May

25

Good leaders balance advocacy and inquiry to resolve conflict

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Striving towards a vision and bringing about successful change is one of the hallmarks of leadership. However, vision equals change and change is often accompanied by conflict and tensions within and between teams. The leaders ability to effectively resolve this conflict and get people to move forward, acting to bring the vision into today is the result of great leadership. Unless we learn to productively deal with conflict, our change efforts will result in failure. One of the best tools to help with resolving conflict is the art of balancing advocacy and inquiry. What do we mean by advocacy and inquiry?

  • Advocacy: is about how ideas are presented and explained. It’s primarily, one-way communication. When communication is one-way it becomes difficult for the the listener to understand the reasoning which supports the ideas being presented. This makes it unlikely, that people will commit themselves to any meaningful course of action. Before people will commit to a course of action they need to understand the reasoning behind the ideas. Advocacy is about making your point, taking a stand in an attempt to influence others, supporting your viewpoint with a relational argument, whilst remaining open to alternative views.
  • Inquiry: is about how questions are raised and answered. Inquiry allows people to inquire into one another’s reasoning and understand the conclusion they have reached. Inquiry help us to understand what others are thinking and the reasoning behind their viewpoints.

Advocacy alone is insufficient. Likewise, inquiry alone is insufficient. Without a balance, people do not commit to action, they remain neutral. Learning to balance advocacy and inquiry increases likelihood that others will commit to take action. To gain a better understanding of the differences between advocacy and inquiry the following matrix, illustrated below, which I have adapted from “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook” provides a great overview of the various ways of dealing with conflict.

Advocacy and Inquiry

 

The above matrix shows that their are dysfunctional forms of advocacy (politicking and dictating) and inquiry (withdrawing and interrogating) which we need to be careful to avoid.

 

How to balance advocacy and inquiry

It’s important to understand when to use advocacy and when to use inquiry. Mark Gerzon in his book “Leading Through Conflict” provides the following guidelines to help leaders in combining these two very different styles:

“The general rule is this: inquiry precedes advocacy. If you (1) are uncertain about having reliable, complete information; (2) have not yet engaged all the relevant stakeholders; and (3) doubt that you have sufficient votes, power or other support to put your plan into action, then it is time for inquiry not advocacy. However, if you (1) have access to all the necessary information, (2) have obtained input from all the necessary people, and (3) have mapped a clear road to implementing a viable plan, then go ahead. Advocate your ’solution’ to the issue or conflict, and begin to rally everyone behind you.”

Balancing advocacy and inquiry enables constructive two-way communication and learning. “I state my views, I inquire into your views, and I invite you to state your views and I inquire into your views.”

When balancing advocacy and inquiry we expose our reasoning and encourage others to challenge and probe our argument. Having a viewpoint is important as much as being open to learning about the viewpoints of others. Some useful tips for improving advocacy and inquiry from “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook” includes:

  • State your views providing the assumptions and data you used that led to your view.  - “Here’s what I think and how I got there”
  • Always seek to make your reasoning explicit. - “I came to this conclusion because….”
  • Keep your viewpoint in context, what’s your purpose, who will be affected, how and why.
  • Provide concrete examples. - “To get a clearer picture as to what I am talking about imagine you’re…”
  • Encourage others to explore your thinking, assumptions and data without becoming defensive. - “What do you think about what I have just said?… What can you add?”
  • Ask other to explain their thought process without interrogating or making people defensive. - “How did you arrive at this view?”
  • Ask questions that help to gain insight into why people have the views that they do. - “Can you help me understand your thinking here?”
  • Explain how your questions help to clarify you concerns and assumptions.
  • Test what others are saying by asking or examples.
  • When advocating, keep listening, remaining open to different viewpoints.

Leaders often make the mistake of relying too much on advocacy to get their message across. Time pressures also make it more likely that leaders default to as means of getting commitment to their vision and to drive action. Usually leaders want to be the first to provide answers and they push their views too strongly, not leaving enough room for discussion and debate. How about you? This month why not try to balance advocacy and inquiry in your conversions, you’ll be amazed at the results.

 

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Mar

24

Context, Purpose, Drama and Conflict: The secret sauce of great meetings

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Patrick Lencioni author of the numerous books including "Death by Meeting" wrote an interesting article "Avoid ‘Death by Meeting’" which provides some great insights on creating an effective meetings. Patrick describes the two primary reasons meeting are ineffective as..

  1. Meetings lack drama. Which means they are boring.
  2. Most meetings lack context and purpose.

 

Drama and Conflict

Great meetings need what Patrick calls drama he says that "The key to making meetings more engaging - and less boring - lies in identifying and nurturing the natural level of conflict that should exist." Conflict keeps us engaged and interested, encouraging us to participate and contribute to the discussion. A leader’s role is to ask questions that matter so as to encourage engagement around the key issues.

 

Context and Purpose

In addition to drama meetings need context and purpose, "Unfortunately, no amount of drama will matter if leaders don’t create the right context for their meetings and make it clear to team members why the meeting is taking place, and what is expected of them. To create context, leaders must differentiate between different types of meetings. Too often, however, they throw every possible conversation into one long staff meeting. This creates confusion and frustration among team members who struggle to shift back and forth between tactical and strategic conversations, with little or no resolution of issues."

Effective leaders take a four pronged approach to effectively address context and purpose, they create and sustain the following four meetings.

  1. The Daily Check-in: is a schedule-oriented, administrative meeting that should last no more than five or 10 minutes. The purpose is simply to keep team members aligned and to provide a daily forum for activity updates and scheduling.
  2. The Weekly Tactical: is what most people have come to know as staff meetings. These should be approximately an hour in length, give or take 20 minutes, and should focus on the discussion and resolution of issues which effect near term objectives. Ironically, these work best if there is no pre-set agenda. Instead, the team should quickly review one another’s priorities and the team’s overall scorecard, and then decide on what to discuss during the remainder of the meeting.
  3. The Monthly Strategic: is the most interesting kind of meeting for leaders, and the most important indicator of a company’s strategic aptitude. It is the appropriate place for big topics, those that will have a long-term impact on the business.
  4. The Quarterly Off-Site Review: is an opportunity for team members to step away from the business, literally and figuratively, to reassess a variety of issues: the interpersonal performance of the team, the company’s strategy, the performance of top-tier and bottom-tier employees, morale, competitive threats and industry trends. These can last anywhere from the better part of a day to two full days each quarter.

 

Creating the right meeting eco-system or "social architecture" is critical to effective leadership. Ensuring that we have the appropriate levels of conflict and that each meeting has the right focus, the right conflict and purpose, is essential for great performance. How are your meetings? Do they have the right amount of conflict and drama? Do you have an eco-system where you have daily check-ins, tactical and strategic meetings?

 

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May

15

Constructive conflict is essential for creating commitment to decisions

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An article from HBS Working Knowledge “Don’t Listen to ‘Yes’“ where Martha Lagace,talks with Professor Michael Roberto, author of the new book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer on why it’s essential for leaders to spark conflict in their organizations, as long as it is constructive.

If people smile, nod, and say “yes” at your company, maybe it’s time to start an argument. According to HBS professor Michael Roberto, the lack of good conflict—constructive conflict—within an organization makes it that much harder to accurately evaluate business ideas and make important decisions….. But conflict does not mean browbeating.

The importance of constructive conflict

Leaders should create a climate of constructive dissent to improve the quality of decision making and to increase the levels of commitment to the decisions being made. Michael Roberto finds that by:

“Keeping conflict constructive helps to build decision commitment, and therefore facilitates implementation”

This is a key insight which is too easily overlooked. Patrick Lencioni in his book ”The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, reviewed here,  made a similar observation on the importance of conflict in teams and the key role that constructive conflict played in teams in building commitment to team vision and goals.

This insights means that to be effective we need to change the way we make important decisions. Encouraging constructive conflict in important decision-making processes increases people’s commitment to the decision and this in turn helps to ensure more effective implementation. Given the critical importance of conflict and dissent in effective decision making and execution leader need to take a more active role in fostering the dissent in their decision making processes.

“Leaders need to recognize that expressing dissent can be very difficult and uncomfortable for lower-level managers and employees. Therefore, leaders cannot wait for dissent to come to them; they must actively go seek it out in their organizations……. Leaders can and should take concrete steps to build conflict into their decision-making processes. For instance, they might ask a set of managers to role-play the firm’s competitors in a series of meetings so as to surface and test a set of core strategic assumptions. Or they might assign someone to play the devil’s advocate so as to ensure that a thorough critique and risk assessment of a proposal has been conducted before moving forward……. By inducing vigorous and open debate, leaders avoid the guessing game of trying to discern whether or not people truly agree with a choice that has been made” 

The three cultures of indecision

Looking at organisations culture of decision making Michael Roberto identifies three of what he calls ”cultures of indecision“ that undermine effective decision making in organisations:

 

The Culture of ‘No’

“Lou Gerstner coined the phrase ‘culture of no’ to describe the situation he inherited at IBM in the early 1990s. In this type of culture of indecision, dissenters essentially have veto power in the decision-making process, particularly if those individuals have power and status. The organization does not employ dissenting voices as a means of encouraging divergent thinking, but rather it enables those who disagree with a proposal to stifle dialogue and close off interesting avenues of inquiry. Such a culture does not force dissenters to defend their views with data and logic, or to explain how their objections are consistent with the organization-wide goals as opposed to the parochial interests of a particular division or subunit. A culture of no enables those with the most power or the loudest voice to impose their will.”

The Culture of ‘Yes’

“When Paul Levy embarked on a turnaround of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he discovered a ‘culture of yes.’ Levy described the dynamics: ‘People will not tell the truth during meetings about how their department would react to a given proposal. They will sit there quietly and you won’t find out until a week later that they object to something. This behavior had become standard practice. If you object to a proposal, you get quiet during the meeting. Then later, when you leave the room, you undercut the consensus that appeared to have emerged.’ Many organizations have similar patterns of behavior, and the tell-tale signs are quite similar to those described by Levy.”

The Culture of ‘Maybe’

A ’culture of maybe’ exists when companies are highly analytical, yet also quite uncomfortable with ambiguity. They go to great lengths to gather more information and to perform additional formal analysis, in hopes of reducing the ambiguity associated with various options and contingencies. They strive for certainty in an inherently uncertain world—to turn every maybe into a simple yes or no. Indecision and a lack of closure result if managers cannot recognize the costs of trying to gather a more and more complete set of information.

It seems to me that these three cultures are drive by the need to avoid conflict and dissent. The price they pay is in the lack of commitment and execution. The key lesson I take away from this is that conflict, although uncomfortable and messy at times, is a powerful mean of fostering commitment to decisions.

 

Keep the conflict constructive 

To be effective, leaders need to ensure that conflict remains constructive. That is, they must stimulate task-oriented disagreement and debate while trying to minimize interpersonal conflict. Leaders can accomplish this by taking concrete steps before, during, and after a critical decision process.

Before the decision making process

  • Establish ground rules for how people should interact during the deliberations.
  • Clarify the role that each individual will play in the discussions.
  • Build mutual respect.

During the debate

  • Redirect people’s attention and recast the situation in a different light.
  • Present ideas and data in novel ways so as to enhance understanding and spark new branches of discussion.
  • Basic facts and assumptions when the group appears to reach an impasse.

After the decision making process

  • Leaders should try to derive lessons learned regarding how to manage conflict constructively.
  • They must attend to hurt feelings and damaged relationships that may not have been apparent during the process itself.

The skill of hosting constructive dialogue is necessary for all leaders to take time to learn.

 

Ensure that the process is fair

Constructive conflict requires a fair decision making process. All people involved in the debate need to feel that the process used to come to the decision was transparent and fair.

“Keeping conflict constructive helps to build decision commitment, and therefore facilitates implementation. But, to build buy-in, leaders also need to devise a fair process. During a decision-making process, some individuals will have their views accepted by the group, while other proposals garner little support. Leading a fair process does not mean trying to satisfy everyone in terms of the ultimate decision that is made. Instead, it means creating a process in which leaders have demonstrated authentic consideration of others’ views. For people to believe that a process is fair, they must:

  • Have ample opportunity to express their views and to discuss how and why they disagree with other group members.
  • Feel that that decision-making process has been transparent, i.e., that deliberations have been relatively free of secretive, behind-the-scenes maneuvering.
  • Believe that the leader listened carefully to them and considered their views thoughtfully and seriously before making a decision.
  • Perceive that they had a genuine opportunity to influence the leader’s final decision.
  • Have a clear understanding of the rationale for the final decision.”

Make time in meetings for constructive debate

Constructive conflict and debate take time. Debate is one thing that your cannot optimize and make effective by limiting the time available to explore options and for each team member to feel heard.

“Leaders need to be careful about trying to maximize the efficiency of their meetings. In so doing, there may be a pernicious unintended consequence. Agenda overload, coupled with the quest for efficiency, often works against a leader’s best efforts to stimulate debate. Why does efficiency crowd out debate? For some dissenters, it takes some time to gather the courage to express their views or to determine precisely how they would like to articulate their point. For others, they may want to listen to others and gain a better understanding of the issues before offering their views. The rapid pace of the discussion may become discouraging to those who aren’t comfortable ’shooting from the hip’ as soon as a new topic opens.”

Hold people accountable

 To hold people accountable require clear rules of engagement and clarity around acceptable behaviour and norms.

“It is very important for leaders to be clear about the way in which they want people to contribute and behave during decision-making processes. People need to understand what is expected of them, as well as what to expect of the leader. But perhaps more importantly, leaders need to maintain discipline over time, holding people accountable if they violate the accepted norms and rules of engagement. If someone clearly engages in personal attacks or withholds a dissenting view only to obstruct the implementation later, they need to be held responsible for such dysfunctional behavior. Leaders may find that such moments are developmental opportunities, where they can help their managers and employees learn and improve from situations of poor performance.”

The need for constructive conflict to build commitment and to drive implementation is a key leadership principle. It’s a skill that’s essential to effective change and execution and as we all know the ability to facilitate change and drive results are priceless in today’s business environment.

 

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