Don’t Be Frozen in Fear of Conflict

Most of us feel uneasy at the thought of conflict and conversations that could upset someone we need to talk to. At the same time, most of us know that avoiding conflicts and conversations at all costs leads to undesirable results. If you’re experienced at conflict management and dealing with it is natural for you, this post might not teach you anything new (but maybe it could help you coach others to get better at handling conflict). This post is for the people out there who find conflict taxing, if not terrifying, and typically only engage in it if they absolutely have to. Here are three things that people who dislike conflict can do to make it easier to address issues in a timely manner:

-            Write about the issue to help you address it with the other person in the conflict

-            Talk with a third person who can be a confidant or facilitator

-            Consult and learn from other sources to grow your ability to manage conflict

Write about the issue to help you address it with the other person in the conflict

If you’re someone whose first feeling about conflict is to shy away rather than approach it, it might help to write about the issue you need to discuss with someone. By writing about it, you more fully flesh out your understanding of the situation, think about what you believe to be the other person’s point of view, and figure out how to broach the subject in a respectful way that doesn’t make the other person feel like they’re being attacked. This also gives you time to look at your thoughts on paper and to more carefully consider the other person’s perspective and your belief about why they hold it. Do this keeping two things in mind:

-            Don’t use writing about the situation as an excuse to avoid addressing a conflict in a timely manner

-            Remember that you probably don’t know everything about the situation and that writing your thoughts doesn’t give you complete awareness of the other person’s or party’s situation and perspective

Showing your writing to the other person when you meet to address the conflict can be a way to help them understand your situation better than only verbally communicating. Keep in mind that any writing you share should only be a supplement to the conversation and not a substitute for talking face-to-face.

Talk with a third person who can be a confidant or facilitator

It might help to bounce your thoughts off a third person with whom you can share confidentially, or who could be a facilitator if they have a trusted relationship with both you and the other person or party in the conflict. Hearing yourself talking out loud to this person is another way to process your thoughts better than just holding them in your head; as your words come out, you may realize that the perceived conflict isn’t so daunting, or that in fact you should be the one adjusting to resolve the conflict. Or this third person you talk to might be able to calmly help you understand the right way to resolve the situation. If this person does act as a facilitator to help you resolve a conflict, ask that person to coach you to be able to better handle future conflicts without a facilitator so you’re less dependent on one going forward. Someday, there could be conflicts you have to face without a facilitator available to help you (although you should always seek a sounding board whenever you think it would be helpful).

Consult and learn from other sources to grow your ability to manage conflict

Conflict management is not easy for most people, but like most things, it can get easier with practice and learning and developing techniques. If conflict management is not your strong suit, don’t practice so much that it takes your focus off your strengths, but practice enough that the idea of dealing with conflict doesn’t paralyze you. Looking online or asking mentors for sources to consider can help you learn enough about conflict management to not feel totally unprepared when presented with a problem you need to address.

Below are some online sources that can help you become more comfortable addressing conflict – if you don’t have ample time to read them all, you might skim them and more carefully read the two or three you believe would be most helpful for your current needs:

-            Conflict Avoidance: Why It's Harmful, How to Overcome It & More | Healthline

-            How to Overcome Your Fear of Confrontation: A Simple Plan - Happier Human

-            How To Overcome Your Fear Of Confrontation And Deal With Conflict | A Conscious Rethink

-            How to Handle Conflict If You Hate Confrontation: 5 Tips from Experts | SELF

-            How to Overcome Fear of Organizational Conflict | wikiHow

A book worth considering for this topic is one called Crucial Conversations, written by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, and Emily Gregory. If you want to listen to a podcast hosting Joseph to get a feel for the book, click here: Podcast #1,105: How to Have the Conversations You’ve Been Avoiding | The Art of Manliness. If you can borrow this book from your local library system or see it at a bookstore, pick it up and read pages 4 through 6 (of the third edition) as a sample; reading that page range will probably make you interested in reading more of the book.

If you find that independent learning and practice isn’t enough to help you reliably work through conflicts with others, it might be worth seeking professional counseling to help you overcome your reluctance to engage in effective conflict management.

Conclusion

Fear of conflict and a strong desire to avoid it is a powerful influence over many people. Most of us are not trained in how to deal with it well. Taking small but determined steps, we can develop our ability to overcome this fear and confront and resolve conflicts skillfully instead of avoiding them. By getting your ideas out of your head, either writing, talking with someone else, or both, you’re starting to work through not just the conflict itself but also the habit of avoiding conflict because it makes you feel fearful. Consult other sources for help with managing conflict as needed to help you move toward engaging with others to resolve the conflict in a timely way.

Commit yourself today to overcoming fear of conflict, one step at a time!

The next step on the roadmap: Why Learn About Project Management

Staying On Top of Workload Change

Most people have jobs where their workload changes, sometimes without much notice or predictability. Projects staffed with teams face the same challenge; the people doing the work had an initial vision and work direction, and then their leaders realized that something somewhat different was needed, so the vision and work direction were updated accordingly. When this happens, individuals and teams alike need a robust and reliable system for staying on top of changes and making sure they’re doing the right work at any given time. Typically, people and teams are balancing several work items in parallel, so along with working in line with the latest direction, workers need to be able to effectively prioritize work items to deliver the most urgent, highest value outputs soonest.

Work Wisdom from the Agile Manifesto

Smart ways of working offer the double benefit of making work easier and delivering better outcomes, and one source of wisdom on smart ways of working is the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001 by the 17 signatories listed on the Agile Manifesto website. The Agile Manifesto is an outline for making software development less wasteful, less risky, and more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs. However, even though it was written for software development, its wisdom can be applied to just about any other work. This post focuses on some of the twelve principles of Agile software development and how you can use it to make sure that your work efficiently delivers the value that other people need, whether they be your teammates, managers, or your organization’s customers.

-            Work at a sustainable pace

-            Build what your customer needs and not what they don’t

-            Get feedback early and often

Work at a sustainable pace

Don’t try to get ahead with intense bursts of effort to build your career. It’s too easy for this to lead to burnout and demoralization well before you get very far. When just starting out in your career, it’s easy to forget that you have lots of workdays ahead of you, and you’ll get further in a career of consistent daily effort that you can keep up over the long haul. Here’s the eighth Agile Manifesto principle, encouraging work at a sustainable pace:

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

While this is written in a software development context, the principle applies to work in general. Your career is a marathon and not a sprint, and being a consistent, reliable producer adds up over time. Plus, daily performance compounds your skills and capabilities (in other words, causes you to grow) without you even realizing it. Working at a steady pace leads to greater overall output, and the consistency of that approach leads to better quality work as well.

Build what your customer needs and not what they don’t

Ultimately, your job exists because there is some kind of “customer” who is willing to pay for what you produce in that job. Whether you’re producing for a consumer buying a product for personal use, or you’re making something to be used by a colleague in the next step of your company’s production process, you need to make something that meets standards of quality, quantity, and timeliness. What’s the most efficient way to make what is needed? It’s certainly not to make what is not needed. In addition to not producing something nobody needs (or even wants), producing specifically what your customer needs and nothing different often makes your work simpler. The tenth principle of the Agile Manifesto states it this way:

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.

Get feedback early and often

Remember how, in the last section, the point was made to not produce what is not needed? The Lean Startup by Eric Ries makes an excellent point that can be summarized in the remainder of this paragraph: How can that be called anything other than waste? Wasted time, wasted effort, maybe also wasted materials. Getting feedback from your customers early and often is the fastest way to produce what they truly need; this helps you to understand what they actually need (instead of what you think they need), and it even helps your customers better understand what they need (which is not always what they first ask for).

It’s worth borrowing The Lean Startup from your local library or buying your own copy and taking the time to read it.

Returning to the Agile Manifesto, getting feedback early and often is so important that it is arguably embodied in half of its twelve principles. Consider the first and third principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Delivering small amounts of work early and frequently allows customers to tell you of any changes that are needed while the amount of effort needed to make those changes is small. Additionally, this collaborative style of working with the customer sets the best possible tone for working together. You’re showing them that you’re working hard on their request, you’re keeping them frequently engaged throughout your work on their request, and you’re much more likely to have a happy customer by the time you finish working on and deliver their request.

The fourth and sixth principles also emphasize rapid feedback to clarify any ambiguities and identify any corrections needed, either with the customer or within your own team, while they are still small and easy to address:

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

There are two more principles that your work team can use to review how and how well work is done, leading to ways to improve both efficiency and quality of output over time; these are the seventh and twelfth principles:

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

With the seventh principle, replace “software” with whatever your team produces (unless software is what your team produces). Note that it’s not just something that works from a technical standpoint; software that runs and doesn’t crash the computer isn’t valuable if it doesn’t provide the functionality and level of quality the customer needs from it. Producing and delivering products that meet customer needs should be your team’s primary measure of progress. Once you have figured that out, then your team can reflect at regular intervals about how to gradually become more effective. This is where the Kaizen approach can come in handy to help you and your team find and implement small improvements that accumulate into a big impact over time.

Conclusion

Remember that your career will continue for many years ahead of you and that trying to work at too fast a pace will cause you to burn out long before the end. In contrast, the time you have means you can accomplish a lot (more than you can imagine, even) by working steadily at a pace you can sustain throughout your career. Stay focused on creating what your customer needs, as doing something else means delivering less than the maximum amount of value possible. To succeed at this, get feedback from your customers early and often, as you probably won’t precisely understand what they need at first, and what they say they want at first may be different from what they say they want by the time you deliver to them. These three points together will help you to deliver the most value possible during your career.

Check out the entire Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles. This post only applies select principles to three main points, and there’s more to learn from the manifesto than what is shared here.

Read the Agile Manifesto and its twelve principles to improve how you work today!

The next step on the roadmap: Staying On Top of Workload Change