When you let your team shine, empower them and support them, everyone wins. Check out today’s video for tips on helping your team to shine.
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In two previous posts, I shared ways to help your team move beyond conflict and ways to focus your attention for better conflict resolution. Today, I’m turning my attention to coaching approaches you can use to encourage your team to behave in ways that lead to reducing the number of conflicts you experience and to resolving them more quickly when they happen.
If your team has a history of unresolved conflict situations, you won’t likely correct the problem with a single conversation. You will need to set the course for a better future state in your team by modeling the behaviors you want to see and then coaching your team members to model them as well.
Here are the six specific coaching points you can use to help your team move from conflict to resolution…
Clearly identify what is and is not appropriate behavior.
Workplace conflicts can generally be traced to a specific behavior or set of behaviors by one person that somehow negatively impacted someone else. The negative impact could be either real or perceived, and it doesn’t really matter if it was a real negative or merely a perceived one.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to coach people on perception and feelings. It is possible to coach them on behaviors, and that’s where I suggest you keep your focus.
If your team has a history of demonstrating conflict escalating behaviors, start your coaching efforts by identifying specific actions, inactions, and word choices that contribute to the rising conflict. Also identify examples of actions, inactions, and word choices that you notice turn the conflict towards resolution.
Communicate your expectations to your team.
Armed with knowledge of what helps and hurts the conflict situations in your environment, let people know what is and is not acceptable behavior from this point forward. Let them know how you expect them to act towards and interact with each other.
How you communicate your expectations will depend on the specific situation in your team. In some cases, you can do a group meeting to convey your vision of how the team will interact in the future. In almost all situations, you will need to have at least some one-on-one conversations about the new expectations.
Work with your team members to identify behavioral norms that build trust and reduce conflict.
Ideally, your communication of expectations will be more conversation and less message delivery. If at all possible, work to engage your team members in a conversation about what helps and hurts the interactions within your team. Engage them in discussion about how the team can interact to move past historical conflicts. Keep your focus on the future and invite them to do the same. Ask them to help you solve the conflict situation in productive ways that unify and build the team.
Recognize and reward the behaviors you want to see in your team.
After you have agreed on a new set of behavioral norms for the team, be on the lookout for examples of team members exhibiting the new interaction behaviors and living up to the stated team aspirations. Thank people for demonstrating conflict resolution behaviors. Notice it. Make it obvious that you are watching, and keep your attention on positive examples as much as you possibly can.
Let people know when their behaviors do not meet minimum expectations.
When team members fail to behave in accordance with the team norms, let them know. While it is generally better to highlight and encourage the behaviors you want to see rather than try to punish away the behaviors you don’t want to see, you do need to be willing to confront unacceptable behaviors when you see them.
Except for very rare situations, this conversation should happen in private. It does need to happen if you see people behaving in ways that foster conflict rather than resolve it.
Teach and encourage your team to resolve their own conflicts rather than bring them to you.
In an ideal world, leaders would rarely get involved in the conflicts between their team members. In reality, it’s going to happen.
When you do get involved, resist the temptation to impose a resolution plan or to act like a judge to determine who is right and who is wrong. Instead, encourage the two conflicting parties to resolve the conflict for themselves with your support and guidance. In the process, you will teach them conflict resolution skills that enable them to resolve future conflicts without your involvement.
Sadly, some teams are so badly damaged that historical conflicts might not get resolved. However, that is not usually the case. In most situations, even many situations that initially look hopeless, you can turn the tide and help your team move forward.
Maintain a hopeful perspective. Keep your focus on where you want the team to go. Model the behaviors you want to see in your team, and coach your team members to model those behaviors as well. If you do these things and stay committed to a positive outcome, you can help your team move from conflict to resolution.
Check out these resources for even more specific tips for implementing these ideas:
As a supervisor, it is absolutely necessary that you provide your employees with performance feedback. For new supervisors, the process is often challenging and uncomfortable. After all, it is not easy for everyone to criticize others. That said, you can’t avoid it.
Just remember that the words you use are only part of your message. Your full message is a combination of the words you choose and the emotion you get across.
When you deliver performance feedback, the emotional part becomes particularly challenging. People receiving feedback are often already feeling vulnerable and emotional. They can be quick to believe that you are criticizing or threatening them in some way, and so they immediately put up their defenses.
That defensiveness, in and of itself, creates a potential minefield for supervisors. Let’s say you want to offer feedback that will turn a great performer into an excellent performer. That employee could still become defensive when you offer negative feedback, even though your goal is to simply elevate his or her performance. The situation becomes immensely challenging when you must address poor performance and bring it up to acceptable levels.
However, by understanding the emotional filter of the person receiving the feedback, you improve your odds of delivering the right message in the right way so that you minimize defensive reactions from employees. Additionally, while you do not want to be emotional when you provide feedback, you do want to frame your feedback based on employees’ emotional filters. To figure out what those filters are, answer two questions about each employee:
Then follow this advice. (Remember: Your feedback should always focus on observable issues, for example, behaviors, words, actions, results and so on.)
Take action: Use the tips above as a starting point to understand your team. Schedule a feedback meeting with someone on your team within the next 48 hours to practice applying the suggestions. As you speak with people, observe their responses to your approach, and then make adjustments as necessary.
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While it’s hard, time-consuming and often frustrating, coaching can be extremely gratifying on a personal level. Here’s a little motivation to help jump-start your next coaching situation.
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Is your team stuck in a cycle of personal bias and conflict? Are you struggling to help your team move beyond personal conflicts and disagreements so that you can get better results and see more professional behaviors?
If you said yes to either or both of those questions, I have two things to tell you that I hope will give you hope for a better future:
While I want to offer you hope, I also have to balance the hopeful statements with two “reality check” statements:
Building trust and resolving conflict are involved and complicated issues that depend on a wide range of situation-specific techniques and approaches. I do not believe I can adequately address every nuance of fixing this situation with a simple blog post or even a series of blog posts. I can offer some tips and suggestions to get you going in the right direction and to point you towards other resources that can help you build both your confidence and skill in addressing this messy and complicated issue.
To help you get started, here are two things you can do to help your team move beyond conflict to achieve resolution…
Model the behaviors you want to see in your team.
Professional conduct and productive conflict resolution are like every other workplace behavior; they start with the example set by the leader. In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John Maxwell calls this idea The Law of the Lid. To quote him directly:
“Personal and organizational effectiveness is proportionate to the strength of leadership.”
Or, to quote one of my early mentors, “Guy, you can’t teach what you don’t know and you can’t lead where you won’t go.”
What, then, are the behaviors you want to see in order to resolve conflicts and solve problems productively as a team?
I’ll elaborate on each of these ideas in a future post. For now, though, here’s what I propose:
Coach your team to demonstrate the behaviors you want to see.
Coaching your team members towards the goal of building trust and reducing conflict will require you to do at least these six things:
I will also elaborate on these six coaching points in a future post to give you more specific insights on how you can apply each idea.
Watch for two future blog posts that will elaborate and expand the ideas I presented with this post, and consider checking out these audio recordings with specific tips for implementing these ideas:
SMILE! The positivity of your team starts with you. And when we create this positive environment, we see increased productivity, engagement and success. Watch today’s episode below for tips to help create a positive outlook for your team.
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Coaching is usually about the poor performer. And while coaching absolutely can and should be used for this, if we want to be more successful as leaders, we need to also coach our high-performers. Check out today’s video for tips on coaching your high-performers to even more success!
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One common mistake that new leaders make is to be too lenient and “cut people some slack” on performance issues. If you have slipped up in this area of leadership, it’s okay. Many people before you have made the same mistake, and it is recoverable.
A common sign that you have made this error is surprise and/or shock expressed by your team members when you speak with them about some element of poor or unsatisfactory performance. Your first step towards fixing this issue is to recognize it. Your next step is to immediately take action to correct it.
You can get a more complete action plan for resolving this problem from two teleseminars I held previously titled Coach Your Way to Leadership Success and Accountability Conversations. Here are three steps you can take to begin turning the situation around…
Accept responsibility for the miscommunication.
One key principle of remarkable leadership is that you cannot reasonably hold people accountable or expect them to take responsibility for issues that you failed to make clear in the past. This includes both performance issues that you failed to identify and performance issues that you have “let slide.”
In both cases, the ultimate responsibility for the performance shortfall rests with the leader.
If we expect other people to take responsibility for and act to correct their mistakes and failures, then we must be willing to do the same. The important point here is that you are accepting responsibility for the failure to communicate the expectation or to identify the performance gap; you are not exempting them from participating in the process of finding a solution to the problem.
Identify the gap in performance.
Your next step is to tell them the gap in performance as you see it. In most cases, it is also useful to ask them for their understanding of the gap. Some of the questions you want to answer at this stage of the conversation are…
The idea here is to have a discussion about the gap between current performance and expected performance. Keep the conversation focused on the specific, observable, and, if possible, measurable gap between the current state and the desired future state rather than on perceptions and intentions.
As much as you possibly can, keep this conversation directed toward clarifying the desired future state rather than exploring the past. The better you accomplish this goal, the less likely the person will be to get defensive during the conversation.
Ask them to help you find ways to close the gap.
After you have clearly identified the performance gap, its likely causes, and what you would prefer to see in the future, ask your team member how they think the gap can be closed. You want to engage them in the process of answering these questions…
When you engage your team member in solving the problem, you reduce the risk of the conversation feeling like a reprimand and you increase the probability that they will take action to address the performance gap.
The goal of this conversation is to strike a balance between overly lenient and overly harsh. You want to have a conversation directed towards resolving an identified performance gap and not directed towards placing blame. If you start by accepting your role in failing to communicate or to require meeting an expectation in the past, you will probably “take the sting” out of the conversation. When you take out the sting, you can move in the direction of problem solving and collaboration in a way that engages your team member rather than alienating them.
This is a guest post adapted from YOUR FIRST LEADERSHIP JOB: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others by Tacy M. Byham and Richard S. Wellins, Wiley, 2015. Byham and Wellins are CEO and SVP, respectively, of Development Dimensions International (DDI).
We absolutely believe that as a leader you are a powerful, creative and indispensable force for good in society. But you’re not a mind reader, nor are you a psychiatrist (most likely). You may discover that the employees you’ll be coaching have personal issues beyond your scope that make it necessary to enlist your HR team for help. But by approaching the entire situation with empathy and planning—and considering the personal and practical needs of all involved—you’ll be better able to help your team consistently work well together. The following tips can help.
Start with a Comprehensive Hiring Process
Choose team members in ways that lead to top employee performance and engagement.
For now, let’s say it this way: The right hiring decisions today will save you considerable headaches in the future.
Ensure Expectations for Performance Are Always Crystal Clear
“How can you possibly tell me I missed my goals?” ranted Malu. “You never gave me any!” Yes, this happens more often that we would like. Use your company’s performance management system to set expectations each year. Include both the “whats” (quantitative goals) and the “hows” (behaviors/competencies). And review them with employees regularly. Clear expectations equal fewer surprises!
An Ounce of Planning is Worth a Pound of Cure
Plan your approach and conversation in advance. If the situation is serious or is likely to involve formal consequences like probation or termination, seek guidance from your HR specialists. One thing you can count on—employees are likely to ask for specifics, so make sure you seek and use real data.
All-Around Coaching
Coaching is one of your most important leadership roles. When you coach proactively, by helping your team members do things right from the start, it not only builds their confidence but also it helps to prevent problems from occurring in the first place—a far better place to be. Better to learn from success than failure. When you must react to a team member gone astray, coach for improvement sooner rather than later.
Keep Notes
Don’t rely on your memory. Discussions with problem employees should be documented for three reasons. First, documentation helps you and them keep track of your agreements over time. Second, it keeps you on track for your next (of many) coaching conversation. And third, it ensures that there will be no misinterpretation later about what you discussed. (“I never said that,” “I didn’t agree to that” or “I never knew it was a serious problem.”) If problems become severe enough to lead to disciplinary action or even termination, documentation will become even more crucial. It might very well be used as part of a legal proceeding in some countries, should the employee accuse you of wrongful treatment.
Be Prepared for Multiple Conversations
It might take several coaching and feedback sessions to reverse the negative trend. If you take two steps forward and one step back, that’s OK—it’s still progress. Always schedule follow-up meetings to review where things stand and to clarify the process. Positive feedback is also critical. If (when) things begin to turn for the better, let the person know with sincere, positive feedback. One supervisor told us she had five different meetings with one of her team members over a period of two months. It was worth it! The person has become one of her top performers.
Don’t Get Hooked Emotionally
Your commitment to good leadership is admirable. And it’s not a bad sign that you care about the employee, or that you’re nervous about giving feedback. But others’ problems can quickly become your problems. And to make matters worse, some employees may attack you personally, saying you are to blame for their problems. Many leaders stay awake all night blaming themselves for an employee’s or team’s poor behavior. Besides feeling sorry for yourself, you might also feel like you and you alone are on the hook for solving the mess.
Take a breath. Your role is to help the employee understand that something needs to change. Then your job is to help the person come up with solutions. And, in most cases, it should be the employee’s solution, not yours. Your goal is to provide support without removing the person’s responsibility and accountability for addressing the issues.
Are your employees saying “YES, I understand”, when they really DON’T? In the video below, you’ll learn some tips to ensure that there is real understanding in all of your communications.
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