Chapter 8
YOU DON’T WANT TO FACE INTERPERSONAL CONFLICTS, BUT . . .
ALICE WORKED AS AN ASSISTANT MANAGER in the financing industry. “Forget about it” and “Never mind” were her go-to pet phrases. She didn’t like having a conflicting opinion to everyone else and she was afraid of being seen as different from others in her department. Alice always believed that “If I can blend in with the group and make everyone happy, they’ll like me,” or she’d think, “It’s fine. My ideas are just so-so, they don’t matter. The important thing is that the meeting concludes, and that we’ve reached our goals.” Sometimes she’d go as far as to tell herself, “I want this to be the perfect presentation. I don’t want to hold everyone back or become a burden or else they’ll hate me.” She always put other’s ideas before her own, and because of that, everyone thought of her as unimaginative or idea-less. Not only did the managers think she didn’t have any ideas, her colleagues all thought she didn’t have any sense of existence or survival. Because of her high level of empathy and because she put the team first, Alice never made waves within her department. One day, however, when she finally had to face an assessment and needed to discuss who was to blame for a major issue, her empathy and willingness to put the team first quickly became a liability.
It began with an internal communication mishap between Alice’s department and another department that resulted in Alice’s company accidentally charging a customer in Alice’s portfolio twice. Unfortunately, this client was notoriously cautious about money and became very upset. Technically, all the charges and transactions are processed and managed in the computer system, so that such a mistake could ever happen with their accounts really sent this client into a rage. As a client manager, Alice normally had a great relationship with this client—she could always put herself in her customer’s shoes, and the client in turn put a lot of trust in her—so her managers had given Alice the responsibility of maintaining contact with this client. But this time, when she was facing such an explosively angry customer, she completely lost any sense of what she should do. She could only think about running away and hiding somewhere. All of a sudden, this peaceful, harmonious, happy-go-lucky woman seemed like a completely different person.
It wasn’t easy, but with the help of her manager, Alice was able to placate her client with a face-to-face meeting. But when she got back to the office, she was raked over the coals by her supervisors about the business incident, which became another major obstacle for her. The truth of the entire matter was that another department’s employee, who was supposed to support Alice in taking care of her clients’ inquiries, had mistaken Alice’s instructions and had therefore handled it wrong. However, because Alice was so empathetic, she didn’t wish for her colleague in the other department to be written up and reprimanded for this incident, and she didn’t want that colleague to be the one to shoulder the burden, so when several departments came together for a meeting to deal with the issue, she chose to respond gently by saying, “Perhaps it was me not communicating clearly that caused you to misunderstand. In the future, I’ll double-check with you to make sure you understand so we can avoid the same problems happening in the future.”
Because of how Alice responded, her manager completely lost any power he had to control the situation from his end. Fortunately, the manager in the other department knew that his own department was at fault, so he didn’t say anything in response to Alice, and the whole thing blew over nicely. When Alice walked out of the conference room and thought that everything was all smiles and roses, she let out a sigh of relief. Therefore, she was totally blind-sided when her boss called her into his office to berate her. “It was obviously the other department’s fault! All you had to do was let him rightfully take the blame! What were you thinking? Why are you trying to take the blame for someone else?! Was there an email record from the time? No! There wasn’t! Sooner or later you’re going to end up getting yourself into a bigger pot of hot water by doing stuff like this and I’ll end up being dragged down by you!”
Alice was shocked. She didn’t expect that her way of dealing with problems would make her manager so incredibly angry. In her heart, she thought, “Ugh, there’s no way for me to make anyone happy. I completely fumbled the ball in front of my supervisor, and none of my department colleagues like me either. Forget about it, I’ll just grin and bear it.”
HANDLING CONFLICTS
When I was first starting out at work, I encountered a situation similar to Alice’s. At the time, I was a planning specialist, and I had a client who needed a customized gift. I told the Sales department that this was doable, at which point Sales sent a professional reply to the customer telling them we could fulfill their request. Unfortunately, the communication link was wrong; the Product department actually said that they couldn’t provide this option. In an instant, I had massively messed up, but I felt that I was just a small cog in a giant machine; I didn’t have any power to deal with this kind of cross-department conflict between the Product, Sales, and Planning departments. All I wanted to do was find a place to crawl under and hide.
The book Highly Sensitive People in an Insensitive World points out that, among those who are highly sensitive, 70 percent are introverts. A highly sensitive person might easily pick up on a nearby vibe that isn’t right and start to feel uncomfortable . . . they might even go so far as to think that they’re responsible for something, or that they did something wrong. They’re apt to feel the need to just get out of Dodge ASAP. For the highly sensitive person, conflicts bring psychological pressure and physiological fatigue, and this is especially the case for sensitive introverts. As a result, many introverts tend to avoid conflict and conserve their energy. However, no matter whether it’s in your personal life or in the workplace, if you’re always choosing to flee, then the things under your control will gradually dwindle.
METHODS YOU CAN ADOPT WHEN FACED WITH CONFLICTS
Conflicts can also create great opportunities to explore new ways of communicating with and understanding each other. Don’t waste the crisis; use it to create opportunities instead. Here are some methods you can consider when facing conflicts.
Take a breather for a bit, but remember to come back.
The moment conflict erupts, it’s particularly hard for introverts to bear, adding on to the chaos that’s going on in their minds. They might feel stuck, unable to do anything for their own benefit. My recommendation is that they first get away from the place of conflict or take some time to collect their thoughts and feelings. But after they’ve done so, they need to remember to reengage with the conflict, face up to it, and solve it. If you find yourself in such a situation, you could propose a different time to revisit the issue at hand: “Let’s meet up again this afternoon to discuss this issue. I’ll inform people from the relevant departments and take care of collecting the relevant information. We’ll work it out then.”
Listening compassionately is not the same as agreeing.
Don’t interrupt. Don’t interject. Pay close attention to the messages so you can figure out what people care about, and then you can understand where they’re coming from. Consider making room for common ground; this is one of the greatest abilities an introvert has at their disposal. But remember: empathizing with and respecting the other party’s feelings does not mean you have to agree with their viewpoints.
Take charge of your communication opportunities.
Some introverts don’t like expressing their own emotions or thoughts, especially when they are under tons of pressure. They practice all sorts of possible scenarios in their heads about what can happen once their words leave their lips. The more they think, the more they’re unwilling to speak. But if they don’t speak their mind at that moment, it could be a missed opportunity for communication.
Let it go.
Introverts are people who are good at thinking deeply. It’s easy for them to put information coming into their minds into long-term storage. As a result, you need to remind them that after the conflict is over, they don’t need to keep holding onto the thoughts and feelings that arose from the conflict. Take, for example, a mistake that I made several years ago in the workplace. To this day, I still remember it like it was yesterday. As long as I remember a conflict I had with a specific person, I’m afraid to talk with them because I’m afraid that they might still have a conflict with me. Even if holding on to past conflicts can help you remember a good lesson, secretly holding these memories, thoughts, and feelings, and accumulating these hard lessons in your mind is not healthy over the long-term.
It took three separate department managers in our company to deal with the saga of the specialized product for my customer. The issue finally got straightened out, drawing the curtains closed on that drama. What influenced me the most was that once things had settled down, one of the managers took me aside and told me, “The office is not a big place . . . if you have any concerns in the future, just take a couple steps over to that department and talk to them directly.” I realized later on that running away from face-to-face communication is a major crux for introverts when it comes to interpersonal communication.
FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION ISN’T ALL THAT SCARY
Even though introverts are always masterfully using written communication, some conflicts are actually caused as email exchanges or text messages pile up. I have been in situations in which clients, project managers, and information consultants constantly used email for their communications because of time zone differences and language-related issues. In one instance, a computer system went haywire. The English-speaking project manager then needed to continuously apologize to the Chinese-speaking customer and communicate in numerous emails to explain the possible reasons for the issue and future measures that the company would put in place to prevent any future issues. However, the client was obviously not feeling very happy and lost their patience. The tone of their emails was full of distrust, and the wording was getting more severe with every reply.
In a flash, I knew the situation wasn’t right. I intervened by promptly calling the customer and communicating in Chinese, at which point I discovered that the issue could be fixed; it was just a misunderstanding that arose and was aggravated by too many emails, especially since cultural and language barriers separated my company and the customer. The customer had limited English proficiency, and, in the absence of body language and facial expressions, they couldn’t completely understand what the other party was trying to express or the tone of the words or sentences. When the customer felt frustrated while reading an email, they’d get defensive and not think about how to solve the problem. Instead, they’d focus on holding the person responsible and making them accountable for what they did.
In The Introverted Leader: Building on Your Quiet Strength, Jennifer Kahnweiler writes about the management style of Matt Underwood, a middle-school principal. Even though Underwood would promote using emails as the basis of communication, he’d just use it to exchange strictly basic information. The reason he gave is that “directly standing in front of someone can convey many expressions that just can’t be made with a keyboard or a computer screen.” I saw with my own eyes how a boss was treating his introverted colleague when he yelled, “Is there anything that you can’t say to me in person? When I am in the office, the door is open anytime. If you have time to write an email, how is it that you’re not able to spend a simple five minutes to have a conversation? Once I’ve finished reading the email, I still need to call you in and discuss the matter in person anyway, so what’s the point of writing an email?”
Corporate consultant Sylvia Löhken also suggests that, regardless of what work you as an introvert are responsible for, when circumstances permit, you should leave your computer as much as possible and walk around the office a lot. Take advantage of talking one-on-one with other introverts, who are masters of that skill. But her advice, especially for introverted managers, is that when they walk around and talk with their colleagues, they will express much more effective communication than they would in a conference room.