26: This is Where Conflict Comes From

Hi, I'm Sy Wakeman, and you're listening to No Ego, a podcast where we teach you how to ditch the drama, end entitlement, and drive big results in your workplace and your world place. In this episode of the podcast, I want to talk about conflict. I have been getting a lot of questions lately from leaders on best ways to resolve conflict. As you know, on this podcast, I talk a lot about the work of the ego and how the ego sees insult when there really isn't any. And I would tell you that the ego creates conflict where there doesn't have to be any. Because if we are able to go beyond the narrow view of the ego and go beyond that, we can truly find solutions that benefit the greater good and benefit all of us. And our ego tends to help us Situations very narrowly where we get so narrow in our focus that we really start to only see the either/or and that things are in competition. And we forget that all things are possible and that there's infinite possibilities. And if you go beyond ego, you really get into this kind of and mind. So I wanna talk about some of my thoughts on conflict and what we as leaders can do to continue to move that energy of our team away from why we can't or what we're gonna to lose, or what is not going to work, or what actually is inherent in the conflict, to what can work. So we move energy away from why it won't work, or what's holding us back, to how it could work, and what is a possibility that can really take us beyond our limited view of what we're seeing today. I became actually a bit of an expert in conflict, not as a leader, but as Many of you know that I have 8 wonderful sons. I have 4 sons that I've had since they were born and raised them. And then 6 years ago, I welcomed 4 additional sons into my family as I married my husband, Richard. And I remember the times in my life when those little boys would get into some pretty hefty conflict about very important possessions. And in fact, one of the most important possessions in our home was A certain Batman. I think this Batman actually was not just the source of all conflict in our home, but probably the source of all evil in our home when my boys were little. Now, we had probably 100 of these Batman figures. They were the hard plastic Batmans with the pointy feet. And when you stepped on them in the middle of the night, they hurt worse than any Lego. Ever. And I was always scooping up these Batman and putting them away. And the kids loved them. They played with them all the time. But there was this one green Batman that we only had one of, and the kids fought over almost constantly when my little boys were young. I did everything to try and find a second green Batman just like the one, one that we had. And I am convinced that he maybe was some freak of the manufacturing process because he got through with only having one arm. Having a bit of gold paint on him, it seemed like he was almost unfinished. He was the odd man out and the one that caused all kinds of conflicts. And I spent a lot of my life working to resolve conflicts with my boys when they were younger. I was pretty much of a peacenik, someone who believed we could, you know, talk all these things out and that boys shouldn't hit and, and try and use violence to resolve their conflicts. And for those of you that are parents of boys or aunts and uncles to boys, you are probably laughing at that idea now. Here's what happened in My family, I would hear fighting break out from the playroom, and knowing it probably was about this one Batman and 2 little boys who each wanted it. So I would do, I think, what a lot of leaders do. At first, I would absolutely just ignore it and hope that it went away or they resolved it. I think as leaders, we can all relate to the fact that sometimes we know something's going on, but we use hope as our strategy and just figure our employees or kids will work it out. When that didn't happen and the fighting would escalate, as a young parent, I would go down and work to resolve the conflict. And I need to let you know that my first type of resolution was basically what I would call a win-lose, meaning I was the adult with the power. I would take Batman away from whoever had it clenched in their tiny little fists. I would like pry their fingers away from Batman. And I would say, you know what, if you guys can't get along, then I will take Batman and he's mine now. And I would basically put him on top of the fridge and think that this resolved it, that I had settled it by using power. What I found out is whenever there's a win-lose solution, that the losers, even if they hated each other before the conflict, tend to come together and plot the revenge against the power. So whoever is without power will do what they can to regain power. Now, my boys were creative. They would do things like take ketchup out of the fridge, Pour it on the arm of a brother, lay down by the retaining wall out in my yard, and have another come in and say, Mom, Henry is hurt. I would go running out, see the red and the blood, and they would sneak in, get the Batman back, and continue on their way. It became— while Batman was the source of conflict and the issue, when I jumped in and used power, I became the issue. And I think this happens in so many situations where we may settle it by a policy, Or by being judge and jury to our employees, or by simply just telling them what we think and putting a mandate out there. And while this might work in some situations with non-negotiables, in other situations, what you're gonna do is just get those who were in conflict joined together against you now, kind of their new enemy. So I found out pretty quickly that if I had a win-lose situation, that now a lot of our energy went to getting power back. So that didn't work. So I called my mom and I was talking to her about How to resolve conflict with these boys. She was great. She raised 7 kids, and she talked more about how to have them talk it out and maybe reach a compromise. She was a little conflict-averse and reach a compromise. So I came up with this great idea. When they started fighting about the Batman, I would talk to them and say that we had to share the Batman. And so even though we had 99 other Batmen, the focus was on green Batman. I would actually set an egg timer and say, you know what, William, you can have Batman for 10 minutes, and when the timer goes off— Oh, I see. goes off, I want a peaceful transition and Henry can have Batman for 10 minutes. And that way you both can enjoy Batman. I'm thinking this is win-win. What I found out is it was actually lose-lose. See, they didn't really focus on the time they had the Batman. They focused mostly on the time they didn't have the Batman. And every time the egg timer went off, there wasn't a peaceful transition of power. And in fact, my new job as their parent and leader was to monitor The egg timer and monitor and micromanage all of their sharing. So it became more work for me, and people really didn't feel great about the solution. And then as I started to think more about ego and conflict, I started to realize that win-lose is about power and ego, and that lose-lose, which is the ultimate compromise, meaning that when you compromise, both parties lose, both parties are less off, and that really engages the ego. So both of those solutions were really ego solutions. In order To kind of move beyond this chronic conflict over green Batman in my house, I got a brainstorm and approached it differently. I went to these boys. Now, they had aged a bit, but I went to these boys and I said, you know what? We're not gonna have this level of conflict in our playroom. So here's the deal. Our reality is that we have one green Batman and we have 2 boys. So what's the goal? The goal is to have fun and to play well together. What can 2 boys do with one green Batman? And still have fun? And I put it back in their court. It's another type of self-reflection that gets us beyond ego. It takes us out of that frontal cortex and focusing on what we own and what we are losing and all that win-lose stuff. Let's really think about this in a broader context. What can 2 boys do with 1 green Batman and still have fun? Now, they came up with some ideas that I would've never thought of. And just because I gave them that question doesn't mean that I didn't retain veto power. Their first response was something Like, we could put him in the blender and, you know, watch how that works. And I was horrified because, I mean, that's Mommy's margarita blender. That's a very important part of my kitchen. And I vetoed that. They then came up with a solution that if it were left to me, their parent or leader, I would've never thought of because I'm not little boys and I don't really play with Batman. They came up with the solution. What if we Filled up the big bathtub, put in a bunch of bubbles, put 99 Batman in the tub, had one green Batman dive bomb from the shower, and they played out of the solution for hours. Now, I had some water to clean up outside the tub, but they were fully entertained when I, instead of telling them what's gonna be done or coming up with a solution or taking power away from them or having them compromise, they came up with a solution that was really sustainable. It fit their needs. And even though it's a silly story, it's my conquering our Batman conflict as a parent. It really stuck with me so that when I was working with so many different departments and groups and functions and team members, I would often remember that win-win isn't just a trite cliché, that a win-win solution really is a beyond ego solution, and that it arises not when I as a leader give the answers or impose or use my power, but when I can reframe the question so We take out or and put in and, and with that, really open people up to a bigger piece of reflection. Now, in college, I actually had the opportunity with one of my team assignments to study conflict, and that was long before I was a parent. But as I became a leader, all these lessons in conflict started to come back to me, and I remembered some of the research that I did in college. And I think it's also useful to you as leaders to have this context on how do you take the wisdom of the Batman conflict resolution and put it into work. And one of our classes, we were needing to do some work that was research-based on interview processing. So it was qualitative research. And we had just studied a journal article that came out that talked about a group that looked at the number or the amount of strategic plans that were actually accomplished. Like, we all put so much work into strategic planning. And then when you look at what actually after all of that work changes in the organization and gets implemented and produces the desired results, it was something that was so grim. It was about like 15%, if I'm remembering correctly. It was very low, the actual results produced based on all this planning effort. It was kind of a statement on how much work we put into strategic planning and questioning whether there was return on investment for this type of planning. And then it looked at what got in the way of plans being accomplished. And one of the main barriers One of the barriers to plans being accomplished actually had to do with conflict. They said that one of the reasons for the dismal results was that conflict ensued when they were attempting to implement and really focus the organization around new goals. And that a lot of the times this conflict was like longer-standing conflict where that level of conflict had killed many good intentions in the past. So we saw that as really interesting and a great opportunity if we could help people get better return on investment of their strategic planning process. their visioning process and their implementation of these big initiatives, that would be a great contribution. If conflict was an issue, and if the way you resolve issues is really doing some root cause analysis, its root cause by definition is solvable. We really thought, well, gosh, what if we could do some root cause analysis and really understand, are there some typical root causes of the majority of conflict in the workplace? We went out and we started to do some interviews. And as we interviewed people, we asked them what they thought was was the source of conflict in their teams and in their workplaces. Very quickly, we saw the data fall into categories, and that was really exciting. Whenever you see some organization to the data and some, you know, themes emerging quickly, it always gets exciting for me as a researcher, 'cause I think, gosh, this could— we could be stumbling on some universal truths. So the data we collected fell into 2 categories. When we asked people about the source of conflict, they very quickly talked about personality conflicts, and they said, you know, We can get lost in conflicts between personalities and forget kind of the greater good of the organization. But basically, there are just some folks that are very difficult to get along with. They are resistant to change, and they really block a lot of change. And so we had this category of personality conflicts. And then there's another category that was interesting to us because people were saying that basically we want to make all these changes, but we run up against some people that just aren't really competent in their positions. They've been promoted to their highest level of incompetence, so to speak, the Peter Principle at the time. And we thought that was interesting that if you think about conflict, that a majority of the conflict has one of two causes, that somebody is not capable in their role or somebody has personality conflict. So as we were working through these two categories, we lovingly referred to them as the jerk and idiot categories. So the bottom line is that we had conflict because some people were jerks, personality conflict, and other people were idiots that, you know, they just weren't incompetent. I joke a lot that our ego's very judgy, and when we meet people, we basically are trying to put them into 3 categories. When we meet somebody, we listen to how they see the world, and if they see the world like us, we're quick to label them genius. If they don't see the world like us, we have to kind of figure out, is it, you know, that they just are not that bright, they weren't raised right, or are they working hard to be disagreeable? And so it's kind of these same jerk, idiot, genius and they sounded familiar. So as we were wrapping up our first part of the study and doing kind of our summaries, and we started to think about the sources of conflict, the root cause, jerks and idiots, we got back to our research question. And root cause by definition is solvable. So if the problem with these jobs were the people, by definition, if it's root cause, it'd need to be solvable. So like, how do you solve for jerks and idiots? Like, how do you smarten up an idiot or nice up a jerk? And we started to see that perhaps we weren't at the root cause level. And in fact, people had really portrayed to us this personal side of conflict and really judging and blaming of the people, and that this really couldn't be the true source. And so we regrouped, we went back out, and we asked better questions. And what we found out was interesting. We found out that the root cause of conflict really wasn't the people or their ego behaviors, although that's definitely a source of drama. We found out that if you went beyond those symptoms, that the root cause of conflict was actually more around ambiguity, lack of clarity. And the ego loves ambiguity because it can insert its own agenda whenever there's ambiguity. We also know that ambiguity is everywhere. There's no way possible for an organization to clarify everything. In fact, that's where overmanaging and underleading comes from. But we looked at the fact that the personal side of conflict was these personality conflicts, And naming people incompetent and judging and blaming and all of the stuff we do out of ego. But if you really got beyond ego, a root cause of conflict really was around ambiguity or lack of clarity. And we actually found that there's lack of clarity in kind of 3 key areas. And this is why I wanted to share this with you, because I think as a leader, it gives you a diagnostic checklist of where can I facilitate clarifying conversations and self-reflections around these 3 areas. And the 3 areas were goals, roles, and procedures. That if there were clarity in goals, roles, and procedures, regardless of personality differences, regardless of people's general level of competency, they were able to quickly move through and get stuff done. Let's talk about this, what we call the professional side of conflict, the beyond-ego side of conflict. My first tip to you is whenever you're seeing conflict, what will be presented to you is the personal side. Who's at fault, and who's an obstructionist, and who's the barrier? And your first job as a leader is to take energy away from the personal and manage it into what I would call the professional side of conflict, the giving people the benefit of the doubt, the no ego, the more expansive, the taking it to a bigger place. And your checklist is, can we get clarity on goals, roles, and procedures? Not that you as a leader have to deliver clarity. I think that actually leaves people less better off because now they're dependent on you. But can you facilitate people gaining their own clarity in these areas? They're in order for a reason, because once people are clear on goals, they can facilitate clarity on the role that they can play in achieving those goals, the contribution they can make, how they can make it work and contribute and use their expertise rather than focus on why it won't work. And then lastly, the procedures is we decide how to get the work done. And this is a great place to use business discipline like project management methodology or product launch processes. So the procedures We don't really need a bunch of policies, but we need people that are capable in business discipline. So let's talk about goals, roles, and procedures. If you're a leader and there's conflict, the first place to check is, is there clarity of goals? And many times, people are seeing their goals as either/or or mutually exclusive, rather than finding the higher ground, the win-win that comes out of the and. When I had the 4 boys and they were very little, I found that as a leader, As a spouse, I would get into conflict with my spouse on a regular basis over very silly things. Our egos would create conflict where there really wasn't any. One of the places we had conflict, actually, that we'd argue about is our goal would be to have fun for the day, and we would end up arguing about who did more than their fair share and whose approach was right. And I mean, we're arguing about how to have fun, basically. But it would tend to go like this, and it was just an ongoing ego conflict we got in. But we would go and make plans plans for the day. Because we both were entrepreneurs and worked from home, we knew that we needed to really put some structure around what we would call mandatory family fun days. We needed to do some planning to get the kids out of the house, to get us out of the house so we wouldn't end up working or getting lost in emails, that we really just wanted to be present for our kids on those days that we should have free from work. In the mornings, we would— I remember it clearly— we'd be sitting in church and I would be the most grateful mom in the world I'd look down that pew and see that I just had the most wonderful spouse who was a great dad and kind and loving. And I would have these 4 beautiful little boys, and I just would be so grateful. And that usually was about 9:45. We lived close to the church, so we would get home and have plans to go to the zoo, which was over an hour away. That might be our plans. At 9:45, I'd be full of gratitude. At 10:05, I'd be in the driveway thinking I had made the biggest mistake of my life, married the wrong person, and that my husband was an And he would be thinking I was an absolute idiot, and we would be in this conflict. So how does one go in 20 minutes or less from, I have the perfect family, to, I can't believe I married this guy? Where does the ego take over in all of that? How does this even happen? Well, here's how it happened in our household. My husband would begin his preparations for our trip to the zoo, our road trip, and that included taking the van out, Filling it with gas, and maybe grabbing a bottle of water for him and I. And then he would sit in the driveway, and he would basically do this safety check. And the safety check involved making sure the horn worked. And he would test the horn over and over and over. He would sit in the driveway and honk the horn. Now, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I'm thinking, oh, he's checking the horn to make sure on our road trip, perhaps there'll be cattle in the middle of the road, and he'll need to use the horn. That didn't last very long. By the 5th horn honking, I would be in the driveway, furious. Why? My path was different to get ready for our road trip. I would begin to even get the kids out of the van to get their clothes changed. And that involved making sure that I got them out of the impossible car seats and consoling one child because the other child had just looked at him or something trivial. And I would get inside and I would begin packing clothes in case they peed, clothes in case they pooped. puked, a wagon and a stroller in case they wouldn't ride together, the double stroller in case they would. At the time, MapQuest directions, Pokémon Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Silver, Gold, Goldfish crackers, juice boxes, diapers, sunscreen. I'm packing, packing, packing. The whole time I'm packing, I have one little guy who's following me around, kind of walking like Frankenstein with his hands up saying, me hold you. He's about 40 pounds. I'd have him carried on one hip. I would have another little guy following me around. I was trying Trying to direct traffic, get everybody's bladders emptied, where my husband just emptied his own bladder. I would be really just trying to pull this whole thing together. And oftentimes, I would be hearing questions from, like, 2 stories above me where they're saying, Mom, where are my red tennis shoes? And I was really organized. I would give, like, GPS coordinates about, do you see your blue jacket? Look 2 feet below. And we're yelling back and forth. And they would scream. ...that they weren't there. And I would have to haul all these kids upstairs and basically bring what I call my homing uterus into the room. It's the uterus I have that makes things that were invisible reappear in the very place I said they were. So I would bring the uterus into the room, and it was almost like a little flashlight would shine out my belly, and there would be the shoes. And I'm doing all of this running, listening to the horn honking, and my husband sitting comfortably ...in the van. And I would race out there. And I would honestly get to the point where I thought he was just a jerk. When he wanted all these beautiful babies, he was Mr. Partnership, and he loved having a big family, but he was just being a jerk. He wasn't helping. And I was, in his mind, being kind of an idiot. He— in his mind, these kids should just be able to get in the car and ride for an hour without making a fuss, and not need Pokémon and Barney tapes. And we didn't need to pack our whole house to go on this trip. So he's thinking, I'm an idiot who indulges our kids, and I'm thinking he's a jerk that doesn't help. And I finally recalled that I had a skill set I could use in this marital conflict since I had training as a counselor. And I asked him one day— I knew that it's not about jerks or idiots, that's the personal side of conflict. And whenever we're seeing somebody as a jerk or an idiot, or acting like we're the jerk or idiot, it's time to move from the personal to the professional side and start with the goal. So I said to him, honey, what's your goal? And he said, my goal is to get someplace at least once in their marriage on time. Now, when you're resolving conflict, ask people what their goal is, and then be very careful not to judge it. So I asked him, what's your goal? And he said, I would love to get one place on time in our marriage just once. And friends, I thought he was a jerk, and I knew better than to judge. But when he said that goal, I started to judge him. I thought, he's not a jerk. He's an idiot. Does it matter what time we get to the zoo? The elephants don't pack up at 2 o'clock and say, gosh, we would have waited, but you were late. There's no point to this on-time business. Until I stopped judging and started helping, and I said, help me understand why that goal's important. And he told me a really great reason, that if we don't get to the zoo at a decent time, let's say by like 1 o'clock, we won't be done until right before dinner. And if we're done late, we'll probably stop and feed the kids and get home late. And I will jump in to pack for the next week, and he's home mostly with the kids. And he I won't get to sit down and crack a beer open and watch TV. Now, this guy's asking for one evening, one hour of TV and a beer, in order to maintain his sanity as a stay-at-home parent. Like, that's so reasonable. I think in, like, Iowa prisons, you get more TV than that, and probably a beer or two once in a while. I don't know. But he was not asking for much. So I understand his goal. He wants to get going so that we can get back into decent times. He can decompress before I jump in, pack for the week, and give him the responsibility of the kids again. My goal? I wanted to have a nice ride because when we went on family trips, even though it was my car, he insisted on driving. And when he drove and the kids started to act up, he would say, Sy, do something. You do something. And if I didn't bring all that stuff, I would end up in the front seat, but on my knees, turned around backwards, trying to, you know, I would do a sock puppet show with socks I took off my own feet, trying to entertain kids so they didn't fuss while we were driving. It was important to me to have all of those things so that the kids had a nice ride and I had a nice ride. His goal is to get going and back on time. My goal is to have a nice ride. Our egos would have us believe that this was a conflict worth starting our day in argument, when in fact, when we really narrowed down our goals and we took out or and we put in and, and we really knew our overall goal— Was the same. Was to have a wonderful day. And we had individual goals of how can we do this in a timely manner and have a nice time? The solution became so easy. See, innovation, collaboration is your natural state once the drama's gone. Once you're beyond ego, it's easy solving these dilemmas. If you're in a dilemma that's hard to solve, I would guarantee you, you're not asking the right questions. You're not positioning the question in the right way. Once we ask ourselves, how can we get going quickly And still have fun on the road, it was an easy solution. We packed a backpack that was kind of our car backpack. There was a recipe card. I just wrote what food I would like for him to pick up and grab for the kids and get on our way. We started to redesign our processes. Instead of take all of the juice box in from a Sam's Club run, we would leave part of 'em in the car. We just got really efficient at having things packed, ready to go, and him knowing exactly what to do to help out, and us being able to get in the house and back out on the road. In very quick fashion. This lesson I hope you're picking up on has to do with our tool that we talk a lot about, and that is the power of and. And there are so many times when we're looking at something from a low perspective, our own departmental goals or our function's goals, and we really believe we're in conflict when in fact, if we looked at our organization's goals and we replaced or with and, And we could dramatically change the way we work together and problem solve for the good of the organization and move out of our own personal preference to really deliver on the potential that the organization's needing from us, the potential of the solution. Along these same lines, I was asked to work in a hospital setting with a couple of groups that were in heavy conflict. The laboratory department and the physicians had gotten into a pretty severe conflict over some changes they were trying to make in the organization. The laboratory had studied their processes and found out some really cool ways to be more efficient. That they would, for some tests that they run, not run every test one-off, but they would batch process. They would wait until they had a certain number in the day of non-critical tests, and they would run them all together because the savings came when they mixed up a batch. It was mixed, and they could use it on one test Or 20, but they only had about 10 minutes to use these very expensive chemicals. And so the more tests you did, the more cost savings there were. It's kind of a simplistic way of explaining it. When they went to implement these changes, their goal was to be more cost-effective. The physicians were not supporters. They were very concerned about patients having to wait for lab results or them having to wait. They were concerned that the lab was directing the care of the patient more than the physician was. Their biggest concern or goal was that the patients maintain access. So they had gotten into the state of mind that cost-effective initiatives for cost efficiency in the lab was counter to patient access, that it would hinder it, that it was an either-or situation. And they were in great conflict. The physicians were saying, if you're batch processing, our patients won't get what they need when they need it. The lab was saying, we can't just continue business as usual running all these one-off tests. It's not an efficient use of our resources. And so when I got called in, people had really personalized this conflict. And I was able in the moment to be a great facilitator. I asked the laboratory what their goal was. And I had drawn a box up in front of people. And on the right-hand side, the right leg of that box, I wrote cost-effectiveness. And then I affirmed the goal. I said, thank you, lab. Great goal. Awesome work. We love to enhance our cost-effectiveness. I asked the physicians what their goal was. It was access. Again, I said, love that goal. We need to protect access for our patients. And so a trick for a leader to not get pitted into the conflict or be judge and jury is to compliment both goals. Worthy endeavors, wonderful place. Those 2 goals were departmental goals. I asked them, what's the overall goal for the organization? Of course, it was easy: provide safe, great outcomes, great patient care. So I put that at the top of the box. So if you imagine the box, I've got great patient care as the overarching goal at the top. The right-hand side cost-effectiveness, the left-hand side access labeled on those legs. And I wrote up in the box the word or, and I said, right now it seems that you're viewing this either/or. Either we have cost-effectiveness or we have access. And I crossed out or and put in and. I said, what if the question really was, in the name of great patient care, how do we enhance cost-effectiveness and maintain access? What if that were the better question? And this is the reflection question, the part that moves us beyond ego into that great part of our brain that can handle complexity. It's just a wonderful ego bypass to go from or to and. Not just to do more work. I'm not testing reality that the and is we just muscle our way through it. The and is that we think at a higher level of consciousness. It raises our vibration, it raises our consciousness. So the and became a new question. And what if we could do both? Good question. I tell you what, I did not have to do much work in providing the answers. I'm not the expert, just like I'm not the expert in Batman, what 2 boys can do with one Batman to have fun. But they were the experts. They came up with a system I would've never thought of. Again, this is where great leaders facilitate solutions that they would never self-generate. They facilitate the innovation, which is the natural state of their team once the drama's gone. They said, if physicians want to maintain access, let's give them 10 opportunities a week, no questions asked. They can just order what they want, when they want. They can maintain that freedom. And they actually gave them Monopoly dollars to pay for those orders because the lab needed some constraints, some knowledge of how much of certain chemicals they would predict to be using and how they could control costs, what their run rates were. The lab was fine with that. They knew kind of their higher and lower limits. So they were fine with that? possible ends of this, and they were willing to just accept that improvement as phase 1. What is wonderful about the solution is the doctors were assured, the lab was assured. Now, most doctors never even used their dollars to order one-off tests. What they found out is that what they feared, having these tests come up that they needed quicker than what the lab had planned on running them, just didn't happen that often. They also found one doctor who used more than than her fair share of her money and other people's money. And that exposed an issue with her practice patterns and how often she was ordering lab before she was doing some other type of assessment. So they were able to improve her work. It was this great solution that they self-generated. When it comes to your first place to start with conflict, start with trying to move people out of their personal goals or functional goals or department goals to the higher perspective of the organization and move them out of or Into and, and that's how you're gonna facilitate great questions. Many times people are seeing why it wouldn't be possible to have access and cost-effectiveness, and a great way to regroup that is, but what if it were possible? What would that look like? 'Cause people will shy away from that and by citing reality and all the reasons it's not possible. And remember, great leaders manage energy away from why we can't to how we could. Getting next to the roles, a lot of people in conflict get very narrowly focused And define their jobs rather than their roles. When people would come to me and they'll go, is it really my job to do X? I would say, you know what, your job is pretty narrowly defined. I was asked to write a job description by HR, and it's my best guess at how you might spend some of your time while employed here. But your role is to do whatever it takes to serve our customer or our patient. That's legal and moral. And we have some constraints, but not many. So it may not be your job, but it's definitely your role. And a lot of folks, when they're judging, assign people a version of a role that they've never really talked to that person about accepting. And people want to resort to job descriptions and such to define that. And I would encourage you as a leader to help people just talk about what needs to happen for all of us to play at our most empowered level. What would What would great look like? If you were being great right now, what would that look like? And that usually takes us away from what I have to do, we're playing defense, to playing offense, like what I could do to have impact. And this is where engagement really gets important because without self-reflection, most people believe they can't have any impact over their circumstances. It's learned helplessness, the opposite of personal accountability. When I help you self-reflect, like what would great look like, I help you identify where you could have impact, where you could go plug and play. And that really is what drives engagement. folks, not perfect external circumstances or perks like foosball and pool, but really knowing where you can have impact. And I think this is really important. A lot of conflicts comes up with just lack of clarity of these roles where we expect something of someone else that we've never really even just asked them for. When I was a therapist, couples would say to me, and usually it would be if it was a heterosexual couple, would say, he never says he loves me. And I would say, well, just ask him. If you need to know if he loves you, just ask him, do you love me? And they would ask him in my session, and the partner usually, you know, said, absolutely. And they would do things like, well, if I have to ask, it doesn't count, or, they should know. And it was so hard to break through this ego's need for people to just know and read your mind, and if I have to ask, it doesn't count. And roles are really important here, and this clarity. I remember one time I was asked, to serve on a parent-teacher association as the president. I was excited to do that because our meetings tended to be long and they rambled, and I thought, you know what, we'll get together and we have just very few things to decide, and we'll communicate to the parents, and then we've got a babysitter, go have a free night together and enjoy, but we're going to keep these meetings short. So my first meeting, I had been told by the leader of the school, I'll just call her Julie, was the secretary I was the president, and we had a vice president and a treasurer. So I had the meeting. We did it very quickly. We decided the day of the pizza sale, when the kids could wear jeans, 'cause it was a school with uniforms, and we really just booked through our agenda. I looked over at Julie, and she wasn't taking notes, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I thought, you know, she probably runs a million-dollar organization, and she can remember these things, and I'll just trust that she's gonna put minutes out. That's what secretaries do. About a week later, no minutes had come out, and we needed those for the people who couldn't attend. I called her up and, benefit of the doubt, I said, Julie, could you do me a favor? Could you send out some minutes from the meeting we were just at? She said, sure. Next month, we had the meeting. She didn't take any minutes. I was a little bit more frustrated because I'm thinking, as secretary, she should just get these minutes out. I called her up and I said, you know, can you get those minutes out? And she said, well, this time it doesn't work so well to help you out. I have family in town, and so I guess I could do it in a couple of weeks. weeks, but she was kind of resistant. And my ego saw this as an issue, and I saw insult where there isn't any. And I think, why is she being so uppity? Why doesn't she just do her job? She sent the minutes out, although they were late. Third month, no minutes. I call her up. I'm like, Julie, this isn't hard. Like, as secretary, you should just attend the meeting, send the minutes out. And she said, tell me more. Like, what do you mean as secretary? See, the leader told me she was the secretary, That no one ever told Julie or asked her, 'cause it was a volunteer position to be the secretary. So I'm furious with her because I'm judging her based on a role I'm assuming she knows she has, and she doesn't know she has this role. She's just helping me out. And the first time she was glad to, but after the third time, she's thinking, why don't you call the secretary? She's thinking I just picked her out of a group of 100 parents and I'm like torturing her. So she's thinking I'm a jerk. I'm thinking she's an idiot. And this is where conflict arises. arises and where we as leaders interfere because we try and do all the clarifying and dole out the roles instead of asking people to come together and say, why don't you guys get together and plan on how you're going to work together and who's going to have accountability and how you're going to really as a team deliver up what the organization needs. Now, if you're doing all of this well and you're depersonalizing conflict, you're professionalizing it, you're working on goals, you're working on roles, you will have to do Very little with procedures. Too many people want to over-proceduralize things because they haven't clarified goals or roles, but they want somebody to give them a manual or a policy book on how to do it so that they can manage with clarity rather than lead with discernment and facilitate interactions. The power of a leader isn't what we tell people about, it's what we get people thinking about. This procedure piece, be very careful not to over-proceduralize your workplace. You have a few non- non-negotiables. And otherwise, you really want people to be agile and nimble and able to really work more in agile format rather than a waterfall format. You really want this agile organization where you're not tied down by dictating how the work can be done. What does help people though, once they're clear with goals and rules, with just knowing how to quickly fall in and get work done, is if they have business acumen, if they are fluent in the core business disciplines like project management and product launch cycles and problem-solving frameworks. So for those of you that find people over-relying on procedures, you might want to look at developing your people in the acumen, in financial acumen, business acumen, decision-making, problem-solving, project management methodology. Because when I know what the goal is and I know our roles, if I can fall back on these really great best practice methodologies, it really supersedes any policy and procedure, it really talks to us about how to get the work done. If you don't have clear goals and roles, that whole procedural piece, what will happen is that people will start playing soccer like 5-year-olds. Meaning, in order to get the work done on the operational level, you will have involved a senior vice president, a vice president, a director, and managers, and lots of people. Any issue that comes up, you'll have this very expensive group of people trying to keep their eyes on the ball. And 5-year-olds play soccer in a Clump. They get out of their positions, and it's an expensive way to do business. So if you find that when you look up around the table, you have so many people involved in all levels of these decisions, or in recovering for your customer, or in trying to make decisions, really look towards how you need to get more clear about goals, more clear about roles, and more fluent in business discipline with your people. If you over-rely on procedures or you over-rely On getting groups together to make decisions that, if goals and roles were clear, would almost make themselves. You would just do the right thing and really think your way through that. It's important that, that you really problem solve that. My goal for you is whenever things get personal and ego-focused and you're convinced that people are your problem, that these jobs would be easy if it weren't for people, that you can depersonalize that and really look to where is there ambiguity and how can I facilitate clarifying discussions? Not that clarify for all time, but that clarify for the moment. A leader's job is, when possible, bringing your team to a higher perspective. And I have a story I wanted to share to end this podcast with that I have carried with me for 35 years. I had volunteered at a summer camp, and I did it with kind of poor motive. There was a guy who I thought was adorable, and he worked summers at that camp. And I thought, well, if I work summers at that camp, I'll be close to him. I really wanted to have him understand how incredible I was. So I interviewed for this camp. And when they asked me in the interview if I knew orienteering, I said, absolutely. Like, who doesn't know orienteering? And for all of you folks that are a lot younger than I, this is before GPS and geocaching. I mean, this is where you count your steps and you have a compass and you know how long your stride is. I lied. I said, I know orienteering. A few weeks later, they gave me about 20 4th graders and they said, Sal, you're going to do orienteering today. We're going to take you and drop you off in this point in the woods, and then you and the kids are going to orienteer your way back. This seems serious. I didn't want to jeopardize the kids. I realized I had lied. I pulled my boss aside and I said, I just need to come clean. I don't know how to orienteer, so it would be really silly to send all these kids into the woods with me. You'll end up doing a rescue mission. I wouldn't know how to get back. I'm sorry, Sorry, I lied. You can fire me now. Well, he didn't have enough help. And he said, I'm not gonna fire you. He gave me a crash course in orienteering and was about to send me off with all these little kids. And I said, I think this is a horrible idea. What if I get lost? And he said, here's a trick. If you get lost, seek higher grounds. Climb a tree, climb a ledge, a mount. There were kind of hills in the area. Go up higher. Look from that higher perspective. where you're at and commit that to memory, then come down to where the kids are and lead them according to that memory or that vision. I thought, good advice. We got lost within, like, 20 minutes of being out. So I climbed up on a ledge. It was called the Ledges. It was kind of a hill with these cliffs. And what was funny is when I climbed up there, the higher perspective showed me that we were only in a square mile. Any direction I walked straight, I would be at a gravel road, and could arrange pickup. We were in no danger. Otherwise, this leader probably would never have sent me out with these kids. But I got that higher perspective, came down, and walked the kids out, and we were fine. A summer experience came back to me so many times when I would find my team at that lower perspective, really not seeing their way out of a situation, not finding that win-win solution. I would know that it was my job as a leader to seek higher ground. And that higher ground for me is look at the organization, that overview, get them out of their individuality, goals and really make it about the organization's goals, seek that higher perspective, commit that view to memory, and then come back down to where we had a seeming conflict and work it from that higher perspective, usually with the word and rather than or. I hope that you have found some helpful things about conflict. It was a topic coming up a lot that I wanted to take a break from having guests on the podcast and go deep into for As you find conflicts coming up in your life today, I just want you to think about where you can use that higher perspective or where you can draw a box and replace or with and. Really, you can start becoming aware of when you're in ego and you're seeing something as all or nothing, either or, as a threat to going forward, and how you can reflect and go beyond ego and really shape it into a win-win solution and how you can stop directing your team or using power or compromise and really call them up to greatness. Use the tools that we provide. And if you're interested in these tools, check out realitybasedleadership.com, access the extras tab on that website. It has a lot of great tools for you to use. I think you'll find it helpful. And of course, in the book No Ego, We have a whole toolkit in there. The last 20 pages or so are exactly tools for you to use to get people beyond ego. I hope that you are well, and I look forward to the next time you tune in. Thank you so much for joining the episode today. If you're loving this podcast, just make sure that you check me out on Facebook and Instagram, and especially YouTube.