“We lead from who we are.” Dr.’s Angie Ward and Tim Koller remind us of this every session in the Denver Seminary Master of Divinity in Leadership program.
It’s a foundational principle for our learning community as we dive deep into the biblical, sociological, psychological, military, and corporate illustrations of the art and the profession of leadership. As we navigate that terrain, the core of who we are always informs what we learn. Who we are shapes how we lead and leading from any other place is flat and phoney. Our people can always sense it.
I’ve been considering this a lot while working with our clients, who are engaging in a number of challenging team and interpersonal conversations and for good reason! We are now 17 months into consistent operational, personnel, and expectation changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Universally, exhaustion and malaise have set in.
All organizations feel the weight of these pressures. Whether growing or shrinking, thriving or struggling, we are placing an extra emphasis on the need to communicate clearly and consistently in order to generate positive outcomes.
While pressure turns coal into diamonds over time, sadly it has the tendency to turn relationships into something far less beautiful. Relationships that are unable to navigate this pressure just seem to get crushed.
As a result, one of the most common workshops that Blayne and I are invited to facilitate is simply titled: Difficult Conversations.
Spending so much time on this concept over the past year has given me the opportunity to further refine my perspective on the matter, while reflecting on how I have viewed difficult conversations throughout the course of my life and leadership. One thing I’ve realized about myself is that early on, I had an unhealthy relationship with conflict that shaped the way I approached difficult conversations.
I grew up in conflict, I learned to survive and to thrive in conflict. From the time I was a child and my father would viciously pit his children against one another or write off family members, conflict just seemed to be the natural outcome of disagreement.
It’s no wonder that when I became a 20 year old Ranger Leader, I viewed my position as one of conflict with my subordinates. Especially in the late ‘90’s era Ranger Battalions where Specialists with Ranger Tabs were like salty inmates running the prison yard. I wielded any degree of authority I could through coercion and position, and discarded those who didn’t comply. That was a mistake, but I guess in those days I was just happy to be one of the inmates a rung up from the floor.
I never considered any of this a problem until one evening my girlfriend Kelly (now my wife of almost 20 years) asked, “so how many guys have you sent to Ranger School successfully?”
Zero. I was a 21 year old fire team leader and the answer was zero.
“Seems like that’s your job though…right?” Kelly replied matter of factly.
Right.
Photo credit: 2nd Ranger Battalion yearbook. Fast rope training, Ft. Knox 2001.
Something had to give, and the way that I related to my team when tension arose was the problem. To be clear - I was the problem. I didn’t understand tension, though I felt it constantly in leadership when the men would not achieve excellence.
I misread growth opportunities for a chance to fight. Time and again I missed the mark and wore out some good men and my soul in the process. In retrospect I can see that I was wracked with fear, insecurities, and anxieties too often in those early days.
In moments of team tension, I chose a posture of team conflict because I failed to properly distinguish the target. If something didn’t go perfectly, I would make my teammates the opposition rather than the actual issue.
I think this might be something we can all relate to today. And I think what is making difficult conversations so damned...difficult is the fact that we are confusing conflict with tension.
Conflict occurs when two or more people, or teams, are in opposition to one another. Tension on the other hand, is when two or more people, or teams, are together in opposition to the circumstances.
Conflict by definition, whether viewed in noun or verb form, must include a clash or an argument between competing bodies.
Tension is a stretching or straining, often of the mental or emotional type, which understood in verb form is the application of a force to (something) which tends to stretch it.
Tension is a good thing because we all need to be stretched to reach our goals. No matter how uncomfortable the tension is, we all intuitively know that adversity is the gateway to growth. And maturation as teams, and as people.
But tension is also straining, mentally and emotionally, and that’s where we become vulnerable.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by what we are feeling, activating those anxieties and fears. How we respond to this internal tension oftentimes determines whether our communication is effective or not. Effective communication prioritizes team unity, goal orientation, and the co-creation of solutions that lead to achievement. Negative communication disrupts unity, assaults character, and invites more failure.
And let me be clear, failure is a part of the process. State it, examine it, and learn from it, but don’t vaguely dance around it like it’s acceptable. Nothing about the environments I’ve led in allow for failure to be acceptable. Not in Special Operations, Corporate Healthcare, or the Social Impact sectors.
But does any role invite or allow for this? Does anyone get up in the morning thinking, “how can I suck today?” No one that I know does that.
And I’d bet that about 99% of those whose performance is lacking are not thinking that either.
And that’s where we come in as leaders. We have the gift and the responsibility to step into the muck and help our people find the right way forward. It’s up to us to endure the discomfort, to establish clear and kind communication methods that address issues, and to set clear intentions towards success.
But we can’t do that if we are looking for a fight instead of looking for a solution.
Every time we walk into a difficult conversation with a sword, we can expect our teammates to pick up a shield. If we allow ourselves to get baited into fighting with our teammates, our spouses, our families, or our companies, then how can we possibly be focused on achieving our goals with them?
Photo Credit: @jupp via Unsplash.
There is a better way.
I learned this from a Ranger Legend, CSM Hugh Roberts, as I sat in his office contemplating reenlistment in 2000.
Comically, I told him about the leadership development advice I had received from my girlfriend, to which he responded, “don’t let go of that one,” (I didn’t) and we discussed what growth might look like for me as a young Ranger leader.
The thing is, I didn’t accomplish what I had hoped to and my fixation on conflict was a contributing barrier to my professional growth. I had to change. I had to stop demanding immediate perfection and start looking for progress. And I had to do this by coaching, teaching, and inspiring my men instead of fighting them into shape.
Just because you’re in front, and others are forced to catch up, doesn't mean you’re leading them.
The next four year enlistment saw great growth in me, and great success in leading men to Ranger school - one of my greatest accomplishments as a Ranger leader. It saw many difficult conversations, giving me many chances to learn that tension occurs in moments of growth, but that doesn’t mean they are moments of conflict.
So much so that I even got the chance to serve as a cadre in the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Pre-Ranger Course, preparing future leaders of the Regiment to graduate Ranger School.
In retrospect, I thank God that people like Kelly, CSM Roberts, and the many great leaders I’ve learned from embraced the tension of the moment to have a difficult conversation with me--a young hothead--instead of fighting me or writing me off.
I share this in the hopes that it may encourage others to resist the urge to jump into conflict with your people and embrace the tension of taking aim against the real problem together.
The enemy is the enemy. Our people are not the enemy.
Here are a few ideas for how we can isolate the enemy of our progress together, thereby avoiding unnecessary conflict.
Identify the problem - people are not problems, people are people; problems are problems. Behaviors, results, systems, and processes that people exhibit or otherwise operate within may be the problem, but just because people function within them (or from them) doesn’t make them the problem.
Identify your problem - what’s going on inside of you that is making this so difficult? Are you scared, insecure, or anxious? Interrogate your feelings and your motives for what’s going on inside of you during your preparation for this difficult conversation. By the way, not wanting to hurt someone is a good thing, but it can’t excuse leaders from their responsibility to remedy off course performance.
State the problem - candidly and clearly; clear is kind. In one sentence consider how you can communicate the problem to your teammate leaving no room for confusion. By the way, if at this stage you still think the problem is the person, start over.
This simple and useful three step process may increase the effectiveness of the impending difficult conversation. And opening that conversation with the stated objective and an explanation between the difference of tension and conflict can take a lot of the pressure out of the room.
When people know they are not under attack, and are given the opportunity to join in the assault against poor performance, disunity, and failure, they are far more likely to pick up arms with us instead of against us.
Cover Photo: @hagalnaud via Unsplash