How coaching brings peace to discord
Tempers flare amidst conflict, especially when our values don’t feel aligned. When our judgmental mind activates, meetings become hijacked and doomed as the meek retreat and the overbearing take over. In his timeless book, “Dying for a Paycheck,” Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes toxic work environments endanger us as much as second-hand smoke. I believe toxic or hostile relationships can do the same.
And yet, if your job is to keep a meeting going and ensure goals complete, intervening conflict and getting everyone back on track becomes a skill worth cultivating. But how? Coaching can’t save everything; but coaching tactics (designed to evoke awareness) and active listening skills (designed to boost clarity and show empathy) can help. That’s what we’re exploring this week: a few attainable, easy coaching tactics to reduce conflict and gain a better handle on things flailing out of hand.
Set some ground rules
Whether you’re a wedding planner, new manager of a team, or a meeting host, establish ground rules. If you anticipate conflict or pushback, you might ask all parties:
- How do you want and need us/me to be when emotions flare?
- What’s my best role in those moments? Moderator, mediator, or silent observer?
- What’s our code word when we’re uncomfortable to signal we want the conversation to end and for us to move on?
Setting some ground rules prior to any collaboration and asking to honor them as you co-create can help. In group coaching, Coach Shawn Preuss trained me and my fellow group coaches in training to have a shared agreement and contract. This becomes something tactical the group can point to when and if we violate how we agreed to be.
Look for common values that align
I’ve resolved many conflicts through bringing values into the mix. A short personal story illustrates. My husband and I often disagree where and how to vacation with him preferring to return to places we’ve been, me preferring to venture to new ones, preferably overseas. He preferred local and familiar out of time constraint. I preferred overseas and new out of a want for adventure for our family and sons.
By bringing values in and listening, I heard his major concern was time when time affluence was low and added expense. When I found overseas locations at the same price point, his other concern was logistics.
How I helped us compromise was finding an easy, non-logistical nightmare location and reminding us both of our common values: A mutual love for adventure, travel, love for our family, learning, development, and joy. Also, I reminded him I had come to this country alone based on all of these values. Had I not, he would not have met me. This reminder brought more understanding of what we both believed in and cared about.
Some questions to highlight shared values:
- Which values might feel compromised here?
- Which shared values cross over and connect?
- How might you both better honor these values by some small compromises?
Reveal the misunderstandings
If we’re arguing, frustrated, and angry, we’re experiencing a mental hijacking of our inner critical brain. This becomes the very premise of Positive Intelligence, the mental fitness program by Shirzad Chamine, through which I certified as a coach. In fact, I recommend teams doing the Saboteur assessment to help understand our inner critical mind. If our inner Judge is active (typical when we’re upset) I like to pause and ask myself (or those heated in the moment) the following:
- What is your/my inner judge wrongly assuming about me, this person, and the overall situation?
- What is the lie this judge is telling me?
- What is the truth of this lie, under the light of the day?
- What is my loving Sage counter here?
Exposing our inner judgmental lies becomes super powerful and diffuses conflict quickly. In the earlier example about disagreeing about vacations, I had wrongly assumed my husband said ‘no’ to my ideas out of a need to control. This activity revealed he had misunderstood the ideas I shared as me wanting to go to all of these places. (In fact, I was brainstorming and hoping he’d help pick one.)
Ask direct, open-ended questions. Stay curious.
In conflict, we’re confused and become confusing. Coaching through the moment can bring clarity by active listening, listening with all senses on what someone says, how they say it, what their body language and even their vocal patterns reveal. Coaching also requires asking open-ended, short, but powerful questions. A handful of coaching questions which have helped me reel in the emotionally charged:
- What do you really want?
- What’s the lie here?
- What’s the biggest blocker?
- What’s the hardest thing here?
- Why does this matter? Or, why are we talking about this?
- What’s the truth?
- How does X connect with Y? Or, how do these things connect?
- What’s the problem behind this problem? (Meaning: Look beyond face value. I can’t think of a single coaching problem that doesn’t have a bigger, more emotional problem behind it.)
- What’s come clearer (if anything) now you’ve aired all of that?
Tone becomes important as it’s not only the words that have weight. Ask your questions from a place of anthropological curiosity and with full empathy and compassion. Ask with blameless discernment and with zero attachment to the answer. Ask without needing to solve, without needing to be ‘right.’
Stay calm. Reserve your right to leave
This article and my stand on the coach approach to dealing with conflict includes staying calm, neutral, having ground rules, listening, and avoiding judging. I also contend leaving if and when you can’t do any of the above because you’re feeling too hijacked and triggered to proceed.
Here’s my take: If you’re hijacked, you’re not able to listen well nor serve. You can try self calming and correcting in the moment through kind self talk, i.e. “there there” or, “separate past from present,” which helps if the anger or hostility unearths old wounds from your past and/or resembles an abuser in your life. But to a point. If you’re truly uncomfortable, then, announce the feeling and take that space to reset.
I take my cues from a dear friend whose very livelihood is to coach and train educationally challenged teenagers, who are apt to rage when frustrated. (My friend expresses her inability to sit through the rage and leaves the room for five minutes. Then, she returns.)
I also learn from It’s Not You, an excellent book on managing antagonistic personalities from Dr. Ramani Durvasula. Dr. Durvasula contends we can lay down short, non-inflammatory statements to show our boundaries, such as: “That’s not what is going on here,” which helps when someone gas lights us. We can signal we’re listening with short phrases, like: “Understood.” Or, “I can see why you feel that way.” We can add to that: “If this raging communication doesn’t stop, I’ll need to leave.” And she’s right. Ultimately, we can leave the meeting.
This past three years I’ve coached thousands of mid-level managers and executives all over the globe. These coachees report that interactions with antagonistic personalities and communicators have spiked, most likely out of those individuals’ stress, overwork, and their fear of falling back and losing their place. I too have encountered more antagonistic communicators this past year than in the last decade. While uncomfortable, I do believe we can maintain our core values and continue interacting.
Anger and frustration are two emotions that we here in the West tend to frown upon, especially in business. But I view them as helpful for revealing what’s behind the anger: hurt, fear, regret, and worry. I consider anger an interesting paint color in our palette of emotions to draw from as we frame our picture of what’s going on. I hope this handful of coach approaches offer a reframe and some tactics so you can continue on and complete your fine work together vs. stall.
PS: I devote this article to my new, brave friend Keerti, a wedding planner in New York, who requested help with staying calm with her growing clients — and their parents.
Debbi Gardiner McCullough has reinvented three times across three continents and three industries, most recently leaving academia after 19 years of service to train to become a coach. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and serves as a communications coach to leaders all over the globe with BetterUp and Sales Rocket Fuel.