Conflict Management — Transcript
[00:00:00.06] Ken: I had a client one time and I say I had a client. I wasn’t the manager of the project. I wasn’t even really on the project. I was a quote project partner which meant my job was to oversee quality and if there were issues, it was to, you know, deal with issues from our end. performance perspective. I had a client one time who was kind of heck-bent on enforcing process over results and I’ve probably said this about other clients before but in this case he had a he was not our direct report we didn’t report to this individual, but he had influence. He wasn’t even the same agency, he had influence over us, and he was bound and convinced that we weren’t doing things the right way, or that we didn’t bring the qualified people on the project. Now, our client wouldn’t have said this. As a matter of fact, I talked directly to them. the client and said, you know, “Hey, what do we do?” Or, “Hey, are we screwing up? Is there something good going, or is there something bad going on here?” And he said, “No, you guys are doing a great job.” But this other individual just seemed, and I think some of it was he and I had never gotten along. You know, they’re those people you learn in life. that are, you’re never just, you’re just not compatible for whatever reason, and he and I were not, and in some cases I actually had you come in, Jim, and deal with him simply because our relationship had deteriorated to the point he almost couldn’t be in the same room to me, but his, his… The ostensible reason for him not liking us was because we didn’t have the right technical people and therefore we’d get the wrong answers or we didn’t have the right technical process. In reality, the work we were doing, the technical stuff was critical, but it needed to be balanced with the managerial and political realities of the project. That’s where I came in, that’s where a lot of our people came in. So he didn’t recognize that and underplayed the importance of that, and it led to some serious conflict on the project to the point he wrote letters to the powers above the person that we were talking to saying, you know, we’re not qualified to do this and if the project fails, it’s going to be. our fault and blah, blah, blah, and we naturally had to respond to those things, and, and we did with actually the help of a lawyer, and this is where I first heard the phrase. I have a tendency to try and deescalate conflict, you know, um, rather than, um, address it head on. nature. Despite being from the East Coast and I’m pretty plain spoken, I would rather de-escalate and keep things on a level playing field. But you finally told me when we were dealing with this guy, “Look, sometimes you just got to punch a bully in the nose.” And you were right, and I was so deep into it, and so, um, um. you know, just emotionally invested in it, that I couldn’t see that and that’s in essence what we did in responding to that letter was with our attorney’s help. We wrote a very strongly worded letter and basically punched him in the nose, and we did a couple other things aside from the letter just calling on our personal connections that I hated doing that. But the point is in conflict management, there are a number of approaches that worked, and you can’t rely on one arrow in your quiver. In my case, that arrow was appeasement mostly, and like I said, you kind of said, let’s just punch the bully in the nose, and we did, and it worked. Not sure that would work in every situation. Sometimes people would respond poorly to that. But if there’s a big theme here, it’s gonna be conflict management is hard and you have to have a number of strategies for dealing with conflict. You recall the situation I’m talking about, I’m sure.
[00:04:27.89] Jim: - Oh yeah. I think what exacerbated the problem is that this was a very experienced and smart person who by the time, yeah, yeah, very bright guy and with a lot of experience. So that, I think that made it even tougher to resolve. the conflict, and by the time we got our lawyer involved, he, he was, he was attacking not just you, he was attacking me too, and I don’t think either one of us could really think clearly on it at that point, and so she was as bright as he was, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put my money on she was.
[00:05:15.27] Ken: This is our lawyer. When you say she, you’re referring to her.
[00:05:18.55] Jim: Yeah, our attorney was much brighter.
[00:05:21.94] Ken: Our attorney was about 4’11” and weighed all of 90 pounds wet, and I would not scrap with her for the life of me. She would have killed me.
[00:05:33.09] Jim: Yeah, after she wrote the letter, I think we both… call her and said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Yes, don’t change a word.” And she was right. It did fix the problem. I guess what I, what always bothered me about that is I, I have bit of dumb persistence and I I hated to lose the relationship even though everything pointed at it and there’s just no reason to keep keep trying to keep that going when it it I mean it came down to the reputation of our company at that point so that I was disappointed that we couldn’t, I mean, both of us have worked with a lot of difficult people, a lot of bright people, and I think we were both a little bit defeated by having to resort to, you know, the relationships broken.
[00:06:38.21] Ken: And we tried all, you know, we tried all kinds of things saying, okay, well, we tried compromising. where we say, okay, we’ll do these things, these seven things that you seem to think are important, we’ll make sure those happened, and then an eighth thing would come up, or a ninth thing, or a 10th thing, or something else would come up. So it wasn’t like we didn’t try a strategy of appeasement, which is, in my mind, the first, probably, step in conflict resolution is to try and find a middle ground compromise, you know, provided within the bounds of reason and ethic, you know, it’s ethical and in good taste. Simply because in our business relationships were so important and we did want to maintain that relationship. You’re absolutely right, he was a bright guy. There was a time I actually enjoyed talking to him because he was so bright. But eventually my, you know, his kind of constant attacks would, you know, drag me down is the bottom line. Did you have a big like, do you remember you having a big conflict with a client or a, you know, an employee or something and how did you manage it if you remember something?
[00:08:06.06] Jim: I did have conflicts with the occasional client and, you know, they were just mostly for me not recognizing sort of the boundaries of things that were in place in an organization. Because as you know, one of the nice things about being a consultant is if the problem’s in the mailroom, you go to the mailroom and talk to the mailroom. If the problem’s in the director’s office, eventually you’ll find yourself up in the director’s office. we could transit a hierarchy that people in state government will recognize. It was difficult for an internal person to do that. So yeah, I would run into conflict because I missed some boundary that I had crossed. But my, style with conflict was more avoidance and try to just keep it on the periphery. But this, the ones that I found I had to act on immediately and did were if it employed, if it involved one of our employees in a third party, especially. a client, and we didn’t have many of those, but there was one case I remember where one of our more senior employees was just being bullied by a by a guy on the state staff. It wasn’t apparent why. I think he was just a bully and he had found a victim, and there was never anything, you know, sexual or wanting to date her or anything like that. It wasn’t the usual problem that you read about, and she was very defeated by it. Because he would lash out at her in front of other people and he had taken to sort of calling her names and Well that that’s the kind of thing rather than try to avoid it or smooth it over with a client it just had to be addressed directly
[00:10:26.12] Ken: Before it got out of hand. Yeah, I think if I go - Go ahead.
[00:10:31.41] Jim: - Well, all I was gonna say is the client was great. We had a great relationship with our contract administrator and she looked into it and immediately said, you know what, this behavior is actually something that’s been observed and it was prior to this case. case was happening internal to our organization, so they moved the guy out of his position.
[00:11:03.69] Ken: Yeah, looking back on it, the strategy of early intervention, if I had recognized what a problem this was going to become. I think my failure in the story I told at the very beginning was simply not recognizing the persistence of this individual, and it may have just been a personality trait. I do believe it was a personal dislike of me, which is fine. You know, we don’t all have to like each other. I think if I’d recognized it and acted earlier, it would have perhaps not escalated to the degree it did. You know, that said, so I think that’s a strong point that you bring up, that sometimes if you see a conflict starting, appeasement isn’t always, the right approach. Sometimes you have to deal with something a little stronger up front, and it sort of depends on the nature of the conflict. Again, I didn’t recognize the nature of this conflict would escalate to the point that it did. In part because this gentleman started with some legitimately good ideas of things we could do differently. But he just kept adding on and adding on and adding on to the point that it would have either caused us to go to our direct client and say, “Hey, we’ve got to raise the price because we’re doing this, this, and that.” But in this case, I truly didn’t agree with some of the suggestions that came out. I didn’t think it would add any value to the client, and that’s where, you know, I kind of got stuck or that’s where it started to be a conflict for me. It was by saying, look, what value does this add or it adds such marginal value. It’s not worth the cost of adding onto the project. Anyway, I think that’s, I guess, if I were to summarize this, A, try and recognize conflict as early as possible, to deal with it directly as possible, but don’t be afraid to escalate it beyond just appeasement and go into strategies that include punching the bully in the nose. I don’t know if you have a summarization of your experience with this.
[00:13:25.61] Jim: - No, I like your summary. I think the only thing I would add. So I think what I would add is that there were certainly cases
[00:13:41.74] Ken: Where we were brought in to absorb that conflict. I mean we talked about why I hire a consultant but yeah but that’s a little different when you’re brought in to in this case it was the conflicts that that were problematic for me weren’t when I was brought in to deal with a conflict. The problem was the conflict arised that kept me from helping the client with what they needed to have done or what they wanted to have done. That’s what I consider a conflict. I had no problem stepping in, if that was my job, dealing with a conflict. That’s fine if that’s what they paid me for and I was actually quite good at that what I wasn’t always good at is Recognizing conflicts arising either among our staff or with our clients or things like that and and dealing with those
[00:14:28.95] Jim: Get excellent distinction because I I as you say that This was the conflict was much more Personal that yeah related. Yeah, that’s what it was. Yeah, so Yep Okay