Conflict Will Never Be Comfortable
I know I upset you, and I know you need space. I just want you to know I care about you and I’m here when you’re ready to talk about it.
That’s the Teams message my then colleague, now closest friend Tommy sent to me after our biggest fight. At that time we were facing impossible conditions: two remote teammates supporting an entire North American employee base with almost no help.
We were walking through a rough re-org, some of the longest hours we had ever worked, and there were days where Tommy and I spent nearly 10 hours looking at each other on video as we navigated issue after issue, project after project, fire after fire.
Yet here I was, massively hurt and fuming at the person I depended on to get my job done.
A leader in a business unit we were transitioning over from me to Tommy had treated me in a discriminatory manner and I didn’t approve of the way Tommy handled the situation.
I felt betrayed, in part because I was exhausted to the point of hysteria and also because I knew conflict with Tommy would be big. As an employee relations expert I eat conflict for breakfast; I conflict for a living and do it well, yet this was different. I was really hurt and had my expectations let down.
If we fast forward to today, Tommy is my closest friend and one of my biggest safe places even though we don’t work together anymore. What we forged in that conflict and our professional relationship created a lasting and rare friendship - one you wouldn’t assume came out of a massive conflict.
Human Resources and Corporate America has bought into the lie that conflict can become comfortable. We have paid millions of dollars to sit in front of skilled speakers that give us “tools” to help us become less afraid of conflict, and it’s all a lie.
The truth is, conflict will never be comfortable.
There are tactical and practical ways for you as a professional to become more skilled at handling conflict and confrontation. Those skills will enable you to walk through a conversation with a lower chance of putting your foot in your mouth or putting your company at risk.
Those skills, no matter how often you use them and how sharp they become, will not stop your heart rate from increasing when it’s time to conflict. Those skills will not repair damaged relationships or build stronger bonds among teammates.
Verbal deescalation, proper interrogation tactics, and motivational interviewing are beneficial and needed for conflict, hear me when I say that to you. However, they do not make you more comfortable during conflict.
Because conflict will never be comfortable, but people will.
If we, just for a moment, allow ourselves to put aside the idea that actual conflict will some day be comfortable, then we can hold this new thought that people can be comfortable instead.
We know that conflict will make our heart rate increase, and we know that it will make us uneasy, but we also know that our relationships with people can be some of the safest spaces that produce legitimate growth and vulnerability.
Having confrontation with a comfortable person may not feel fantastic, but you know that you know that you know they will respect you, listen to your point of view, and challenge their own thinking during the conversation.
All too often these comfortable people aren’t in our professional circles; they’re our spouses or our family members or friends outside of the workplace.
And all too often we as HR focus our training budget on making people comfortable with conflict instead of making people comfortable with each other.
If we spent our resources building relationships with each other instead of workshopping an impossibility, we might just create an environment of healthy and productive conflict that spills out of the danger zone and into the space where our shoulders come away from our ears and understanding is met with enormous relief.
There will be times where you cannot build relationships with people enough to make them comfortable before you have to conflict, and that’s where you fall heavily on the tactical skills and lean into the uncomfortable spaces of conflict. This, however, should not be how our HR teams feel.
If there are any members of your HR team that are not comfortable to conflict with, you have failed.
So my most comfortable space to conflict with, Tommy, sat down with me to talk about how we conflict for all of you and this post. Tommy is only open to people he cares about, so this commentary is rare and I’m deeply grateful for his participation in this post. I hope you all are, too. (Love you big, friend).
Tommy and I did what we always do when we sat down to talk about this (something I felt was important): we made sure we could see each other. We set aside a time that worked for both of us, jumped on a FaceTime call, and the following vulnerability is my safe space opening up to all of you:
You know that saying about how character isn’t developed in hard times, it’s displayed? That’s how conflict is. How it’s handled isn’t developed in hard times, it’s displayed, and that’s how having conflict is with you.
We have a genuine friendship and connection which makes having an edgy conversation possible, especially the one you’re talking about in your blog.
That conflict went over well because we both knew there was something bigger than us going on. We needed to figure this out in order to keep up the work, but I also needed to understand you and not assume I knew why you were hurt.
As a white male I didn’t have to think about coming across the situations you did and I knew I had to hear you out and let you express yourself, otherwise I didn’t have the context I need to know what to do with the conflict.
We also didn’t talk to anyone else when I was giving you space. There wasn’t any gossip during the emotion. That can really drop a nuclear bomb in shared vulnerability once forgiveness starts.
Conflicting between us typically goes like this -
1. We need space apart to feel the emotions. When we were working together we were able to still talk to each other productively about work, but we knew to keep distance to let healing happen. We both always reached out to say, “when you’re ready,” though. I think it’s important for people to know that in the workplace we get so caught up in this idea that we need to fix this right now and that can be destructive. You need to be able to communicate about work right now, but you don’t need to conflict right now.
2. We schedule time and meet as face to face as we can, which is video. It’s always a priority. We have to go into that talk with the intent to seek first to understand; I need to understand the depths and ugliness of the situation for you before we can forge a path forward and vice versa. And each time we handle the conflict really well; We look each other in the eye, listen, forgive.
3. Sometimes we need space after the conflict conversation to keep healing because the resolution doesn’t always mean we agreed with each other on the outcome, which is healthy. You do not have to solve all the world’s problems in one conflict. We’re different people and we aren’t always going to be aligned. What’s important is that after we have a talk we never bring up the issues again in a negative way, only in talks like this.
Each time I conflict with Tommy, my heart rate still rises despite my tactical training and how good I am at this confrontation thing. It’s not comfortable. But he is comfortable, and that coupled with the three steps he outlines is what makes us such a great team.
Instead of focusing on bettering your conflict management, let’s focus on creating a team of Tommys and being like Tommy ourselves; people that are so comfortable to confront that the HR team is known for their healthy conflict. We must lead our organizations in this different way of conflict management if we’re going to truly be an innovative, vulnerable, productive company.