Preface

by Linda Hill

Years ago, a colleague and I got into a fight. I had been selected to lead a cross-functional task force to review a portion of our MBA curricula. This was a diverse group of people—a few fellow junior faculty, people from other departments, and professors who had been at the school for decades, including my senior colleague and friend, whom I’ll call Elizabeth. I was a brand-new tenured professor, and although I was surprised that I’d been picked to lead the team, I was also honored. And I was glad that I would be able to rely on Elizabeth for her expertise. After all, she had much more experience than I did.

Yet each time the group met, Elizabeth wasn’t participating. She sat silently and rarely, if ever, had anything positive to contribute. We’d be talking about a topic that I knew she had an opinion on, and still she didn’t say anything.

When she did open her mouth, it was to disparage me. In front of the group, she picked on what I felt were trivial things, like the fact that I didn’t have all the supplemental materials in the same order as they were listed in the agenda. I could tell that something was wrong.

So could the rest of the team. People exchanged glances when Elizabeth openly criticized me for not being prepared. Some people tried to jump in and move things along when things got tense between us. But it was clear that the situation was making the whole team uncomfortable—me, Elizabeth, and everybody else.

I was confounded. Elizabeth and I had always gotten along, and whenever we’d collaborated in the past, it went well. After a few weeks of enduring her alternating silent treatment and carping, I decided to talk to her. I closed her office door behind me, sat down, and asked, “We aren’t really working well together, are we?”

I wasn’t prepared for what came next. She started yelling at me. She thought that I was doing a horrible job of running the group, that we weren’t making progress on the evaluation, and that I was wasting her and everyone else’s time. I felt backed into a corner, and as a result, I raised my voice, too, defending myself against her accusations.

This was not a smart way to handle the situation. It quickly became clear that neither of us wanted to be fighting. I didn’t know what to do. I was concerned that without Elizabeth on board, the group would never be able to finish our work. And more importantly, I worried that Elizabeth’s and my relationship, a relationship that I valued, was going to be irreparably damaged. And she didn’t seem to be doing any better.

I’m not proud of what I did—you should never raise your voice at people at work. It felt horrible at the time; I was exasperated, angry, upset, questioning myself and Elizabeth. But our disagreement over who should be in charge of the group, how it should be run, and whose expertise needed to be tapped and in what way was not necessarily negative in and of itself. These questions needed to be addressed for the group to do its best work and for me to be effective as a leader.

During our heated exchange we got those issues out into the open. But how we handled that initial discussion was problematic—we weren’t going to solve the issues we’d raised if we were both defensive. We needed to work together.

And that’s just the thing—conflict at work is going to happen, no matter what you do. And it should. It can be good for you, your team, and your organization. But how you deal with it can make the difference between a negative interaction and a productive one.

That’s why you’ve turned to this guide. We don’t want to have screaming matches with colleagues. We don’t want to feel as if our projects will fail unless we give in to what someone else wants. We don’t want to lose sleep over an intense interaction. We want to better understand why conflict happens, our options for addressing it, and how to navigate these disagreements so that we end up with our dignity and relationships intact.

Imagine how things with Elizabeth would’ve gone if I hadn’t just waltzed into her office and confronted her. What if I had thought through the discussion in advance, considering what Elizabeth and I were actually disagreeing about, and thinking about our different personalities? What if I had chosen the right time and place for us to talk, framed my message carefully, heard her out, and explained my position? Or what if Elizabeth had come to me earlier and explained why she wasn’t participating, made clear that her issues weren’t personal but had to do with how I was running the group or what the team was trying to achieve? Instead of sitting there staring at each other, fuming, we might’ve been engaged in a thoughtful, productive discussion.

Learning to navigate conflicts such as the one I had with Elizabeth is not really a choice in today’s organizations. There’s always going to be diversity, interdependence, and competition over scarce resources. And that’s not a bad thing. When passionate people with different perspectives collaborate to address a problem or an opportunity, there can be give-and-take and productive disagreement. That healthy competition helps create better products, features, and solutions. The research on innovation is clear: Without “creative abrasion” you won’t have a robust marketplace of new ideas. The most effective people are those who can disagree constructively, not destructively, and keep difficult conversations substantive, not personal.

Thankfully, mercifully really, in the middle of our fight, Elizabeth paused and asked if I wanted to get coffee with her across campus. Not sure what else to do, I agreed.

The change of scenery was exactly what we needed. As we walked across campus, we both calmed down and Elizabeth opened up about the source of her frustrations. It turns out that I was driving her crazy. I’m not a linear thinker and she is. The process I was using was infuriating to her. She wanted to know how each step led to the next, and I was willing to let things evolve more organically. Plus she felt as if I wasn’t using her expertise. I assumed people would speak up if they had ideas—that those with the most experience, such as Elizabeth, would chime in when they wanted to, so I didn’t call on anyone in particular and never met with individual team members outside the group to get their perspective. By not calling on her, or openly acknowledging her expertise and asking for her opinion, I had upset her. She felt that I hadn’t shown her enough respect. It’s not that I didn’t feel it (in fact, I assumed that she assumed that I respected her), but I didn’t demonstrate it.

Perhaps what really got me in trouble was that I hadn’t tried to see the situation from her perspective. I didn’t think about how she might feel having someone with far less experience be in charge of something she cared about so much.

We didn’t see eye to eye on how the committee should be managed—and she felt mistreated. We both were unafraid of conflict and typically approached it head-on, which is why we ended up in such a heated exchange in her office.

Her complaints made me realize that perhaps others in the group were having similar reactions. I wasn’t adapting my style for what worked best for the team—I was doing what was most comfortable to me. Also, I had assumed that by virtue of holding the leadership position, I had credibility. I didn’t think I needed to earn everyone’s trust, but I absolutely did.

Once we understood what exactly we were fighting about, and we had heard each other out, we were able to move toward a resolution. I asked for Elizabeth’s advice. How would she run the group? I was a new leader, and I wanted to learn from her. We both wanted the same thing—to produce the best curricula for our students—and to get there, I vowed to be more respectful of the wisdom and experience she brought to the group and to be more explicit about the process I was using to run the meetings. I started to ask her opinion before the team met. If I thought there was something she wouldn’t agree with, I gave her a heads-up. And I started regularly asking everyone to suggest options before we started evaluating them so that we could objectively look at the pros and cons.

Elizabeth made changes after our discussion, too. She stopped nitpicking. She backed off and gave me more space. Because everyone deeply respected her, the change in her attitude influenced the group positively. People were more at ease and offered ideas freely. Suggestions were no longer “Elizabeth’s idea” or “Linda’s idea”; they were all viable options we could evaluate based on their merits.

I was fortunate. I was able to preserve my relationship with Elizabeth, and the task force’s work was better as a consequence of our fight.

Looking back, I wish I had had the advice in this book before I spoke to Elizabeth. I could’ve saved us both a lot of grief if I had better understood the common sources of conflict, how people approach it differently, and the various options and strategies for solving it.

That’s what you’ll get in the pages ahead. You’ll learn how to effectively navigate conflicts with your boss, your peers, your direct reports, and partners outside your company. You’ll do the foundational work of better understanding the different types of conflict, your own tendency toward approaching it, and your options for resolving it. Then you’ll learn the process to follow when a specific conflict arises—from assessing what kind of conflict it is, to preparing for the conversation, to hearing your counterpart out, and to ultimately reaching a satisfying resolution and repairing your relationship, if necessary.

Mastering all of this will not absolve you from having fights at work. I still have them, for sure. We all do, and maybe on occasion you will lose your temper, say something ugly, and behave in a way that you regret. But by following the advice in this book, those occasions will be fewer and less painful—for you and your colleagues.