This Common Workplace Problem is Costing You Money

It’s a workplace epidemic. Poor conflict skills are hurting business teams at every level. 

We’ve all been there: 

You notice a problem but it feels “nicer” to avoid confrontation. But “nice” can’t stop the problem from continuing or resentment from growing … before long emotions are festering… until someone blows up! 

Now a moment of misunderstanding has become an emergency. 

Not only do poorly managed conflicts damage team unity, interpersonal trust, and communication—but they hurt the bottom line! 

The American economy has lost billions, yes billions, of dollars of work hours to unresolved arguments at work. The top offenders? 

  1. Personality clashes
  2. Stress levels
  3. Workload amount
  4. Poor leadership 
  5. Lack of honesty 

Do any of these sound familiar? Well, thankfully your team isn’t alone. 

It’s just a fact that not every belief and behavior is going to line up. 

That’s why leaders need a plan for discussing conflict with the individual member(s)—and realigning the powerful pull of the team. 

So how does it happen? Here are 4 steps to facilitate your next workplace conflict: 

Understand the Specifics

Instead of entering the conflict with guns blazing generalities—“You’re delivering the wrong results! Do something about it!”—help each listener understand the specifics. 

Break the problem into tangible pieces—only then can you create tangible steps back to cohesion and reconciliation.  

Watch out for ad hominem attacks, personal grudges, or conflict of personality.

Identify what expectations are unmet, how the team member might have gotten off the trail, and where the disconnect actually lies. It may be a simpler fix than you think. 

Assume Better not Worse 

Many people interpret correction or confrontation as an assault or a rejection of them as a person. Biting assumptions about their intentions immediately backs that team member into a corner. 

And when anyone gets cornered, they will almost always lash out for self-preservation. 

You’ll be amazed at how giving people the benefit of the doubt clears the way for honest communication. 

Ask for Perspective 

For years I’ve taught on using the “sandwich method” for confrontation—where you affirm the person (bread), deal with the issue (meat), affirm the person, their contribution / value (bread) and set points of accountability and clarity around future behavior.

When asked, genuinely, for their point of view, they are more likely to feel seen as a whole—even to return the favor.

De-escalate the conversation by putting yourself in their shoes. It’s harder to argue when you know you are affirmed. 

Rediscover the Trail

After you’ve identified where someone has lost the trail (or maybe the trail went somewhere without their knowledge) don’t leave them wandering! 

Most of the time, sharing your lens and the desired lens of the future will be enough to start the change process.

If a team member continues to engage in divisive behaviors or continues to hold onto beliefs that are contrary to the team and harmful to progress then we’ll need to increase the intensity and frequency of the confrontation. 

A last resort: you may recommend that they run for a different team. And that’s ok. 

To move forward, everyone has to pull in one direction—one purpose, one goal, one team.

Craft New Expectations 

I mention all the time that frustration happens when expectation meets reality. 

Here’s our reality—conflict happens. As long as your team works together, you will experience miscommunication, clash of opinion, and other conflicts. But it’s not the end of the world. In fact, it’s an opportunity. 

When your team members can expect purposeful, balanced, and thoughtful conflict assistance they are free to do their best work. They are free to communicate. They are free to ask questions. 

They can lean into a unified, positive, and purposeful culture. 

If we value the mission and we value the players on the team—we can’t do without these resolution skills. 

 

The Real Reason No One Listens When You Speak

3 Steps to Communicate Powerfully with Your Team

People have been figuring out ways to communicate with each other since they first set foot on the earth—from cave drawings and hieroglyphics to modern day emojis. 😎

We’ve become masters of getting our ideas across. Without dialogue, our teams disintegrate. But communication requires more than the transmission of information.

On a boat flying across the bay, crew members must become efficient and effective at relaying information. Wasting time and energy, or worse, risking miscommunication, just won’t do.

In your business, what are your critical communication points? Do you speak to employees or team members in person or via video calls? Will a team member text you with a question, call you, email you, or wait until you come asking? How does your behavior influence how willing teammates are to communicate with you?

Every interaction is a potential miscommunication unless you are intentional about integrating.  

The Communication Checklist

As you re-envision what you want successful communication to look like on your team, take these three steps:

1. Identify

It’s also important to identify the key people with whom you need to communicate the most—and help leaders on your team do the same with their key personnel. Everyone needs a leader who will hear him or her. As a leader, you must take responsibility for communication as far as it is within your control.

2. Adapt

Integrated communication depends on doing it in ways others understand and appreciate. Does one member love to contact you directly? Give them a chance to do so.

Are they independent and work on their own until checked upon? Be sure to check in on them at regular intervals.

It’s impossible—and not necessary—to get everyone to speak the same language. Do your best to integrate with the people you lead and speak to them using their preferred style.

3. Ask

When I’m working with turnarounds or start-ups, I like doing critical communication in morning huddles. These are short team meetings designed to communicate critical information, focus the team, and get back at it.

To make sure you are communicating effectively, consider these questions:

  • What are the critical components I need to communicate?
  • What does my team need to know?
  • Whom should I tell first?
  • Are there any critical communication points being missed?
  • Is my communication one-way or two-way?
  • Is the message I’m trying to deliver the message that’s being received?

People Who Listen are People Who Feel Heard

All communication is not created equal. Many leaders technically say all the right information—but they’re still not communicating. They’re just transmitting. Because if you are talking and nobody is listening, you aren’t communicating.

In the military, when somebody has given an order, the soldiers respond back with a term called “Hooah!” It stands for H.U.A. Heard. Understood. Acknowledged. Effective communication asks for an echo check from the team, a confirmation that not only have they heard, but they understand what to do, acknowledge their role, and are moving to action.

Don’t mistake leadership monologues for company dialogue. Communication means not only that transmission has occurred, but also that recipients have received the information—and they know what to do with it.

As a leader start the communication evaluation with yourself. Perform a communication audit. Ask your team members to rate your communication skills, and take what they say to heart.

Then perform a listening audit. Work to listen to your team members and use their best input.

When people feel truly heard, they rise to the occasion every time. When you start listening to them, they’ll start listening to you.

How to Make Sense of Your Team Performance

Identify Where Underperformance Strikes to Blow by the Competition

Measuring Your Team Performance

If someone dropped you in the middle of nowhere Alaska with just a map and an X on it… would you know how to get there?

Of course not. (And if you attempted, would be lucky to avoid frostbite.)

Because, as any adventurer knows, before you can move towards a goal, you need to know where you are on the map. You would need to identify some landmarks to gauge where you are and some checkpoints to measure your progress toward the goal.

Evaluating the right route for your team—even if you know where to go—requires the same assessment. Any leader needs to know the landmarks or checkpoints that lie between the organization and optimal performance.

When assessing where you are as a team, there are two general categories of landmarks or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you can use: tangible and intangible.

Tangible KPIs

As a general leadership rule, you should stay out of the operational weeds. It’s your job to plan and sustain the big-picture and train up the right delegates for detail work.

However, assessing your team well does require a season in the weeds to really understand who is doing what.

Only then can you assess the skills of each team member and position him or her for maximum value and production. Only then can you identify strengths and weaknesses and position each of them in the best possible position to contribute to the team performance.

You’ll want to take a look at things like:

  • Output
  • KPIs
  • Conflicts
  • Collaboration
  • Turnover
  • Wants and needs
  • Beliefs and behaviors
  • Capacity
  • Capabilities
  • Empowerment levels

Intangible KPIs

Other performance indicators are more easily missed because they don’t show up as numbers or percentages. But oh, do they matter! They are intangible so far as they are the performance indicators of healthy culture, problem-solving, and the relationship between team members. The four intangible KPIs I like to look at first are:

Trust. Trust is the currency of leadership. It starts when your team can trust you and you can trust your team. On the other hand, mistrust creates isolation. Isolation in a team environment always leads to disaster.

So, ask yourself:

  • Does my team trust me? Do I trust my team?
  • Do external customers trust us?
  • Do other departments within the organization trust us?
  • Do I know what my team can and can’t do—and how to grow where we are lacking?

Competence. Trust can only take you so far when you’ve got a competence problem. As an InSPIRED leader, you have a responsibility to create and guide a competent team. That means you’ve got to understand your team’s core competencies:

  • What is it that your department does?
  • What are the critical deliverables?
  • What are the critical roles?
  • Within the critical roles, what does competency look like?

Communication. All communication is not created equal. Many conversations among/to team members technically use all the right information—but they’re still not communicating. They’re just transmitting. Communication means not only that transmission has occurred, but also that recipients have received the information—and they know what to do with it.

Commitment. We all start with some level of competence, but knowledge in any industry has to be learned. Give me a person who has some level of competence, but is trustworthy with a heart full of commitment—and I can turn that person into a vital and integrated member of the team. You will gain competence every day if your heart is committed.

Becoming a Master Navigator

Together these KPIs make up your team compass. Most leaders focus on the tangibles, but the secret to finding true north is understanding both the measurable performance indicators and the abstract characteristics that set the context and culture for everything you output.
Keep them in your pocket at all times, and it won’t matter where you get dropped—if you can evaluate where your team is now, you can strategize how to get them anywhere.

How to Unleash the Power of a Fully Integrated Team

The One Thing Leaders Must Do to Get Results

You probably know the pain.

Investing countless hours in redundant meetings only to find out the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing the entire time.

Getting the runaround between departments trying to track down simple information.

Struggling to get leaders on the same page when communication snafus blow up what should have been a quick project.

The unintended results? Wasted time, project delays, budget overruns, and competing expectations. The list could go on and on.

How many times have you thought, It really shouldn’t be this hard to get things done?

When you do, know that you have identified a point of disintegration.

You’re not crazy. It truly isn’t supposed to be this way.

Don’t bury those thoughts. Heed the signal that your team isn’t properly aligned somewhere.

A leader with a disintegrated team is like the emperor with no clothes. Everyone knows about the problem except the leader. If team members believe stress, struggle, and production pain are just “how it’s supposed to be,” they’ll continue to suffer and unintentionally underperform—until disaster strikes.

Thankfully, you can avoid million-dollar mistakes before you lose any more time, sleep, or your most precious resource—people.

3 Levels to Release Remarkable Results

While disintegration is not sustainable, integration changes everything. I’m not talking about perfection, but rather the alignment, understanding, and adaptability of the group for the mission as it unfolds in real time in the real world.

So, what kinds of things need to be integrated? Here are a few examples:

  • Culture and values into hiring, on-boarding, and daily activities
  • Management modeling with daily habits
  • Strategy and strategic approach with marketplace wants, needs, and reality
  • Product and service offerings with customer wants or needs
  • Strategy with organizational capabilities and capacity
  • Strategy and operations with systems and processes at scale
  • People and processes
  • Change appetite with change metabolism

Complete integration requires attention at three levels:

  1. You. The first person you need to integrate is yourself. If you are scattered regarding a vision for your team or dysfunctional when it comes to your own ability to get things done, you can’t expect everyone else to have clarity.

[call out] Leaders set the tone and pace for the team.

So, ask yourself: How am I integrating with coworkers, team members, customers, mentors, other influencers? Where do I need to step up my game?

2. Your team (internal customers). Once you’ve addressed your own integration challenges, consider the integration of your own team with others in the organization. Integrated teams are drawn together holistically on a shared mission. Ask:

  • Do I know the critical people I need to integrate with?
  • Do I intentionally reach out to peers?
  • Do I know what their personality style is and how best to integrate with that style and communicate in their language?
  • Can I trust them to have the know-how and flexibility to either get the job done or to communicate their problems?
  • Do they trust me?

3.  Your external customers. How integrated are you with your external customers? Customer integration means you know your target audience well. You are on the same page with them and understand their problems, pain points, needs and wants. Ask:

  • How accurately am I working to solve real customer problems with my product or service before they even know there is a problem?
  • How easy am I to do business with?
  • How seamless would customers say our interactions are?
  • Do customers come back to us?
  • Do they tell others about us?

When you intentionally integrate fully with yourself, your team, and your customers, everything starts to run more efficiently. Zombies disappear and work gets done.

Integration Begins with YOU

You don’t have to be a military leader or the coach of an underdog sports team. When any team is integrated and functioning properly, the results are truly inspiring.  However, you are responsible for equipping your team to run at an integrated, day-to-day level.

At its core, communication begins with you. Are you talking with your team or at your team? Is communication one way or actual? Integration runs on dialogue.

The most important thing to realize is that integrated teamwork begins and ends with leadership.

Model integration for your team. Make it a priority. And you’ll enjoy plenty of first-place—even come-from-behind—finishes of your own.