Conflict resolution can be baked into the design of our teams, families

In our family, there are no small lies.

So when our older son (Bo) lied about knowing where our younger son’s (Myles) favorite-toy-of-the-week was, we didn’t take it lightly. He went to “the step” where I directed him to stay for 10 minutes. 

“Think about the reason why you lied. I want to know why. We’re going to talk about it over lunch.”

“But papa…”

“You’re a good kid. But lying is unacceptable in this family. We’re going to talk about it over lunch.”

It turns out, Myles did not treat Bo well the previous night. The two of them recently started sharing a room (which they love and they get along great), and Myles was talking loudly and preventing his big brother from sleeping.

Bo, now four, was not happy about this. And even though Bo loves his little brother dearly - they’re best buds, thank goodness - his frustration manifested by taunting Myles about the toy keys, and lying about knowing where they were.

As we talked over lunch, the real problem became clear, lying was merely a symptom. Bo was angry about being mistreated by his little brother. What our lunch became was not an interrogation about why Bo lied, but a expression of feelings and reconciliation between brothers. Our scene was roughly like this:

“Bo, I think I understand why you lied about the toy keys. When someone does something we don’t like, we have to talk to them about it. I know it’s hard. Let me help you work this out with Myles. Could you tell Myles how you felt?”

“Sad.”

“Why?”

“Because you were talking loud and I couldn’t sleep.”

“What would you like him to do to make it right with you?”

“Don’t bother me when I’m trying to sleep, Myles.”

“Can you both live with this and say sorry?”

“Okaaayy…”

Which got me to thinking - this happens in organizational life all the time.

Intentionally or not, we get into conflicts with others. More often than not, the conflict brews until it spills out into an act of aggression. Rarely, in our organizational worlds, is conflict handled openly or proactively.

It’s understandable why it plays out this way Conflict is hard. Admittedly, my default - like that of most humans - is to avoid dealing with all but the most egregious of conflicts and letting things resolve on their own. Stopping everything to say, “hey, I’ve got a problem” is incredibly uncomfortable and difficult. Basically nobody likes being that guy.

It’s MUCH easier to pretend everything is fine, even though it’s usually a bad choice over the long-run. This tendency is unsurprising; it’s well understood that humans prefer to avoid short term pain, even if it means missing out on long-term gain.

But, we can design our organization’s practices to manage this cognitive bias. We can build pressure release valves into our routine, where it’s expected that we talk about conflict because we acknowledge up front that conflict is going to occur.

In our family, we’re experimenting with our dinner routine, for example. We shared with our kids that we’ll take a few minutes at the beginning of our meal to talk about what we appreciated about other members of the family, and share any issues that we’re having. 

We had a moment like this with our kids:

“We all make mistakes, boys, because we’re all human. It’s expected. We’re going to talk about what’s bothering us before we get really sad and angry with each other.”

In hindsight, approaching organizational life - whether it’s in our family, marriage, our work, or our community groups - with the expectation that we’ll have conflict is so obviously a good idea. Conflict doesn’t have to be a bug, it can be a feature, so to speak. If we’re intentional, we can design conflict resolution into our routines and make our relationships and teams stronger because of it.

I didn’t realize it, but this design principle has been part of my organizational life already. The temperature check my wife and I do every Sunday is centered around it.

Even my college fraternity’s chapter meetings tapped into this idea of designing for peace. The last agenda item before adjournment was “Remarks and Criticism”, where everyone in the entire room, even if a hundred brother were present, had the chance to air a grievance or was required to verbally confirm they had nothing further to discuss.

The best part is, this “design” is free and really not that complicated. It could easily be applied in many ways to our existing routines:

• Might we start every monthly program update by asking everyone, including the executives, to share their shoutouts and their biggest frustration?

• Might every 1-1 with our direct reports have a standing item of “time reserved to squash beefs”?

• Might part of our mid-year performance review script be a structured conversation using the template, I felt _______, when _________, and I’d like to make it right by _______?

• Might the closing item of every congressional session be a open forum to apologize for conduct during the previous period and reconcile?

It might be hard to actually start behaving in this way (again, we’re human), but designing for peace is not complicated.

If you have a team or organizational practice that “designs” for peace and conflict resolution, please do share it in the comments. If you prefer to be anonymous, send me a direct message and I’ll post it on your behalf. 

Sharing different practices that have worked will make organizational life better for all of us.

The unmeasured life

The way I think has been a bit of a trap, at least historically.

I have a lot of angst, shame even, that I am not as professionally successful as my peers. No matter how hard I try, even on vacation, I can’t get away from thinking about whether I measure up - either to my peers, or even to the career trajectory I thought I would be on.

Which is all foolish, by the way, because I don’t even care that much about career. Where I intend focus most of my energy is family, community, and character. And yet, because I have been trained in the realm of organizations, business, management, and leadership I am always going back to that foolishness of measuring myself up. 

Because that’s what many of us who are professionals by training - whether in business, law, public service, health, athletics, or anything else - do. We measure things and maximize them, because in our professions the result is what matters.

Again, for me this thinking is a trap. It’s the relentless pursuit of more, and my ego wants me to be cooler, professionally speaking, than I am. And if I use my peers (and my own egotistical visions) as a yardstick, I don’t measure up to that expectation. 

And so I try to cope, probably in a way that’s irrational. Because I try to cope with the fact that I don’t measure up professionally, by counting the ways I think I measure up in other domains. I always think - “I have a loving marriage and family. We have a dog. We have a home we like. I get along with my parents. I have a BMI that stays at a healthy level. We have kids with good hearts. I may not have a fast-track career, but I measure up. I measure up. I measure up.”

And that is the trap. Measuring my non-professional life is the trap. Because what I’ve realized is that, my life is not an enterprise judged by it’s measurable results. My family is not a business unit. It isn’t in the nature of a soul to be benchmarked, standardized, or process-mapped to ensure it has optimal peacefulness.

And by trying to “measure” my non-professional life, I’m propagating this pernicious, unsustainable mindset that my life must be measured. I’m locking myself into a mindset that keeps me anxious and makes me live in a constant state of needing to quench my egotistical desires.

The whole mistake I’ve been making is to try applying the principles and methods of my profession (i.e., focusing on measurable results) to my life. I can’t live at peace with my own thoughts if I try to replace the measurable career results I’m not achieving with an attempt to measure love, family life, children, happiness, faith, peace, experiences, stories, or moments of ordinary joy. Doing what I’m doing locks me into a place where I’m always on the verge of a stomach ache. What I need to do instead is let go of measuring my life.

Because life is something, I think, that cannot be measured.

The problem is, I want so desperately to be able to grab hold of something. My lesser self wants some morsel of incremental progress to remind me that I’m not wasting my life. Some mile marker along this long walk that makes concrete the messy path of life I have ahead and the road I have already traversed. Some interim report card that shows I am doing well at living out the life and that I won’t fail the final exam on my deathbed.

And this is the trap. It’s akin to the plight of Sisyphus. He was rolling a rock up a hill that could never be summited, and I trying to measure my life - something that is not only immeasurable, but that defies measurement.

But after all these years of acculturation and training - how do I resist the near-natural urge of measurement, and instead live an unmeasured life?

I admit now that I should not try to look for mile markers, or anything that charts progress along a fixed path toward a final destination. Because after all, my life has no fixed destination, duration, distance, or pace. Life defies measurement.

But perhaps there is some consolation.

If we know how to look for them, there seem to be where God gives us a window into our inner-compass, to remind us whether we are heading north toward home, or whether we have veered from the righteous path. 

The other day, I had one of these moments. Myles got into a spat with his older brother. He, as a 1.5 year old occasionally bruises his nearly four year old brother. And Bo was sad. And we said, “Myles, that was not nice. It is not kind to hit your brother. You need to say sorry.” And he pondered for a minute. Bo gave Myles a glance back, unsure whether Myles was heading in his direction for reconciliation or to continue the bruising.

But there Myles went, arms outstretched, toward his brother. And it was, without any words or babbles, as sincere of an embrace as I’ve ever seen between two people. It was a moment where my soul reminded my body that it was still in there. It was a moment where God gave me a look at my inner-compass, and it reminded me I was on the right path. 

I never know when those moments are going to come, and sometimes they’re reminders that I’ve veered. But when those moments happens, I am consoled. Because even though they aren’t the mile markers of progress that my egotistical self craves, they are reminders that I am on the right path, heading toward home.

And as much as I would like to, I can’t put moments like that into some sort of scorecard or graph. Those sorts of moments,  where God shares the light see my compass, and reminds me to look, defy measurement. There are so random and nuanced, they can’t be counted or formed into a pattern.

But at least those glimpses are there, consolations to help orient us in a life we want to measure but can’t. It’s still so hard. Because we, who were once young men, are trying so hard not to waste this life, and trying so hard to put one foot in front of the other and eventually reach home. All I want to do is measure something to prove I’m not failing, but what I’m realizing I’m left with is unexpected trail markers which signal whether I’ve veered from the right path or not.

Because at the end of the day, life defies measurement.

Whose shoulders am I standing on?

I stand on the shoulders of many.

My parents, my wife, my high-school teachers and club advisers, my professional mentors, civil servants that have worked in my community, scholars who have created knowledge I learned, my friends, my grandparents, veterans of war, veterans of peace, artists, kind strangers, and probably many more that I don’t know.

When asking myself, “whose shoulders am I standing on?” it compels me to keep pushing through adversity. Because, how could I insult all those who lifted me up by giving up now?

But it also raises another question in my mind, “who am I putting on my shoulders?”

Both questions are worth asking. Spending five minutes with those questions brought me to a place of peace, gratitude, and service.