by Craig Weber
The Reaction
Steve started the conversation much the way he planned. He stated a clear position, provided a lucid account of his thinking, and then tied a bow around it all with a strong test. So far, so good.
So how do you think Phil responded? Steve was using the skills well, so Phil surely responded positively, right? Perhaps by saying, in essence: “Wow, thanks for the feedback. Obviously, I need to change my leadership behavior immediately.”
Not even close.
Phil leaned forward and said: “Look, I appreciate that you’re willing to bring this up, but I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
Is Phil dismissing the feedback, or is he merely expressing a different point of view? Is he being defensive, or does he know something Steve doesn’t know? It’s easy to assume the worst, but there is no way to really know unless Steve understands Phil’s reasoning. To do this, he needs to curiously inquire into Phil’s clear position. The driving questions running through Steve’s mind should be these:
• What leads Phil to think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill?
• What’s he seeing that I’m not?
• How does the situation look from his perspective?
There was only one problem. These were not the only questions running through Steve’s mind. There were also these:
• Were my colleagues right?
• Am I about to get my ass handed to me on a silver platter?
• Did I just commit career suicide?
With every fiber in Steve’s being telling him to smile, minimize, and get out of the room, it took clear focus and mental strength to avoid blurting out: “That’s great news, boss. Glad to hear it. I gotta go.”
But to Steve’s credit (and to the credit of his colleagues who coached him so well) he set aside his minimizing reaction and inquired into Phil’s point of view: “I don’t think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but maybe I’m missing something. What makes you say that? What are you seeing that I’m not?”
“I’ve got a steady stream of people coming into my office day-in and day-out with all sorts of problems,” said Phil. “You’re saying people are afraid to come into my office with bad news. I’ll be honest, some days I wish that were true.”
A Pivotal Point
This is a critical point in the conversation. Phil’s perspective—the way he’s climbed the Ladder of Inference*—contradicts Steve’s view of the situation. This “cop and the architect” moment presents Steve with a choice about how to respond:
1. He can minimize. (“Gotcha. Thanks Phil. Glad we cleared that up. I’ll be on my way.”)
2. He can snap into “win” mode and argue back. (“You are obviously not listening to me, Phil. So, I’ll explain it to you one more time.”)
3. He can get curious and inquire further into Phil’s contrasting view.
Steve chose the third option. He set aside his defensive reactions to explore how the situation looked from Phil’s standpoint. He worked hard, in other words, to pull Phil’s “ladder” into the conversation.
“You obviously see this differently than I do,” Steve said. “Can you give me a couple of examples? Who is coming into your office, and what kind of stuff are they bringing up?”
As he listened to Phil share a couple of examples, Steve’s view of the problem began to shift. “As I listen to what you’re saying, I realize that you might be right. Perhaps this isn’t as big a problem as I’ve made it out to be. But to be honest, I think it’s going to become a bigger problem if we don’t deal with it. Let me explain what I mean and then push back if you still think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.”
The Situation Goes Sideways
Steve and Phil went back and forth, exploring the issue. It was tense, but the conversation seemed to be going well . . . right up to the point when Phil snapped. “I’m going to stop you right now,” he said. “I’m really getting frustrated here. I feel like you’re just putting me between a rock and a hard spot.”
Like an electrician touching a live wire, Phil’s charged response shocked Steve. But his practice paid off and, despite his knee-jerk desire to retreat, he inquired into Phil’s reaction.
“I’ll leave right now if you like. But can you at least tell me how I’m putting you between a rock and a hard spot? That’s not what I came in here to do.”
As clearheaded as it is courageous, that’s a great inquiry. And it yielded an unexpected response. Phil paused, set his glasses on his desk, and said, in a more subdued tone: “Alright, look. I’m going to share something with you, but I don’t want it to leave this room.” Now Steve leaned in.
“Before you came on board my new boss [an executive who came from a firm famous for its aggressive, performance-focused culture] conducted a survey, which included feedback and recommendations for each of his direct reports,” said Phil. “I got high scores for the morale in my division. That’s good. But I got low scores for holding people accountable for performance. So, my new boss thinks I’m soft on the business, and told me that I need to demonstrate that I can be tougher with my team. Now you’re saying that people are afraid to talk to me. That’s just great. I can’t win.”
Double-Loop
Phil’s confession triggered a double-loop aha moment for Steve.* The entire problem suddenly looked different. Steve, along with everyone else on Phil’s team, had erroneously assumed it was a routine, one-dimensional issue: If Phil would just tone down his behavior, the problem would be solved. But now Steve realized the situation was not that simple. Phil was in a real bind. If he meets his team’s expectations, then he disappoints his boss. This is bad for Phil. But if he meets his boss’s expectations, then he alienates his team. Again, this is bad for Phil. The situation, it turns out, was far more adaptive* than it first appeared.
At this point, Steve could have responded with: “Well, good luck with that,” or, “Man, you’re screwed.” But he didn’t. He sat there for a few seconds, absorbing what he’d learned, and then he offered a suggestion:
I think you should bring this up with the rest of the team. Everyone has the wrong impression. They don’t see you as stuck between a rock and a hard spot; they just see you saying one thing and doing another. And if you don’t tell them what you just told me then things are going to get nothing but worse. What’s your reaction to that idea?
To Steve’s surprise, Phil simply said, “I think you’re probably right.”
Taking the Problem to the Team
Phil decided to share his dilemma with the entire team at a quarterly offsite. By this time Phil and every member of his team had attended one of my workshops so they shared a framework for engaging in the conversation that was to follow.
Phil kick-started the day by telling them about his predicament, going so far as to hand out copies of the report with the feedback he’d received from his new boss. He then told his team about his new mandate to run a more rigorous, disciplined business by holding people more accountable for their performance.
So, I’m in a tough spot here. I really do want people to be open with me, but I also have to show I’m holding people accountable. Steve explained that people are scared to talk with me, especially when it’s about bad news. So now I feel like I’m in a lose-lose situation.
The team was taken aback by Phil’s candid admission. The IT director openly sympathized with Phil, admitting that she was having the same problem with her own team. (She’d recently discovered people were covering up information about a disastrous IT project because they feared her reactions.)
Phil’s revelation now sparked a double-loop shift in how the team was making sense of the predicament. And it was a problem with which they could all identify. Everyone in a position of authority, in fact, faces the same basic dilemma: You need to hold people accountable for performance and yet you need them to tell it to you like it is. Yet these two important factors can, if not handled deftly, work directly against one another.
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p; The Search for Solutions
It was now the team’s turn to feel stuck. They understood the problem in a new way, but finding a solution proved difficult. I was in the room to help facilitate the session, and I chose to intervene. “Can I ask a question of the team on Phil’s behalf?” People looked me in the eye and nodded in a “Please, yes,” way. “The basic question this team needs to answer is this: ‘How can Phil meet his boss’s expectations with flying colors, but do it in a way that keeps each one of you coming into his office with all the information he needs to run this business with his eyes wide open?’ So, to find an answer to that question, let me ask you another one: To help him do a better job of striking that important balance, what would you like more of and less of from Phil?”
The room went silent as the team struggled to come up with an answer. “That’s a good question. I don’t know,” someone finally said.
I suggested we break into separate groups to explore the question (and to do so while practicing the skills for balancing candor and curiosity). The team pulled their chairs together in the meeting room, while Phil and I set up camp at a coffee bar in the hotel lobby.
An hour later we gathered back in the main room. There were two requests to solve the problem. The first came from the team:
Phil, we don’t mind when you are tough with us. We expect it. It’s your job. But when you’re holding our feet to the fire it’d be easier to take if you used more testing and inquiry. It’d feel more like a conversation than an interrogation. That’s all we ask. What’s your take on this idea?
To the relief of everyone in the room, Phil agreed with the request. “That makes sense. I do a poor job of that,” Phil admitted. “I will try to do better, but in the heat of the moment I know I’ll forget, so we need to figure out a way you can remind me.”
After a little discussion the team agreed on a hand signal. It was a “T” with two hands, like a “time-out” sign, but that meant, in essence: “Get curious, please, and test your view.”
The second request came from Phil. It sparked the second big aha for the day.
“Here’s how you can help me,” Phil said to his team:
From now on, when you bring a problem to my attention, please bring in more than just your position on the issue. Give me more background. Don’t make me hunt for it because when I get worked up and start asking hard questions, I get accused of attacking the messenger.
He followed up his request with two recent examples before saying: “Does this make any sense at all? What do you all think?”
Like George Clooney walking into a room full of paparazzi, the light bulbs went off. Up to this point, the team members could see how Phil’s behavior contributed to the problem, but they were blind to how their own behavior contributed to it. But in a flash of double-loop insight they recognized that by bringing a position to Phil without clarifying the thinking behind it (“We’ve got a problem on the production floor”) they often triggered the very interrogation they feared. What people viewed as an interrogation was in essence Phil’s inquiry into the problem. His aggressive questioning was in pursuit of something people often failed to provide: more information.
Imagine instead, that when a manager raised an issue with Phil, she stated a clear position, shared the underlying information behind it, and then tested her assessment of the issue with him. She’d be far less likely to provoke an interrogation because Phil wouldn’t be forced to ask so many questions to hunt for information. This approach is more likely to produce just what the team was requesting: less interrogation and more conversation.
Aha Moments
This situation is a great example of how easily things can go wrong when you act from a blind spot. Phil assumed his behavior was an appropriate way to deal with the situation he was facing. He didn’t realize his behavior was creating another problem of equal weight. His team, on the other hand, assumed Phil wasn’t serious about creating an open environment. The team didn’t realize that Phil was also in a bind, and that simply toning down his behavior could easily create an even bigger problem.
Up to this point no one was taking any responsibility for the issue. Everyone viewed someone else as the source of the trouble. “Phil needs to tone it down,” complained the team. “The team needs to toughen up,” thought Phil. No one was able to expand or improve their limited view of the problem because no one dared to raise the subject. No one, that is, except Steve. And in the candid and curious dialogue only he was willing to initiate, both he and Phil learned there was far more to the problem than anyone realized. The conversation sparked two big aha moments that shifted not just how the team was dealing with the situation, but how the team was framing it. Everyone now realized they needed to adjust their own behavior to solve the problem: Phil by cranking up his curiosity; the team members by ratcheting up their candor.
Essential Points
Before we move on, here are a few important points to consider:
• Learning to balance candor and curiosity didn’t eradicate the team’s business problems, the minimizing and winning tendencies of its members, or the divergent personalities, perspectives, and roles in the team. It just improved how they handled it all. It enabled them to better surface and engage difficult issues and to then get more traction and progress out of their conversations.
• It wasn’t easy. One thing about the conversation that Steve wasn’t prepared for, he later told me, was how much he perspired. “I was drenched in sweat.”
• Steve didn’t go it alone. He enlisted the help of tough partners who were critical to his success. Without the coaching and practice provided by his colleagues, it is very unlikely his conversation with Phil would have been so productive because Steve’s minimizing tendency would have pulled him out of the sweet spot long before they reached their transformative aha moments.
• Steve’s actions were driven not by the need to be comfortable or to be right, but the pursuit of smart, informed, effective choices. He set aside his ego-protective tendencies in the service of adaptive learning and progress.
• Steve’s intervention was an act of courage: Raising this issue with Phil was neither easy nor risk-free. But it was also an exercise in humility: Appreciating he was not up to the task, Steve reached out for help to prepare for the conversation. Then, in the conversation, he held his views about Phil’s behavior as hypotheses to test rather than truths to sell.
• It was a skilled use of candor: Steve put his views on the table and clearly explained them. But it was also a skilled use of curiosity: Steve worked just as hard to get Phil’s view of the situation on the table and to understand it.
• An issue that at first appeared one-dimensional and routine turned out to be far more complex and adaptive. Rather than “Phil needs to tone it down” or “The team needs to toughen up,” the more challenging frame was: “We all need to get on the same page and improve how we work with one another.”
• Steve exercised real leadership: His willingness to tackle a tough issue, even when his colleagues advised against it, is impressive. No significant progress would have been possible if Steve hadn’t been willing to stand up, speak out, and make a difference.
• Building and applying the skills for working in the sweet spot was the key to doing all this well.
Before We Move On
Situations like this rarely improve without an intervening agent, someone with the courage to take a risk. But in addition to courage, tackling important challenges also requires skill. It does no good to blunder into a conversation armed with the best of intentions if you lack the capacity to competently act on them.
It does no good to blunder into a conversation armed with the best of intentions if you lack the capacity to competently act on them.
The chapters that follow will help you build your ability to remain smart, steady, and purpose-focused under pressure so that you’re able to spark pivotal learning around the big issues facing your team, organization, or community. As I me
ntioned in the Introduction, to build this discipline, you’ll focus on three activities: increasing your awareness, cultivating a new mindset, and honing your behavioral skills. So, if you’re ready to dive in, consider these application questions, turn the page, and let’s go:
• What are the issues you and your team need to be addressing?
• How can you play a role—like Steve did—in helping your team, organization, or community pull together to address those issues?
Keep these questions in mind as you work through the book because in Chapter 16 I’ll help you craft a personal plan for building your conversational capacity while doing work that makes a meaningful difference.
* On page 107 in Conversational Capacity, I provided a simple chart that shows where a conversation sits on a quadrant; on one axis there’s a scale of difficulty and on the other axis there’s a scale for importance. This conversation ranks a 10 on both difficulty and importance, making it a “10/10.”
† See Chapter 2 in Conversational Capacity for more on “Intentional Conflict.”
* For a review of the “cop and the architect” analogy, see Chapter 6 in Conversational Capacity.
* See Chapter 6 in Conversational Capacity for a review of the Ladder of Inference.
* For a review of the concept of Double-Loop Learning refer to Chapter 7 in Conversational Capacity.
* For a review of the important distinction between Routine Problems and Adaptive Challenges, revisit pages 7–8 and 182–187 of Conversational Capacity, or read the article “Leaning into Difference—The Key to Solving Tough Problems” at https://www.weberconsultinggroup.net/leaning-into-difference-the-key-to-solving-tough-problems/.
