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Ep. 17: How to Manage Intra-Organizational Conflict 2
5 Plays4 years ago
On this episode, Allen Oelschlaeger is joined by Dr. Jim Bohn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesbohn), a change management and leadership expert. He has decades of organizational executive experience and is author of several books. He currently runs his own consultant practice and is a certified speaker for Vistage.
The discussion focuses on the issue of intra-organizational conflict – i.e., conflict that is internal to an organization (rather than with clients or the general public). It is the second episode of a three-part series on this topic.
Some of the core principles discussed include:
How seemingly mundane issues can spur bigger conflicts within an organization
Why intra-organizational conflict is actually a bigger issue within organizations than conflicts will clients or the public
How the issues of power, turf, and fear drive a lot of conflict
The value of having a common goal and leadership focused on driving their team towards that goal
The role of the annual performance review
When a new team is put together, the need to form, storm, norm, perform.
Why leaders need to demonstrate their values, not just talk about them
To learn more from Dr. Jim Bohn, check out his books on Amazon or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Confidence in Conflict Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the Confidence in Conflict podcast, your destination for learning how to prevent and better manage conflict in both your professional and personal lives.
00:00:14
Speaker
This is Alan Oelschlager again.
00:00:16
Speaker
We are deep into the holiday season here in Milwaukee, but it certainly feels different than past Decembers, I'll tell you.
00:00:24
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For you football fans, what doesn't feel different is having the Packers leading the NFC, North Division.
00:00:31
Speaker
We're nine and three and the Vikings are next in line, way behind us with a six and six record.
00:00:37
Speaker
Anyway, this episode is the second in our series about intra-organizational conflict.
Meet Dr. Jim Bone
00:00:43
Speaker
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Jim Bone, who has been on the front lines of this issue for his entire career.
00:00:50
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I think you're going to get just hearing some great insights about this universal issue within organizations.
00:00:56
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So let's get started.
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Well, good morning, Jim.
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Great to have you back on our show.
00:01:11
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Thanks so much for participating here on a Saturday morning in Wisconsin.
00:01:16
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It's always great to talk with you, Al.
00:01:18
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I always enjoy our conversations together.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, well, this will be a fun one.
00:01:23
Speaker
So why don't you, rather than me trying, why don't you introduce yourself so everybody knows your background and where you're from and whatever, and then we'll get into our topic.
Dr. Bone's Background and Experience
00:01:34
Speaker
Sounds great.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, my name is Dr. Jim Bowen.
00:01:36
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I have an earned doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.
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My research skill is in organizational analysis.
00:01:44
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My specialties are change management and leadership development.
00:01:49
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Also, along with that, I have taught in multiple universities in the southeast Wisconsin area.
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Worked in a Fortune 100 company for 33 years, that would be Joss and Controls, and also opened up my own consulting organization, which is ProAxias.llc.
00:02:08
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I've written four different books in the area of change management, IT change, organizational engagement, which is a complement to employee engagement, and a book called Nuts and Bolts of Leadership.
00:02:23
Speaker
So I have a dense background over four decades of working with literally hundreds of leaders and thousands of people in multiple different ranges of markets, ranging from oil and gas to banking to retail to telecommunications.
00:02:39
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So I don't want to say I've seen it all, but I've seen a whole lot.
00:02:44
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Exactly.
00:02:46
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I think we did talk, Jim, about how when you go from organization to organization, this was early in my career.
00:02:53
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There was a guy from General Electric.
00:02:56
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who came to our organization.
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And I was a new guy coming out of business school.
00:03:02
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And he goes, Al, you're gonna have a long career and I'll just give you one little piece of advice.
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He goes, nothing changes, but the part numbers.
00:03:11
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And it's so true.
00:03:13
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I'm sure you've seen the same stuff over and over and over again, no matter what organization you've worked with.
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So I had a friend who used to say the bodies have been moved, but the tombstones are in the same place.
00:03:26
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There we go.
00:03:27
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Yeah.
00:03:27
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So, but just give that one example you've shared with me about how, when you're with Johnson Controls on how you would go into an organization and people's jobs would change like pretty
Complex Change Management Project
00:03:39
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dramatically.
00:03:39
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So just share that so people can get a sense for how big a change is you dealt with.
00:03:46
Speaker
Do you mind if I use a different one?
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's fine.
00:03:49
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Yep.
00:03:49
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Yep.
00:03:49
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But the one I was referring to was in big pharma and the work that we did had to do with what we called facilities management.
00:03:58
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And essentially what would happen is people's jobs would move from their organization into Johnson Controls.
00:04:05
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But the one I want to share with you today is a little bit more relevant, I think, to the subject that we're talking about.
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And that is the hardest change process that I ever did.
00:04:16
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which was standardizing uniforms for 5,000 people.
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Now that may sound very mundane and very boring.
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It may sound like, well, all you do is just tell them what to wear tomorrow.
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But the reality is that is extremely complicated because when you're talking about people's attire, when you're talking about their clothing, you're one step away from the thing that
00:04:39
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that is most valuable to them in the workplace, of course, which is their pay.
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So that was one very, very complicated change process.
00:04:48
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And I just recall a vice president walking past me in the hall saying, can you get those uniforms standardized in a couple of weeks?
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And I took a breath and walked back and I said, no, this is going to take a little longer than that for us to do this right.
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I mean, we can force anything, but to get this
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to really be adjusted and adapted.
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We're going to do some work.
00:05:08
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So anyway, real quick story on that one.
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Of course, there are people out in the field who were very, very frustrated about the idea at all.
00:05:16
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So one of the most important things you can do in change is engage the people who are rejecting the idea.
00:05:23
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And so what I did is I contacted one guy out in Oregon and I said, what do you think about this?
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Of course, he was very brusque and, well, this has never been to work.
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I said, I'll tell you what, we'll send you a couple of different versions of this.
00:05:34
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And the funniest thing happened, he ended up putting one of the shirts on his dog.
00:05:39
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And having a dog roll around in the dirt and run around for the weekend to test the shirt if it would hold up.
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And then we used him as an exemplar on our conference call.
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I had him talk about what he did with his dog.
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And it was a great way to get people to adjust to the new idea.
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But we surveyed almost 1,000 people.
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We got their responses.
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It sounded really simple, but it's by far the hardest change that I ever conducted.
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Very, very interesting.
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Yeah, yeah.
00:06:07
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You know, it's...
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Yeah, it was a few years back, but I remember I talked to an attorney who had, you know, had been in private practice and then joined an organization.
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And he said the biggest issue that he's seen is who got to sit next to a window.
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Yep.
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Right.
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And if you move somebody into a different cubicle or office that didn't have a window, it was like, you know, you just couldn't get, it couldn't be any worse.
00:06:36
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Right.
00:06:37
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Well, the interesting thing about that is that really sets the table on the subject that we're talking about.
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It's many times those mundane issues that tend to spur on bigger issues and bigger problems.
00:06:50
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So that's the subject we'll be talking about.
00:06:53
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But I'm more than delighted to say that one other issue that I faced was two teams had been in the same building.
00:07:02
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And they were forced to move.
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One team was forced to move across the street.
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And I remember one team saying to me, that road has now become the greatest obstacle to our progress.
00:07:12
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Wow.
00:07:12
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Yeah, yeah.
Vistalar's Conflict Management Work
00:07:14
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Well, so people have been listening to this podcast know that I work with Vistalar, and we are a conflict management training company.
00:07:23
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However, what we normally focus on are working with contact professionals, meaning anybody that's dealing with either their clients or with the general public for most of their day.
00:07:34
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So that would be obviously police officers, teachers, health care workers,
00:07:41
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parking officers that are dealing with parking tickets, casino workers, right?
00:07:49
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Hospitality workers, transit workers, anybody that's dealing with the public or their clients regularly.
00:07:54
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Salespeople are in that category.
00:07:57
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But usually those interactions are fairly brief, right?
00:08:00
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It's a few minutes, maybe 30 minutes, you know, the length of a flight, whatever.
00:08:05
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And then you might never see that person again.
00:08:07
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Right, yeah.
00:08:08
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And what we want to talk about here is something we've been working on for a while.
00:08:13
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We're not there yet, but we want to expand our market into what I describe as intra-organizational conflict, meaning people that are, and it's the examples we've already shared here, but it's where
00:08:28
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the people within the organization are either dealing with their boss, they're dealing with an employee, they're dealing with different departments, they're interacting on issues related to budget, you know, whatever, where it's inside the organization and conflict obviously arrives there and it creates all kinds of problems.
00:08:47
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And Jim, you've had probably as much experience with this as almost anybody on the planet.
00:08:53
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So I just thought it'd be great to have a conversation.
00:08:55
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You know, we're in the process of
00:08:57
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putting this program together.
00:08:58
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You're going to help us with that as we move forward.
00:09:02
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But I just thought we'd talk through what those issues look like and get some of your insights on how to deal with them.
00:09:09
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Yeah, I'm really, really pleased to hear that someone's actually taking this on.
00:09:13
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I think, Al, your organization may be one of the few that is actually looking into something bigger than just the local stuff.
00:09:22
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And I know you guys are experts at the local stuff.
00:09:24
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I have high respect for that.
00:09:26
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But intraorganizational conflict, it starts with something as simple as maybe even a four or five person team.
Causes of Organizational Conflict
00:09:33
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Then it can move up to divisional conflict between teams and organizations.
00:09:38
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And what I mean by that is
00:09:40
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whether it's HR, legal, manufacturing, production and sales, operations and sales is a historical area for ongoing conflict for obvious reasons.
00:09:52
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And then it can go on to even higher levels where you have one product division that is working against another product division where there's competition that's built in for good reasons, which is to quote unquote, bring the cream of the crop to the top
00:10:09
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But because of the notions of competition between groups and the notions of having to get things done, very, very often people forget one crucial, crucial thing when they're working with an organization, and that is this.
00:10:26
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No matter how big the organization is, and I could name some marquee companies here, but I won't.
00:10:32
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I'm talking about multibillion-dollar companies.
00:10:35
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There's only so much to go around.
00:10:39
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And what I mean by that, I know you know, but whether it's money, whether it's retail facilities, or even like a window like you talked about,
00:10:48
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whether it's leadership competence, because there's limits to that, limits to the amount of people you have, limits to the staff.
00:10:58
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You have to put in your mind a box that says, no matter how big this company is, the market cap is still $8.6 billion, and that's it for today.
00:11:09
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It may go up a little bit, but you know what I'm talking about.
00:11:12
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And so that's the beginning of all organizational conflict.
00:11:17
Speaker
Because ultimately, it reduces down into different groups, different divisions, and different teams, ultimately even down into small teams, because someone's going to ask the question, who is getting what and why?
00:11:36
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And that is sort of a perennial question across the
00:11:39
Speaker
human nature, you know, that sort of thing.
00:11:42
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So there's a pretty deep issue there about the notion of organizations only have so much to go around.
00:11:47
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So that's a starting point.
00:11:50
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That can breed conflict any day of the week.
00:11:52
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I mean, if you have 12 windows and you've got 14 people, somebody's not going to get that window.
00:11:57
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And so that comes into the next issue of just... Let me jump in and just make, just you're reminding me of a
00:12:05
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You know, I was clearly involved with that, a big corporation, actually big pharma.
00:12:10
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And every year we did the annual business plan.
00:12:13
Speaker
And because, you know, they wanted to use a good process, so everybody, you know, contribute, you know, we build it up from the ground up, you know, yada, yada, here's what I want to do, whatever, got up to the highest levels.
00:12:24
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It was always way more money than anybody had to spend.
00:12:28
Speaker
Right.
00:12:28
Speaker
So then it became the whole process.
00:12:29
Speaker
Okay, now we're going to whittle it down.
00:12:31
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Well, that's where the right.
00:12:34
Speaker
And I remember we had a vice president of engineering, just brilliant guy, but he said, he goes, I don't understand why we just don't say right up front that 15% of our budget is going to engineering.
00:12:47
Speaker
Boom, go figure it out.
00:12:49
Speaker
And I'm sure there's organizations that work that way, but because we wanted to, you know, get everybody participating, it was no, no, no, we're going to build it up to the ground up, make sure you know what projects you're going to do and let's, you know, forecast out and,
00:13:00
Speaker
But it was always a mess at the end because it was always, you know, like twice as much money as we had to spend.
00:13:07
Speaker
And again, that presents a bunch of new problems along the way, like you've got too much money.
00:13:12
Speaker
And now what are we going to do with the excess and so forth?
00:13:16
Speaker
So what I want to do is just take that broader sort of umbrella notion of there's limits in an organization and put the other side of the tension out there, which is,
00:13:28
Speaker
Human motivation.
00:13:29
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People come to work for a lot of reasons.
00:13:31
Speaker
I mean, primarily they come to work, I believe, trying to think of, there was a very famous actor that said, I act so that I can do the things that I want to do.
00:13:43
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And it'll come to me in a while, but there are some very fundamental human motivations that we don't talk about a lot, but these are the ones that drive conflict and they are as follows.
00:13:56
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Number one is competence.
00:13:59
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Number one is competence.
00:14:00
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Are people in my team competent?
00:14:03
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Can they do the job or the incompetent?
00:14:05
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Am I picking up the slack for them?
00:14:08
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So just think about that one.
00:14:09
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The second one is autonomy.
00:14:11
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Autonomy is a, by the way, there's research behind all this stuff.
00:14:15
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I'm not going to bore you with those details, but autonomy is literally the history of the human race.
00:14:20
Speaker
It's who's, who's going to be free to do something.
00:14:22
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Who's not going to be free.
00:14:23
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Who's going to resist being oppressed.
00:14:26
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Who's going to rise up against it.
00:14:29
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Now in organizations, when we, when we talk about that stuff,
00:14:32
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Of course, we're much more polished in our speech, but the reality is everyone in an organization wants to have a voice, and that's becoming more and more prominent.
00:14:41
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It started probably in the 90s.
00:14:44
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But in the times we live in now, especially with the power of LinkedIn and some other social media, having a voice has become almost a rallying cry for any employee that their ideas and their concepts should be brought forth and admired and such.
00:15:01
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And so if you say that's not going to happen, now you're starting another spark of conflict because, well, I wasn't respected.
00:15:09
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I don't give the freedom to have a voice and so forth.
00:15:11
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That's a really big one.
00:15:13
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Go ahead.
00:15:15
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No, just 100%.
00:15:18
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Every time we talk, my brain goes back to my corporate life, and I just kind of go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:15:24
Speaker
I mean, it's just universal.
00:15:26
Speaker
Go ahead.
00:15:27
Speaker
What's interesting about that, Al, is you and I have some rather storied careers.
00:15:30
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We've been with a lot of different people.
00:15:32
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But these same issues, even if they're four or five decades old, keep coming up because, again, I'll say that human nature is consistent across time.
00:15:41
Speaker
A third real important motivation for people is
00:15:45
Speaker
is the notion of relationships.
00:15:47
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People have friends in the workplace or relationships that they like to have because it gives them some meaning.
00:15:55
Speaker
So if you tweak with those relationships,
00:15:58
Speaker
And you move Joe Smith next to Ann, who he doesn't like, that's going to start to create conflict.
00:16:05
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And this stuff just happens naturally as you assemble teams.
00:16:08
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I'm sure that in your career, you had times where somebody said, Al, you're going to work for Jim Bowen.
00:16:14
Speaker
And you're going, oh, my God, that guy's a tyrant.
00:16:16
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I don't want to work there.
00:16:17
Speaker
But you're forced into this relationship circumstance.
00:16:20
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Which again, so you've got competence, autonomy, relationships, which can be good or bad.
00:16:24
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Then you've got issues, a real powerful one, which we don't hear unless we ask a person, what do you want to do with your life?
00:16:33
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And they say the following statement is, I want to make a difference.
00:16:38
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And that goes back to around 1958.
00:16:40
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There was a researcher called White who came up with this concept that you don't hear very often.
00:16:45
Speaker
It's called the effectance motivation.
00:16:47
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It's the idea of, I want to make a difference.
00:16:49
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I want to know that I mattered.
00:16:51
Speaker
And, you know, even little kids have this.
00:16:53
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They want to know that they mattered, that they're important.
00:16:55
Speaker
So if you start tweaking with that, any of those four motivations, and I can talk about efficacy and some other stuff along the way, but if you tweak with any of those,
00:17:03
Speaker
You're going to start getting into the reasons that people come to work, and that's going to cause some problems along the way.
00:17:10
Speaker
Now, tell me, I got to get this down.
00:17:14
Speaker
So the make a difference motivation is called what?
00:17:17
Speaker
Effectance, E-F-F-E-C-T-A-N-C-E.
00:17:23
Speaker
The researcher's name is White, W-H-I-T-E.
00:17:26
Speaker
I can't remember his first name.
00:17:28
Speaker
No, I love it because I've never heard that term before used in that way.
00:17:31
Speaker
I've heard effective, not effectance, and
00:17:34
Speaker
But it makes all kinds of sense, and you're 100% right.
00:17:36
Speaker
And with all these, just as you're talking, is there, it seems like, and you made some reference to it, that with this, you know, and I know they hate to be called millennials, but the millennials have, in some of these, actually more of a motivation along these lines.
00:17:54
Speaker
Is there some validity to that or not?
00:17:56
Speaker
I would say it's the relationship piece and the autonomy piece is really, really big.
00:18:03
Speaker
And the autonomy piece, I could go into a whole soliloquy on that.
00:18:07
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I'm not going to do.
00:18:08
Speaker
But if you think about, as you and I were growing up, the notion of autonomy was somewhat limited, even by the way that our parents acted coming out of World War I, World War II, Korea, and so forth.
00:18:22
Speaker
That has changed dramatically.
00:18:25
Speaker
And so the notion of autonomy and freedom in my voice, that's a really, really big deal in the millennial workforce.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yep.
00:18:33
Speaker
Heard that.
00:18:34
Speaker
So I want to just want to lay one more thing down before I start talking about some things that can, that we can do to change this and to do it well.
Effort and Leadership in Conflict Resolution
00:18:44
Speaker
The, the issues of power, turf and fear, those three issues.
00:18:52
Speaker
And I know you bump into this in the workshops that you do, you're doing this, this one-on-one, but the issues of power, who is going to be controlling resources?
00:18:59
Speaker
That's power.
00:19:01
Speaker
And if you're interested in whether or not that's an important subject, you can contact Jeffrey Pfeffer.
00:19:06
Speaker
He's a Harvard business professor who spent his whole life studying the concept of power.
00:19:11
Speaker
And he says things like, you know, it's not a question of whether or not there will be power because it will be, but it's a question of how we will use it.
00:19:18
Speaker
And it can be used for good.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it can be.
00:19:20
Speaker
There's issues of turf.
00:19:23
Speaker
And the place that you find this in interorganizational conflict is when people have data, for example, that they don't want to share with other people because it might reveal, number one, that somebody was hoarding some information that's important or because it keeps those people in business.
00:19:40
Speaker
I've met people who've had
00:19:42
Speaker
spreadsheets they protected with multiple passwords because they didn't want anybody to know the cross references for, you know, part numbers and so forth, because they were the ones that knew it and that protected their jobs.
00:19:53
Speaker
There's a turf element there.
00:19:55
Speaker
And then, of course, the last thing that causes problems in organizations is fear.
00:20:01
Speaker
And that goes in the whole change management business and what we do to manage anxiety.
00:20:06
Speaker
So those are some of the things that are important in this subject matter.
00:20:10
Speaker
And again, I could spend a lot more time on every one of them individually, but I think for today, the key to fixing some of these intra-organizational conflicts is it takes effort.
00:20:27
Speaker
That's just the top thing I would say is it takes effort.
00:20:31
Speaker
to manage inter-organizational conflicts.
00:20:33
Speaker
And I'm not just talking about some kumbaya speech where we just say, we're going to work together better.
00:20:40
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:20:41
Speaker
And again, you've noticed that.
00:20:42
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You've seen these, you go down the hall, we're going to be great together, and two doors down, people are fighting and screaming.
00:20:50
Speaker
So there's an element of being careful not to give the employees rah-rah speeches without giving them some substance behind it, because people are very, very smart about those things.
00:21:02
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But so what it takes is a leadership determination and leadership effort to say, all right, we're going to make things work together.
00:21:11
Speaker
What that entails very often is getting a team of people together around a common project.
Collaborative Projects to Resolve Conflicts
00:21:20
Speaker
And let me say that again, the greatest successes I've seen in getting people to work together is bringing them together around a common project, something that they all can celebrate together when they win, something where they all can stand on top of the mountain and say, we did this together.
00:21:38
Speaker
Those things tend to build a great deal of camaraderie and cohesion and collaboration in organizations.
00:21:46
Speaker
So the first thing I would say is that it's effortful leadership to say we're going to work on this together.
00:21:53
Speaker
And that means the executives themselves need to be rolling up their sleeves and stay in the fray.
00:21:59
Speaker
I can think of one particular merger and acquisition I was involved in.
00:22:01
Speaker
It was massive.
00:22:03
Speaker
I mean, bigger than most people can imagine.
00:22:05
Speaker
We had a 50-person team from all over the company.
00:22:09
Speaker
different people, different groups, different divisions.
00:22:12
Speaker
And we worked like crazy to do this merger and acquisition.
00:22:16
Speaker
And we worked with a company that was being acquired.
00:22:19
Speaker
And we had a spectacular team.
00:22:22
Speaker
but it was led by a guy who determined that we were going to work together.
00:22:27
Speaker
He kept a sense of humor, but a sense of expectation, a sense of this is what we're trying to accomplish.
00:22:32
Speaker
He kept a common sense of measuring progress so we knew what we were doing and brought the right people together and got rid of people that weren't working on things like that.
00:22:44
Speaker
So that notion of having, and this really fits in human nature as well,
00:22:49
Speaker
When people are either aligned against a common enemy, for example, in a war, or they're aligned in a common goal to accomplish something together, like on a sports team, the amount of extra motivational power you get from that is just incredible.
00:23:03
Speaker
So that's... Go ahead.
00:23:05
Speaker
You know, again, you're bringing back memories.
00:23:08
Speaker
So I was involved, as you know, in the medical device business back in the mid-80s.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yep.
00:23:15
Speaker
When total quality management was a big deal,
00:23:18
Speaker
Deming was red hot, you know, the auto industry, the auto industry is going through a transformation.
00:23:23
Speaker
We brought in, I don't know if you know, Clark and Realwright, do you know those names?
00:23:27
Speaker
The name is familiar.
00:23:29
Speaker
I can't say that I worked with them, but the name is familiar.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, so Clark, I think, was from Stanford and Realwright was from Harvard, one of the two, and they had gone over to Japan to learn how they made cars and came back.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so they were, you know, they were all about Deming and all that stuff.
00:23:45
Speaker
But anyway, the we
00:23:48
Speaker
The company I was with hired a total quality management company to come in and embed themselves in our organization.
00:23:55
Speaker
It was called Performance Excellence, remember?
00:23:58
Speaker
And this was, I never thought of it in these terms, but they, one of their biggest thing were these cross-functional teams focused on a problem, right?
00:24:08
Speaker
And it was, let's first figure out what the big problems are in the company.
00:24:12
Speaker
Right.
00:24:12
Speaker
Let's get, you know, the eight step problem solving approach where the first step was make sure you know what the problem is.
00:24:18
Speaker
And then they put a team together cross functional and and they gave them time then to go work that problem.
00:24:24
Speaker
And I never I always thought of it in terms of total quality management and whatever.
00:24:29
Speaker
But what you're saying is that probably had a secondary goal of just getting better teamwork going and less conflict.
00:24:36
Speaker
And also it happens because of a couple things.
00:24:40
Speaker
The funny thing is, is when Al starts to learn what Jim actually does,
00:24:45
Speaker
It's like, wow, you develop a little bit of respect for the fact that maybe I've got a skill in an area that you don't.
00:24:52
Speaker
And the other thing, which is even more fundamental, Al, which helps to remove some of the fear issues, I've got to tell you a funny story.
00:25:00
Speaker
I worked with one large company up in Minneapolis.
00:25:03
Speaker
I won't name the company, but you can probably figure out who they were.
00:25:06
Speaker
And I remember when I was up there, I said, we need to get somebody from purchasing to come and talk about this particular thing.
00:25:14
Speaker
And I was in the engineering, working with the engineering group, and we got this purchasing guy to come down.
00:25:20
Speaker
It was one floor down, one floor down.
00:25:24
Speaker
And he said, I've never met, I've been here for 20 years.
00:25:30
Speaker
How many times have we heard that?
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:31
Speaker
Well, it's so funny, but the reality is that very often we're afraid of people that we haven't met.
00:25:36
Speaker
This goes back to all kinds of things that you and I could spend a lot of time on.
00:25:40
Speaker
But, you know, the more you get to know somebody, the more you realize, you know, they're just another human being like you or they're trying to get stuff done.
00:25:47
Speaker
And when you work with them face-to-face as opposed through email, like you said, in a cross-functional team, all of a sudden you may not like everything about them.
00:25:55
Speaker
You know, they may have...
00:25:57
Speaker
They may have tuna sandwiches for lunch that he don't particularly like, but you come to find out they're a brilliant engineer or a brilliant HR person that can help get things done, or they're a finance person that caught something and respect develops.
00:26:11
Speaker
All of those things are byproducts of having people work together on one thing, and it's a whole hell of a lot of fun.
00:26:19
Speaker
When you, we did a merger we did in six months, we had to hit the cooling season.
00:26:24
Speaker
And my God, it was like people had just won, they won the World Series.
00:26:28
Speaker
I mean, it was amazing because we worked together.
00:26:31
Speaker
Now that's not to say we didn't have some quirky issues along the way and people get frustrated, but those things are more done at the level of conflict you're talking about, those one-on-one things.
00:26:41
Speaker
Getting people to work together around a common goal is psychologically powerful across time.
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah, so it's something that's never thought of it in those terms.
00:26:51
Speaker
And have you had any interaction or or know much about Michael Cudahy and his work at Market Electronics?
00:26:59
Speaker
I've met him several times and I worked with him on a couple of projects that were more nonprofit and beneficial.
00:27:07
Speaker
But I know a little bit about him.
00:27:09
Speaker
He's a very interesting dude.
00:27:10
Speaker
So, you know, quite a maverick and started Marquette back in the 70s.
00:27:15
Speaker
I was there in the early 90s.
00:27:19
Speaker
But I was, you know, he was, in my opinion, way ahead of his time.
00:27:24
Speaker
But when I was there, and I haven't seen this in any other company, I'm curious if you have.
00:27:29
Speaker
We had probably in the building, it was down on whatever that, I forgot the street they were on, but anyway, in Milwaukee here, but they had Tower Avenue, sorry.
00:27:39
Speaker
And they had, I'm guessing seven, 800 people in the building probably.
00:27:45
Speaker
And there was a wall down a hall where he required that every single employee had a big picture of themselves, you know, not just some little thumbnail, but a big picture on this long wall,
00:27:59
Speaker
where you could go and see the person's name that was all in alphabetical order.
00:28:04
Speaker
You could find the person, find out what department they were in, and see their picture on this wall.
00:28:09
Speaker
And it was, I mean, just a silly little thing, but it dealt with some of what you're describing there.
00:28:15
Speaker
I mean, it was you.
00:28:16
Speaker
You'd say, oh, yeah, well, there's John Smith over in purchasing.
00:28:19
Speaker
Well, let me go before I go meet with you.
00:28:21
Speaker
Let me go look at his picture.
00:28:22
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I've seen John.
00:28:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, John was at the event.
00:28:25
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I mean, I even talked to John at the last...
00:28:27
Speaker
you know, get together, whatever.
00:28:29
Speaker
It was a big deal.
00:28:30
Speaker
And it was, I don't know, I've never seen another company do it.
00:28:34
Speaker
Well, I've seen some companies do it, but I don't think they did it as well as him.
00:28:39
Speaker
And I think part of it was he was a very ironic,
00:28:43
Speaker
Fun guy to be around very energetic and so if he thought this was a great idea.
00:28:48
Speaker
People are going to follow that that's probably you're moving me right into the next element of what I what I suggest that we talked about as far as resolving conflict so nice to put the ball on the T.
00:29:02
Speaker
Leadership is one of those hackneyed overused words that candidly almost drives me nuts.
00:29:09
Speaker
And then I look at it on LinkedIn.
00:29:10
Speaker
There's somebody writing a new leadership book every day.
00:29:12
Speaker
And then executives go through an airport or they pick up a book, read it, and they turn their whole company upside down.
00:29:19
Speaker
But the hardball leadership, day-to-day leadership, really makes a difference when it comes to this stuff.
Leadership in Conflict Resolution
00:29:27
Speaker
And I've seen people in top levels of organizations.
00:29:32
Speaker
come down to a level of just plain speech, no corporate talk, getting together with people in cafeterias, meeting them in lunchrooms, meeting them after work.
00:29:45
Speaker
And because of the skill sets that they had, not only interpersonally, but also because of their competence.
00:29:52
Speaker
I mean, I knew people.
00:29:53
Speaker
I know people are so smart.
00:29:54
Speaker
It's just ridiculous.
00:29:56
Speaker
But they also were able to candidly just be part of working with people on a great level.
00:30:03
Speaker
And when those kinds of people come into a team and they set an expectation for teams to work together,
00:30:10
Speaker
People know that this is not just more stuff that's written on a wall or a PowerPoint slide.
00:30:18
Speaker
They know this person, he or she really does mean to have a white hot team.
00:30:23
Speaker
It's just at the risk of personal blathering.
00:30:28
Speaker
I always told teams that I came into in the beginning, even some very, very difficult ones as a designated hitter.
00:30:35
Speaker
I said, we will have a white hot team.
00:30:37
Speaker
Within two years, and we're going to do great things in this company, and we're going to do them together.
00:30:41
Speaker
Now, I had to back up my words with that.
00:30:44
Speaker
I had to do that with things like taking care of their pay, making sure that people were properly recognized for the work that they did and so forth.
00:30:54
Speaker
But when you're talking about intra-organizational conflict,
00:30:58
Speaker
Nothing does a better job of fixing that than someone who's engaged in the broader process.
00:31:05
Speaker
And the one boss, I wish I could use his name, but I won't, that just emulated this so much.
00:31:14
Speaker
He was all about getting the job done.
00:31:16
Speaker
He just reminded me so much of my dad, who was a blue-collar guy.
00:31:19
Speaker
I couldn't even write.
00:31:20
Speaker
John was brilliant, but John had a Harvard education.
00:31:24
Speaker
I mean, he was the top dog, and yet he just was all about, let's get the job done.
00:31:30
Speaker
And he wouldn't countenance things like gossiping.
00:31:33
Speaker
He wouldn't countenance things like
00:31:36
Speaker
You know, let's draw out some old story.
00:31:38
Speaker
I mean, he would call people on old news very quickly and say, what are we going to do to get the job done?
00:31:43
Speaker
And eventually what happens when people hear that, they realize that that leader really is about getting the job done.
00:31:49
Speaker
They're not there to carry a grudge.
00:31:50
Speaker
They're not there to, which I'll talk about in a minute.
00:31:54
Speaker
They're not there to...
00:31:56
Speaker
cause people hardship.
00:31:57
Speaker
They're just here to say, okay, you're on my team.
00:32:00
Speaker
We're working together.
00:32:01
Speaker
We want to accomplish this big thing.
00:32:02
Speaker
How can I help you do that?
00:32:03
Speaker
And what are we doing to get the job done?
00:32:06
Speaker
And at a very baseline level, I'm talking about talking with mechanics and getting in trucks and all that kind of stuff makes a dramatic difference in solving team conflict.
00:32:16
Speaker
Conversely, let me get this point out.
00:32:19
Speaker
Conversely,
00:32:20
Speaker
the leader that consistently talks about how powerful their team is,
00:32:27
Speaker
as opposed to somebody else in the organization and runs that other team down, all they're doing is adding wood to a fire.
00:32:34
Speaker
And so those are the people that very often are setting up the inter-organizational conflicts that you see.
00:32:42
Speaker
In fact, some of them take pride in it.
00:32:43
Speaker
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're narcissists, although there's probably a percent that are, but it's like, you know, we're gonna prove that we're better than anybody else.
00:32:51
Speaker
And as soon as you do that,
00:32:53
Speaker
You're starting to put people in a role where they don't feel respected.
00:32:56
Speaker
And one of Bones' laws is if you push, people shove.
00:33:00
Speaker
And so the two things I've mentioned so far is having a common goal and then having leaders who are willing to work with people and drive them toward the goal and to get away from some of the personality stuff, which, by the way, will never be fixed.
00:33:14
Speaker
I mean, there's evidence to that end.
00:33:16
Speaker
So does that make sense so far?
00:33:18
Speaker
It does, but, you know, it's –
00:33:21
Speaker
There's such a fine balance between that last point you made that between saying, okay, on one hand, I wanna make sure that my team knows that we're crushing it.
00:33:30
Speaker
We're the best on the planet.
00:33:32
Speaker
We're doing great things for the company.
00:33:34
Speaker
We're making a difference, whatever.
00:33:37
Speaker
And then still not making it look like somehow we're better than everybody else in the company.
00:33:42
Speaker
Well, yeah, and candidly, I think there's a way to do that.
00:33:46
Speaker
I'm just a big fan of letting reputation speak for itself.
00:33:50
Speaker
But within the team, you're always saying, let's do this.
00:33:53
Speaker
Let's rock and roll.
00:33:54
Speaker
We're going to be a white hot team.
00:33:55
Speaker
We're going to do great work.
00:33:56
Speaker
We want to be known for something that's big.
00:33:59
Speaker
We want to be respected because people want that.
00:34:01
Speaker
But outside the team, you know, ensuring that we're there to help the company succeed.
00:34:09
Speaker
I always ask executives this one question when I'm in workshops with them.
00:34:15
Speaker
How easy is it to work with you?
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, there we go.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yep.
00:34:20
Speaker
And if people say, oh, my God, I never want to work with that guy again, I'm telling you that that is a place where conflict will start.
00:34:30
Speaker
I want to take a quick aside here, too, to mention this notion of one other thing when it comes to human personality and those motivations I talked about before.
00:34:40
Speaker
I always, when I'm in workshops asking people how they're dealing with their teams, I ask them this one question.
00:34:45
Speaker
Have you ever been to a class reunion?
00:34:49
Speaker
And they look at me and they kind of laugh.
00:34:50
Speaker
And of course, you know, some have been 10 year, 15 year.
00:34:53
Speaker
I'll be doing my 50 year class reunion next year.
00:34:56
Speaker
And I asked them, what are those people like?
00:35:00
Speaker
And they all say the same thing.
00:35:01
Speaker
They're exactly the same as they were in high school.
00:35:06
Speaker
Right.
00:35:06
Speaker
Now, here's the important point.
00:35:09
Speaker
The other one of the other things that causes conflict in organizations is when Al tries to change Jim into Al.
00:35:17
Speaker
Because Jim and Al are going to be who they are.
00:35:20
Speaker
And it's going to be very constant over time.
00:35:22
Speaker
There's something called a big personality, big five personality inventory that proves that it's been used across hundreds of thousands of people.
00:35:29
Speaker
But so when organizations try to train people to be different and try to train them to act different, they're missing the point.
00:35:37
Speaker
The point is, let's work toward a common goal.
00:35:40
Speaker
Let's work on that together.
00:35:41
Speaker
And Al may be a little more introverted.
00:35:43
Speaker
Jim may be a little more extroverted.
00:35:45
Speaker
But the common goal is something both of them can approach together.
00:35:48
Speaker
So does that make sense?
00:35:50
Speaker
It does.
00:35:50
Speaker
And maybe this is a little another little aside, but I'm curious in your opinion on this is that
00:35:58
Speaker
Well, you're scribing.
00:35:58
Speaker
You're saying, okay, don't, you know, you're a manager.
00:36:00
Speaker
You're not going to change that guy that you're working with.
00:36:03
Speaker
I mean, either they should be in the company, which is obviously another source of conflict, or, you know, let's all get focused on the common goal and understand we're bringing strengths and weaknesses to the team, and let's go figure it out.
00:36:15
Speaker
But where do annual performance reviews fall with all that?
00:36:20
Speaker
And you could probably go on for four days about that, but what's your opinion about annual performance reviews?
00:36:25
Speaker
Oh, you know, I know that there's a big push to get rid of them, but I candidly believe that an annual performance review is a very valuable tool if it's done right.
00:36:36
Speaker
There we go.
00:36:37
Speaker
Yep.
00:36:38
Speaker
I mean, if it's only a punitive action to bring up all the terrible things Al's done in the past year, don't do it.
00:36:45
Speaker
But if you use a performance review in a good way and let that person bring their achievements forward, bring forward the things that they've accomplished, bring forward how they've benefited the organization, the powerful subcurrent of that is
00:37:02
Speaker
Is a person gets to go back and do what?
00:37:04
Speaker
Remember?
00:37:05
Speaker
I want to make a difference.
00:37:08
Speaker
So they find that out.
00:37:09
Speaker
And the person that's leading them says, man, you really have made a difference this year.
00:37:14
Speaker
And when you think about it in people's lifetime, they spend a third of their lives at work.
00:37:18
Speaker
They want to know they made a difference.
00:37:19
Speaker
So an annual performance review can do that.
00:37:24
Speaker
If an annual performance review is only to bring up nasty stuff that happened five months ago, that's like me and my wife fighting about something that happened 20 years ago.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's just silly.
00:37:33
Speaker
And it goes nowhere.
00:37:34
Speaker
And so the tricky, hard thing should be addressed immediately.
00:37:38
Speaker
And I'm sure you feel the same way.
00:37:39
Speaker
It's like, you know what?
00:37:41
Speaker
You stepped out of line.
00:37:42
Speaker
Let's get this done.
00:37:43
Speaker
But the performance review, I think, should be to say, you know, we've accomplished a lot together this year.
00:37:48
Speaker
Let's set some goals.
00:37:50
Speaker
I never saw them as bad things unless they were just some sort of punitive action to get rid of somebody in an organization.
00:37:56
Speaker
But that's not the way to think about it.
00:37:58
Speaker
And I think that that's probably why somebody along the way had a bad performance review.
00:38:03
Speaker
And so they color everything and every performance you ever have is something bad.
00:38:08
Speaker
And no one has a right to, you know, review my performance.
00:38:10
Speaker
But the reality is organizations pay people.
00:38:13
Speaker
to do work.
00:38:14
Speaker
And if you're not doing the work, you know, there's always something we can improve on.
00:38:18
Speaker
The greatest managers I ever had said, you know what, you did all this great stuff.
00:38:22
Speaker
Here's two things.
00:38:23
Speaker
I really think you got to work on Jim.
00:38:26
Speaker
And because I respected them and because they had challenged me throughout the year, it's like, you know what?
00:38:32
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:38:33
Speaker
I didn't even think about that.
00:38:34
Speaker
And so I got better.
00:38:35
Speaker
There's one other element to that, that I, that I touched on it just a little bit.
00:38:39
Speaker
And that's the notion of executives that don't hold grudges.
00:38:42
Speaker
Right.
00:38:43
Speaker
The ones that hold grudges will tend to continually build in for organizational conflict.
00:38:47
Speaker
And what I mean by that is that if Al doesn't like Jim and we hold on to that grudge, that can just, you know, people know about it.
00:38:54
Speaker
They pick it up.
00:38:55
Speaker
They know it's on the grapevine.
00:38:57
Speaker
But I had one boss one time.
Learning from Mistakes in Organizations
00:38:59
Speaker
I did the terrible, terrible thing with a project I was working on and side skipped a step and caused him some serious, serious pain.
00:39:08
Speaker
I mean, serious pain.
00:39:10
Speaker
And he took me into his office that afternoon and he let me have it.
00:39:14
Speaker
I mean, and he was right.
00:39:16
Speaker
What I had done was inexcusable.
00:39:19
Speaker
That night at the Christmas party, he saw me, shook my hand, wished me a Merry Christmas, introduced me to his wife, big smile on his face like nothing had happened.
00:39:29
Speaker
We're moving on.
00:39:30
Speaker
Exactly.
00:39:30
Speaker
We're moving on.
00:39:31
Speaker
You know, Jim, you really screwed up.
00:39:34
Speaker
And it cost me dearly.
00:39:35
Speaker
And you're going to go fix that right now, which I did.
00:39:38
Speaker
But I expected for sure when I saw him that night that I'd have to hang my head down.
00:39:41
Speaker
It wasn't like that.
00:39:42
Speaker
It was like, no, we've taken care of that.
00:39:44
Speaker
Let's move on.
00:39:45
Speaker
And I think that's a big piece of if you have executives that hold on to those grudges, that builds into organizational conflict, too.
00:39:54
Speaker
So the last... Two quick things.
00:39:57
Speaker
One is, I'm sure you've...
00:39:59
Speaker
So, and I'm sure you have no data on it, but your question of if performance reviews are done right, I think the big issue here is what percentage of performance reviews are done right.
00:40:09
Speaker
And I think there's a lot that aren't done right.
00:40:11
Speaker
And they do do what you're describing.
00:40:13
Speaker
Basically, it's an opportunity to beat somebody up for what they did over the last year and eight months ago and whatever.
00:40:20
Speaker
But
00:40:21
Speaker
But to your other point is, I'm sure you've heard the story, I think it's Watson at IBM.
00:40:28
Speaker
I don't know if it's even a true story, but where the guy walks in and he had made some mistake that cost the company $10 million.
00:40:35
Speaker
You heard that story?
00:40:37
Speaker
And Watson, he came in expecting to get fired.
00:40:38
Speaker
And Watson said, fire you?
00:40:40
Speaker
Said, I just spent $10 million trading you.
00:40:45
Speaker
I have heard that.
00:40:46
Speaker
I think that was in the poster and Cousins in one of their leadership books.
00:40:52
Speaker
So I've got one other thing that I think helps to resolve these conflicts and bring things toward more normalcy in organizations.
00:41:04
Speaker
And I mean, clearly, right now, there's other conflicts that are going on that I'm just going to express this.
00:41:12
Speaker
I think we're so focused now on our differences in organizations now.
00:41:17
Speaker
And I'm not going to go into all the details on that.
00:41:18
Speaker
We're so focused on our differences in organizations, especially in HR, that we are losing sight of the things we're doing together.
00:41:26
Speaker
And that's why I would always tell people, I don't care where you came from.
00:41:29
Speaker
I don't care what your background is.
00:41:31
Speaker
I don't care what part of the world you came from or what your beliefs are, any of that.
00:41:37
Speaker
That's great.
00:41:38
Speaker
That belongs to you.
00:41:39
Speaker
That's what makes your identity what I'm interested in.
00:41:42
Speaker
is you have a skill and you have a persona and you have intelligence that can build this team.
00:41:49
Speaker
That's all I want.
00:41:50
Speaker
That's all we need.
00:41:51
Speaker
And let's focus on that.
00:41:53
Speaker
But I think, again, we're focusing so exclusively, more and more exclusively on these finite slivers of difference that it's really getting harder and harder for people to say we have things in common as opposed to the things that we have that are different.
00:42:06
Speaker
And that's just sort of an editorial.
00:42:08
Speaker
So I want to give one last bit on this.
00:42:12
Speaker
In the big projects I was talking about, getting people together in a room together and having them talk about the conflict issues that they're facing.
00:42:21
Speaker
It goes a long way, a long way for fixing things.
00:42:26
Speaker
And let me tell you about what I mean.
00:42:28
Speaker
One of the IT projects that I was engaged in, there were 35 different teams across an organization that were involved in this.
00:42:35
Speaker
I mean, it was massive, as you can expect.
00:42:37
Speaker
And I know you were involved in some of that stuff too.
00:42:40
Speaker
Everything from data cleansing,
00:42:43
Speaker
to the coding, to how people are going to get trained, to how people are going to get affected.
00:42:50
Speaker
I mean, it was hard.
00:42:52
Speaker
So instead of just letting this sort of free fall and have people get frustrated and start to build the rumor mill and all the rest of that, I got those people into a room at least once a month while we were going through the early parts of the project.
00:43:09
Speaker
later on twice a month where we could raise issues in the presence of each other and facilitate the group, get the issues resolved so that people could walk away and say, okay, now I know what I'm doing.
00:43:23
Speaker
And it's sort of this buildup that needs to get resolved.
00:43:27
Speaker
And once that happens, two things occur.
00:43:29
Speaker
Number one, okay, we know the next step in this.
00:43:33
Speaker
And secondly, it was like, okay, we're going to have a rhythm and routine here where we're going to come back together and talk about this.
00:43:38
Speaker
And maybe we'll get to it earlier.
00:43:40
Speaker
Maybe we need to get to it sooner.
00:43:41
Speaker
But having people know that open communication around conflict issues, whether it's any of the things we've talked about, that really helps a lot.
00:43:52
Speaker
When it comes down to the issues of power and turf and fear, those issues, again, are best addressed one-on-one.
00:44:01
Speaker
by leaders working with the people that are manifesting those things.
00:44:05
Speaker
That's different than looking at the, for lack of a better word, the collective per se.
Role of Communication in Conflict Resolution
00:44:12
Speaker
But getting people to focus on what we're accomplishing together and ensuring they get a chance to communicate about it, get a chance to even bellyache about it and complain about it and to address it continues to move things forward.
00:44:27
Speaker
I've seen that work, I would say, 80 to 85% of the time.
00:44:31
Speaker
So you might know the source of this.
00:44:34
Speaker
I don't know how many years and years and years ago, I heard some story, probably heard it at a conference or something.
00:44:40
Speaker
Don't know the source, but it was a, and I'm sure, I don't know who it was, but it was this idea of relative to a team, right?
00:44:48
Speaker
Is form, storm, norm, perform.
00:44:53
Speaker
Yes, that is, um,
00:44:56
Speaker
Forming, that's Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.
00:44:59
Speaker
What's that guy's name?
00:45:01
Speaker
He came up with it probably in the late 60s.
00:45:04
Speaker
It'll come to me as I'm going along.
00:45:06
Speaker
But he developed it.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah, those are the stages of performance in the team.
00:45:13
Speaker
I want to say Hathaway, but that's not the name.
00:45:15
Speaker
But it does start with an H. It'll come to me later on.
00:45:17
Speaker
But it's from the 60s.
00:45:18
Speaker
It's that long ago.
00:45:19
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:45:20
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:45:20
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:45:21
Speaker
But that's what you're describing here, right?
00:45:22
Speaker
You're getting a team together and you're saying let's –
00:45:24
Speaker
performing, right?
00:45:25
Speaker
Then storming is that opportunity to bellyache and communicate and what are our issues and let's work through them.
00:45:31
Speaker
And then you finally get back to, okay, now we finally have a chance to get back to normal where a lot of that stuff's been working.
00:45:38
Speaker
We've worked through it.
00:45:39
Speaker
And then ultimately now we can finally perform and really make some great stuff happen.
00:45:43
Speaker
Right.
00:45:44
Speaker
And the reality is that that cycle may happen 12 or 15 times within a long project.
00:45:51
Speaker
I mean, that's not, yeah, it's going to happen, especially as you introduce new members or you remove members.
00:45:58
Speaker
It's just, it's going to happen.
00:46:00
Speaker
It's just people need to, it's no different than any good communication processes.
00:46:04
Speaker
You know, son of a gun.
00:46:06
Speaker
I didn't like this, what this happened.
00:46:07
Speaker
It gets addressed quickly.
00:46:09
Speaker
You figure it out.
00:46:10
Speaker
We address it.
00:46:11
Speaker
And then,
00:46:12
Speaker
But when people are working together, they will go through that multiple times.
00:46:16
Speaker
Now, the trust will build more and more as the team goes along.
00:46:20
Speaker
Right.
00:46:20
Speaker
You know, that's the other the last bit I would say above all this is leaders need to develop a way to to communicate this daily.
00:46:33
Speaker
And what I mean by that, I've mentioned it the last time we talked, is if leaders don't somehow demonstrate this in the work that they do, and I'm talking top leadership, top leadership, and there's research that shows this, top leadership has an influence on the effectiveness of the organization because people are smart enough to say, you know, Jim and Al aren't getting along very well.
00:46:53
Speaker
We know it.
00:46:54
Speaker
We see them.
00:46:55
Speaker
We hear about their teams.
00:46:57
Speaker
You know, why the hell should I work together if those guys can't do it?
00:47:00
Speaker
And that doesn't mean they're always going to agree.
00:47:02
Speaker
And it won't mean that there isn't some hardship along the way.
00:47:06
Speaker
But solving issues quickly and working together at the top of the organization, it's just a fundamental of human nature.
00:47:15
Speaker
People are watching their leaders or what their leaders do.
00:47:18
Speaker
And if they don't do that well, you know, it definitely has a long, long-term impact.
00:47:24
Speaker
So the...
00:47:25
Speaker
So overall, I would say with all this inter-organizational, and there's more to be done on this, clearly, I mean, there's a lot of action behind each one of these points, is that bringing people together takes effort.
00:47:37
Speaker
It does not happen without some strenuous, sweat-bearing effort.
00:47:42
Speaker
It takes hard work, and it takes persistence as well.
00:47:47
Speaker
Well, I think you've said it a few times during our time together here about how it's not some mantra on the wall.
00:47:56
Speaker
And I know you've spent a lot of time in manufacturing.
00:47:58
Speaker
So how many signs have you seen of the poster where it says, there's no I in teamwork?
00:48:05
Speaker
Wow.
00:48:08
Speaker
People laugh at that stuff because, I mean, these are things that you use in kindergarten.
00:48:14
Speaker
I'm not even sure if the kindergartners quite get that, but I see stuff like that all the time on LinkedIn.
00:48:19
Speaker
It's like, yeah, we know all about, but it becomes cliche.
00:48:23
Speaker
It becomes silly.
00:48:25
Speaker
And then it loses.
00:48:26
Speaker
I mean, clearly we know there's a value in that statement, but it needs to be done at the executive level.
00:48:35
Speaker
Well, people need to see it, not just read it.
00:48:39
Speaker
They got to see it demonstrated every single day.
00:48:43
Speaker
That's not even at all.
00:48:45
Speaker
And to your point about how people just know, I still remember.
00:48:49
Speaker
I mean, I was with the chief operating officer in a meeting company years and years ago, and there was some issue that got brought up that impacted another department.
00:49:01
Speaker
And the chief operating officer says, oh, yeah, well, let me go talk to John or whatever his name was.
00:49:07
Speaker
I'm, you know, I have a really good relationship and I'll get this addressed.
00:49:11
Speaker
And everybody in the room, I mean, we just looked at each other because everybody knew that they hated each other.
00:49:16
Speaker
Right.
00:49:17
Speaker
Right.
00:49:19
Speaker
I mean, this is just silliness, but that's, yeah.
00:49:23
Speaker
And not a secret.
00:49:24
Speaker
No.
00:49:25
Speaker
I mean, and it wasn't like two people knew.
00:49:27
Speaker
Everybody knew.
00:49:28
Speaker
Right.
00:49:29
Speaker
Yeah, and it's because this stuff gets out on the grapevine for sure.
00:49:32
Speaker
So I'm pretty much at this point of covered the primary areas I was going to cover today.
00:49:39
Speaker
Mike, Jim, this is great.
00:49:42
Speaker
I'm just I'm really looking forward to working with you as we move forward on this initiative.
00:49:48
Speaker
Obviously,
00:49:51
Speaker
You know, it's my personal opinion that it's actually the bigger issue.
00:49:54
Speaker
I've told this story.
00:49:54
Speaker
I think you've probably heard it before, but I'll do it really quick.
00:49:57
Speaker
I was in front of 500 state tax collectors and asked them where their sources of conflict came from.
00:50:05
Speaker
And I just assumed it would be in dealing with their clients right now.
00:50:09
Speaker
They're out collecting taxes and shutting businesses down and putting yellow tape around businesses that weren't paying their taxes and getting the police to show up and, you know, on and on and on.
00:50:20
Speaker
And 500 people, I asked them the question.
00:50:22
Speaker
I said, okay, source of contact.
00:50:23
Speaker
You got your clients who you're trying to collect taxes from.
00:50:26
Speaker
You got your employees, right, because most of these people are managers.
00:50:31
Speaker
You got between departments and everybody.
00:50:36
Speaker
It's hard to tell if everybody raised their hand.
00:50:38
Speaker
A large majority raised their hand and said it was the between department conflict was their greatest source.
00:50:44
Speaker
Oh, sure.
00:50:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:50:46
Speaker
Right.
00:50:47
Speaker
There was a guy years ago in the Harvard Business Review article, I can't remember his name, but
00:50:51
Speaker
they wrote an article called the white space between the groups.
00:50:56
Speaker
And that was the big area where all of a sudden, you know, Al's got this thing that he's doing great and legal, but fails to hand it off to HR properly.
00:51:06
Speaker
And, you know, that, that kind of handoff stuff is critical.
00:51:09
Speaker
I do, I do want to mention, you said it was okay.
00:51:11
Speaker
I do want to mention my latest book on the subject that we're talking about, which is called, if your water cooler could talk,
00:51:19
Speaker
And that is about how employees see their organizations working together.
00:51:26
Speaker
It's the employee viewpoint of whether or not we know where we're going.
00:51:29
Speaker
Can we work together?
00:51:31
Speaker
Do we communicate?
00:51:32
Speaker
Are we held accountable for the work we do?
00:51:34
Speaker
And are we persistent together as opposed to just focusing on the individual?
00:51:40
Speaker
So you can get that on Amazon.
00:51:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:43
Speaker
And Jim, I'll put that link in the show notes for this.
00:51:46
Speaker
But otherwise, if obviously people know how to get a hold of me, but if somebody that's listening wanted to talk directly to you or interact with you, how would they do that?
00:51:56
Speaker
Best way to be to go to my drjimbone.com website, and there's a place on there where you can contact me through there.
00:52:07
Speaker
Perfect.
00:52:08
Speaker
Yep.
00:52:08
Speaker
And you have four books.
00:52:09
Speaker
And I'm assuming if they, I don't know how many Dr. Jim Bones there are on Amazon, but if you know if they put in Dr. Jim Bone on Amazon, do your books pop up?
00:52:19
Speaker
It may be Jim Bone PhD.
00:52:20
Speaker
I'm not sure.
00:52:21
Speaker
But yeah, you can follow me out there.
00:52:24
Speaker
In fact, at the bottom of the email that I will send, you can see my author's site on Amazon.
00:52:31
Speaker
Oh, there we go.
00:52:32
Speaker
Oh, cool.
00:52:32
Speaker
I'll include that, too.
00:52:33
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes there's not many Alan Olschlegger, so.
00:52:38
Speaker
Right.
00:52:39
Speaker
But yeah, sometimes there's actually there is a Max Olschlegger that's written a bunch of books from on some completely different area.
00:52:47
Speaker
So he pops up.
00:52:49
Speaker
I think he's I'm not sure where he's from, but Max Olschlegger, big guy out there with same spelling with my last name.
00:52:54
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you what, it's an unforgettable name.
00:52:58
Speaker
I find it just absolutely fun to say.
00:53:01
Speaker
Well, fun to say when you're living in Wisconsin, but I'll tell you, I've been in Philadelphia, Toronto, Seattle, other parts of the country, they just roll their eyes.
00:53:14
Speaker
But yeah, Wisconsin, we have a big German population here and people have guessed that.
00:53:19
Speaker
the basics of how a German word is said.
00:53:22
Speaker
You bet.
00:53:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:24
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:53:24
Speaker
Thank you for the opportunity.
00:53:26
Speaker
I enjoyed this.
00:53:27
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:53:29
Speaker
And we'll hopefully maybe talk again soon.
00:53:32
Speaker
I look forward to it.
00:53:33
Speaker
Take care.
00:53:34
Speaker
Bye-bye.
00:53:35
Speaker
You too, sir.
00:53:37
Speaker
Well, that wraps up another episode of confidence in conflict.
00:53:41
Speaker
As you just heard, Jim is a wealth of knowledge about interorganizational conflict, change management,
00:53:47
Speaker
and leadership.
00:53:48
Speaker
So if you want to learn more from Jim, be sure to check out his books on Amazon.
00:53:52
Speaker
And there's a link in the show notes.
00:53:54
Speaker
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
00:53:57
Speaker
If you want more expert advice on how to prevent and better manage conflict, subscribe to this podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:54:05
Speaker
And if you like this episode, please write us a review.
00:54:08
Speaker
Also visit vistalar.com slash blog to get notes for this show, share your comments, and access additional conflict management resources.
00:54:17
Speaker
Take care and stay safe.