Suzan Bond on navigating conflict on remote teams
Lead Time Chats: Season 4, Episode 4 Takeaways
Suzan Bond on Navigating Conflict on Remote Teams
In this episode of Lead Time Chats, Jean Hsu, VP of Engineering at Range, chats with Suzan Bond, Leadership Consultant and Executive Coach, about navigating conflict on remote teams.
Suzan and Jean discuss:
- How conflict shows up differently on remote teams (more conflict avoidance than outbursts)
- Being curious about areas of disagreement, rather than being terrified of conflict
- Designing upfront how you want to be in disagreement in your work relationships
- How simply naming the tension or disagreement can help create a path forward
- Why you should avoid resolving conflict through a third party - and how to coach people to speak directly to each other first
Takeaways from Suzan
Everyone has their own style of addressing conflict
"What are our reasons for conflict? And I think style is a really big one. For me, I'll hear people, I'm like, well, "Did you talk to them about that? Have you talked about how the two of you are disagreeing rather than what do we do?" We make them wrong or "ah they're so frustrating and they don't know how to do it," or we call people incompetent sometimes when we don't agree with their style. They may or may not be incompetent, but often what I find is that we're not actually having the conversation between the two of us so many times when I hear people talking about that, it's always encouraging them to go back to talk to each other and have that real conversation."
Disagreement is normal. It’s how we handle it that matters.
"We think conflict is bad. A couple of weeks ago at Lead Dev I did two workshops for leaders there. When I said the word conflict, you could just feel the room contract, and I think that's actually part of the roadblock, right? I think we also have to normalize that disagreement is normal. Disagreement is okay. In any relationship we're going to disagree. You and I are in relationship right now as we talk. We may or may not agree on things. That's okay. How do we want to be with disagreement and knowing that it's part of the relationship? It's how we handle it that matters more."
Resolve conflict by removing the middle person
"I think what happens is we shy away from it. We don't want to talk about it, but it's like naming the thing that's in the room, it's the elephant. The elephant is crowding us out, which is the thing that's unsaid, and now we can barely interact with each other, and I think what happens is we're having an argument in our head and then we begin to make the other person wrong, or we make ourselves wrong and then we'd try to change, but changing the way that you interact in your style, your natural style, assuming it's in healthy expression, that's really hard. So it is really about go right to it. I think a lot of times we pick intermediaries. Let's just cut out the middle person."