Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Humans naturally avoid conflict because it represents a potential threat to relationships important to us. But in disruptive organizations, healthy disagreements and conflict strengthen and deepen relationships with a foundation of openness and trust. Disruptive leaders must surface disagreements to ensure that everyone is completely committed to the tough disruption journey ahead.
To be competitive, it’s no longer enough to be innovative – you must have a strategy for disruptive growth, a plan to identify and seize an opportunity no one else has the audacity or confidence to reach for. Disruptors don’t just blow things up – they also create and build things that result in huge, positive change. Welcome to The New Rules of Disruption with Charlene Li. For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future and thrive with disruption. She couples the ability to look beyond the horizon with pragmatic advice on what actions work today. She helps executives and boards recognize that companies must be disruptive to compete, not just innovate.
New Rules of Disruption Ep5_FC
Wed, 11/17 7:01 PM • 21:47
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
conflict, organization, leader, disagree, feedback, relationship, healthy, disruption, idea, create, people, person, integrity, deal, performance improvement plan, commit, leadership, decision, disruptive, respect
I'd like to thank Workplaces For Meta for supporting this podcast. To make your place of work a great place to work, visit workplace.com/human.
Leaders have never been challenged in their careers as much as they are today. With technology empowering the voices of customers, many leaders are realizing that we're now in a perpetual state of always-on transformation. It's time for disruption, a transformation of leadership and a transformation of ourselves. But what roles do we play by when you want to create this change? This podcast is about how we as leaders, must transform ourselves to make it all work. My name is Charlene Li, and these are the New Rules of Disruption.
In our last episode, we talked about the importance of openness. What when you have an open organization, something very curious happens. A lot of feedback, disagreement, and conflicts come to the surface. Because everything is out in the open, there is no place for unsaid things or actions to hide. So one key skill you have to master as a disruptive leader of change is to create space for healthy conflict. Because guaranteed, if you're moving fast, if you're trying to create disruptive growth, or go through a transformation, there will be disagreements and conflict, left, right, and center. So you have to learn how to have healthy conflict and look forward to using it as a way to resolve differences.
Your role as a leader is to ensure that your team and organization retain strong relationships in the process, and move through it in a seamless way. Because otherwise, things come to a grinding halt. We've all worked in organizations that didn't have a good feedback system, where people didn't feel comfortable to disagree in the open, resulting in a lot of backroom negotiations and politicking. And I think we can all agree that it's inefficient and debilitating, to forming strong, healthy cultures.
02:26
When I started Altimeter, one of the first things we did was to create a list of values. And at the very top of that was integrity. Now, this was something initially that we put on and took off. Because of course everybody knows you have to act with integrity, why would that even be a value, it's such a clear value, do we really need to have to state it. And in the end, we decided to keep it in place because we defined integrity as the ability to have a relationship that was based on having honest conversations. Because one of the most difficult things to do is when you have a conflict with somebody to not bring it up. It's our most natural human thing to do. It's like, oh, it's just probably a small thing. I'll just let it slide. But whenever there is something that is left unsaid in a relationship, and it's not the strongest relationship you could have, and what we felt was that if we were going to work with integrity with each other, then we really needed to be able to have these conversations with each other, no matter what because it was a value that we had in our organization with each other.
Ray Dalio, the CEO of the hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, has a belief in creating radical transparency in his organization. And he said that this is about creating an environment where everyone has the right to understand, to understand each other to understand what is going on. And when you want to be creating a transformative, fast-moving organization, then this is the environment you want to create also where everybody has a voice heard, and that they can be acknowledged. And if there are differences that we work them out, rather than keep them hidden in the backdoor. Now, this is difficult to do, because we are not wired to have difficult conversations.
We are wired to assimilate ourselves to go along with the flow. And so what we're calling for instead in this new rule of leadership, is to actually foster these conversations to happen to make sure that we're bringing everything out so that nothing is ever left unsaid so that no one is ever not heard. And as a result, we develop greater understanding. We're not asking for agreement here. Very rarely does everyone agree this is not the purpose of having healthy conflict. In the end, there may be some people who are not happy about the decision. But at least we know where everybody stands.
In my work with leaders, they oftentimes say to me, I'm not comfortable with this kind of transparency of healthy conflict. I don't want to have to give feedback to people, all this negative feedback, it just makes people feel really awful. And in the end, what are we really gaining? Well, think about it, if you don't give somebody this tough feedback if you don't confront somebody with something that you're uncomfortable with, what happens? Especially if it's behavior that you don't think is good, but it's uncomfortable having to tell them about it. And what happens is it continues on and on. Now, this could be somebody who's not performing well. And you need to give them feedback. And maybe difficult because it's a very uncomfortable situation to tell somebody that something's wrong.
I have a personal story about this. I was a very young person in my first job. And I had a leader who had terrible body odor. And this was very obvious to everybody working in the office that at the beginning of the day, he was great. But by the end of the day, things were just unbearable to be in the same room with him. And so I really admire this person, obviously, it was not something he was aware of. So I took it upon myself to say to him, at the end of one of our check-ins to say, Well, look, you know, there's one more thing I need to bring up. At the end of the day, you have really bad body odor, and you need to do something about it. I'm sure this is not something you knew about. But I wanted to make sure that you knew about it. I am absolutely mortified that I had said this to a person who was a couple levels above me. And him and his graciousness, said, Thank you so much for letting me know that I'll take care of it. And that was the end of the conversation. And sure enough, things happened. But why was that so difficult? Because we as humans, again, feel, it's embarrassing, we feel shameful. We don't want to be baggy, we don't want to make the other person feel uncomfortable. So many things in our social norms make us not want to deal with conflict with anything that could disrupt things. And yet, if you're going to create disruption, you have to feel comfortable, not just dealing with the conflict, but actually encouraging it to happen.
The reason why conflict is so difficult is that we are actually terrible at giving and receiving feedback. When I told my leader about his body odor problem, one of the reasons why it was such a good experience was his response, he accepted the feedback. And in my heart of hearts, I knew he would because he was just that kind of person. And so when we're trying to have these conflicts, instead of seeing it as a conflict, think about it as feedback sessions to say, I have some feedback for you. Here's a situation. And this is what happened. This is what the actions were taking. And this is what the impact was on me. And it could be a positive point of feedback. But it could also be places where there was an issue a conflict, that disagreement that needs to be discussed. And the key here is to ask somebody, is this a good time for me to give you some feedback. And that prepares the person to be able to take that feedback to deal with it. So setting the stage for conflict is just as important as being able to talk about the conflict itself.
One of the most difficult things to do as a leader is to deal with poor performance. When you have a team member that you know can do better, but they're just not living up to their potential, you need to sit down with them and give them that feedback. Early on as a leader, I really struggled with this until I realized that it was a gift that I was giving them, that they were obviously not aware of what they were doing. Or if they were they thought it would be okay. It was my job as a leader to inform them. No, this is not acceptable, and I want to make it better, I want to work with you to improve yourself. And if it works, thing, fantastic. But if it doesn't, then we will figure out what the next step will be.
The key part of this conversation is to believe that this person wanted to improve, but also that if this wasn't possible within the skill set or the requirements that we had in this job, then we will talk about next steps and a thoughtful and respectful way. Learning to deal with performance improvement plans, as an opportunity for change was a key way of me thinking about conflict in a very intimate way. Instead of putting off feedback, I would give it as soon as possible so that they would have as many opportunities as possible to have that improvement. And if things didn't work out. If we had to actually go on to performance improve plan, it was not a surprise to anybody. And sometimes people just need that wake-up call.
I had to put a key member of my team on a performance improvement plan. And he shared with me, he was going through some very big personal challenges. And sure enough, he was able to turn things around. But without that trust and openness in that discussion, to hear what was really going on, without him realizing I really wanted him to succeed, we would never have gotten to that point.
So many times people will just throw somebody onto a performance improvement plan, think the worst that they just don't care. They can improve. Like to hell with them. I'm just going to put them a pep and get rid of them. And you can tell when that's the operating mode of an organization. And it's a very different organization that says, I believe you're trying to do your best, and with what the situation is that you have. So we're going to try to make that happen. And you need to up your game, you need to stand up and perform.
Charlene here, if you're listening to this and thinking, I'm ready for more than I want to let you know about all the resources available on my website, CharleneLi.com. There you will find my latest books, articles, videos, courses, and more. All built to help leaders in organizations see the future and thrive with disruption. I've worked with top companies ranging from Adobe to Southwest Airlines. I've also spoken at conferences like the World Economic Forum, World Business Forum, and South by Southwest. And on my website, you will find many of the things I have shared with them. So go now to ch, ar, le, ne, li.com, to transform your leadership today.
I believe that the ability to have healthy conflict is at the core of being a disruptive leader. And that is because when you can air all the differences, get it all out on the table, rather than hopefully figuring it out by dancing around everybody in all the considerations in the room, you're going to get to that point of decision so much faster and better, if it's all out in the open.
I worked with an organization, that had as one of its core values respect. And it was originally created by the founder to encourage people to have respect for any opinion in the room. But over time, it had morphed into a behavior where it was about showing respect to a conversation in the room would nobody would disagree with each other. And if they had a difference of opinion, they had to take it outside of the room, talk with that leader privately, one on one, for that leader to consider that before bringing it back into the room as an idea for the group to consider. It was seen as disrespectful to disagree. And it was grinding that organization to a halt, because they could not get decisions made. There was always somebody disagreeing with something so they wouldn't sign off on a decision in the room that they would have to all go circle back and back channels. And the leadership was sick of it. So as they were going through the digital transformation, they realized they needed to systematically change this value. And say that respect was actually going back to the original, that all these other voices needed to be heard. So they set as parameters for leaders to show up and ask for people who has a different opinion, who has a different point of view, is there something else we should be considering? And putting aside the old ideas of what respect was and systematically asking for people to come up with a different point of view, so that they could do better decision making faster decision making, decision making, they would support the transformational agenda that they had, it took that organization almost here to really feel that they had started addressing this. And this is a call to action for you as a leader, that if you are not seeing these types of behaviors, these types of beliefs in your organization, then now is the time to start. Because it's going to take time and energy, but a lot of time to be able to change the way that the beliefs and behaviors in organization work.
It will take a lot of time and effort on your part to be able to switch it and to develop these new habits. One of the best examples of healthy conflict in an organization is Amazon. They have as one of their leadership principles the idea of have a backbone, disagree, and commit. And what they mean by that is, you have a point of view. So what is it, have a backbone and state it and be ready to defend it be ready to disagree vehemently with somebody else on the same team, and know that the other person is just going to fight just as hard for their idea that it's right. And you can go out and disagree, make your points really argue for why your approach is the better one, in the end, a decision will be made, it may be going in your favor, it may be going against you for somebody else. But in the end, everyone is going to commit. And this is the key, we can disagree. But at the end of the day, we will abide by we will commit 120% to the decision that was made. Now, this is really hard. In most organizations, if you're on the losing side of a decision, you're gonna not be happy about it, you're gonna pout, you're going to complain, you're going to sandbag, you're going to move things slowly because you know, I just don't agree with this, I should have chosen my idea.
But think about what that does to the organization. That's not acting in a way of integrity, it is not operating way of openness, it is definitely not moving as one organization align around a particular goal. What if instead, you had a different approach to this, is to say that even if you disagreed, the decision was made. And I'm going to commit myself because darn it, I don't want them to ever say that this idea failed, because I didn't show up and do my best. I'm going to make sure that the execution is flawless. But the idea itself was flawed, then I will feel somewhat more vindicated. But if the idea worked, then fantastic. Maybe I wasn't so right in the end. But I never want execution to get in the way of the idea being right or wrong.
Disagree and commit, the idea of healthy conflict means that when we have this philosophy of being have to disagree, well, that means that we'd never have to pull our punches. It means that we can go full force into the idea that we have presented with all of the evidence that we have, and fight for it without any reservation whatsoever. And knowing at the end of this, that we are still going to be okay. That our organization that the relationships we have with each other are so great that we can walk out of this room having done battle with each other, and shake each other's hands, pat each other on the back, and have lunch together.
If you're thinking about how your organization deals with conflict, think about the last three conflicts you've had to deal with, these tense moments in your team. How are you able to create the environment where that tense moment could actually be used to resolve those conflicts? Are you setting it up? Do people feel that they can be fully transparent and honest with each other? And is the relationship strong enough coming into that room, that you can have these deep discussions, think about the best relationships you have, again, in the world outside of your work. And the best relationships are ones where you can have disagreements, things can go wrong, you can have human discussions about things and still know that you're good with each other. The power of healthy conflicts is that we use them as stepping stones to further, deepen, and strengthen our relationships, rather than see them as places where our relationships could be torn apart.
Now, some organizations take the idea of disagree and commit to an extreme. They see it as an excuse to just disagree with people all the time. And to see it as a license to just speak their mind. It's oftentimes preface with this comment, well, I just want to be direct. And then something very insulting and debilitating comes out of their mouths. This is not what I mean by disagree and commit. Being able to disagree in a healthy way, means that you're putting this relationship first and foremost, that you're investing in the relationship so that you can disagree, and you'll never take it to the point of that disagreement being personal, or to a point where it's going to be debilitating for the other people in the relationship. You're going to understand how far you can push, but you will push right up to that very edge and know that that relationship is strong. Treat it with the honor and respect that it deserves. Because it is a tremendous privilege that the strength of relationship allows you to be able to disagree in such a way that it maintains and strengthens the relationship.
I work with leaders from all around the globe, across many different industries, and across many different levels, and every single leader I talk with is invested in the success of their teams and their organizations. The key to that success is being able to have these healthy conflicts, being able to move together as one group, because you have hammered out all the differences, and you're aligned on what you are committing to. Without that discussion, without that commitment and alignment, you will always be wondering who here isn't completely on board. Without that level of trust, built in the fire of conflict, never be able to forge a cohesive unit that can go through that transformational change.
Rule number five, embrace healthy conflict.
Hey there, thanks for listening to the New Rules of Disruption. We created this podcast with a hope that you would be inspired to become a disrupter. Disruptors don't just blow things up, they also create and build things that result in huge positive change. This is a change that the world needs now, more than ever, and we want to hear about what change you are creating in this world. You can send us your disruptive story by visiting CharleneLi.com slash podcast. That's ch, ar, le, ne, li.com/podcasts.
If you are enjoying this podcast, I have one major ask. Please share it with a co worker, manager, or a friend. Let's build communities of disruption together