How to Handle Conflict in Your Team
In the last post, I set the scene. I was on call as a hospital chaplain and I’d been woken up at 2am to sort out a crisis.
A husband and wife were about to lose their newborn baby, and other family members were mourning with them.
This should have been a time for consoling the parents. Instead, it was descending into a weird version of the Tarantino flick The Hateful Eight where the actors wail and give each other dirty looks throughout most of the movie.
The Caucasian side of the family was mourning quietly, while the Hispanic side was expressive in their grief… and each side was growing increasingly angry at the other for not grieving “the right way.”
What I did that night, I do whenever there’s a conflict between two sides, neither of which are necessarily right or wrong.
First, I give each side a “container” to vent their frustration. After all, sometimes what they're going to say could trigger others. It's like a bomb detonating… and it’s going to be, umm, “quite disruptive.”
What this means in practice is, maybe I’d take one of the sides into a separate room and let them do whatever they need to do. Vent. Punch the wall. Explode.
My role here is simply to listen. To affirm what they say without judgment and just give them permission to be themselves.
After I’ve really listened to them, given them space to let them go through whatever they need to go through... only then have I earned the right to ask them for something.
This is when I invite the first group to give the second group exactly the same permission I’ve just given the first group. I’ve never had somebody refuse to do this. Yet.
After I realized the Hispanic and Caucasian sides were getting increasingly angry with each other, I went back and forth between the two sides.
I’d speak to one group, giving them more and more permission to be themselves, along with the space to grieve how they wanted.
Then I gave them more and more encouragement to allow the other group to be who they were.
Then I’d go to the other group and do exactly the same.
Every time I did this, the invitation was to continually grow their ability to tolerate differences in others… so both sides could grieve together, knowing they were going to be doing it in different ways.
I have to say, it was pretty satisfying to see those two groups come together at such an important time.
OK, so what lesson can we learn from all of this... apart from, “don’t become a hospital chaplain any time soon”?
I mean, you probably won’t ever face a situation quite like the one I just described.
But leaders often face scenarios where people argue over things they feel are important… and where neither side is necessarily right or wrong.
I have an Iranian friend who’s mother is fond of saying the phrase “People are different,” whenever friends are having conflict. We would always chuckle at how obvious this statement was.
It sounds a lot more profound when you hear her thick Persian accent. But, what she’s really saying is... we need to learn to tolerate differences. You can’t change people as much as you think, so you may as well accept them from the start.
As leaders, we have a responsibility to become aware of how those differences play out and affect the performance of our team.
I’ll talk more about this in future posts. I think it’s going to be quite an eye-opener. For now, you could start by taking a look at the Leadership Languages quiz.
It shows how our own language can cause the differences between people to become a source of tension and conflict.
