Jim [00:00:59] Margot, what are we going to talk about in this episode of The OrgHealth Podcast?

Margot [00:01:02] This time we're talking about a big reason why we don't get engagement on teams and that's a lack of conflict norms being set.

Jim [00:01:10] Yeah. Meanwhile, conflict... That word itself...

Margot [00:01:15] Oh, scares people!

Jim [00:01:15] Yeah! And the connotation is usually, like, you can almost see people punching each other in the nose.

Margot [00:01:21] Right.

Jim [00:01:22] And that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about actually acknowledging that it's normal and human when people are sitting around a table together, that they have different opinions, different preferences, different needs. And until that gets on the table, all of it, they're actually in conflict with each other. They're not actually in agreement.

Margot [00:01:46] Right. And setting yourself up to actually have some conflict norms allows for healthy debate on the team.

Jim [00:01:54] Right. What does setting ourselves up look like?

Margot [00:01:58] It looks like making a decision as a group, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within this team environment when we're talking.

Jim [00:02:06] Totally agree. My experience, my observation, is that teams don't know where to start with this.

Margot [00:02:13] Sure.

Jim [00:02:14] So let's help teams by laying out a few ways that they can start. One that I love is this concept of Real Time Permission. Talk about what that means.

Margot [00:02:27] So Real Time Permission is the idea of the leader actually finding somebody doing something right in the conversation and reinforcing that behaviour by calling it out, naming it in front of everybody.

Jim [00:02:42] And sometimes when someone says, "Wait, I don't—I don't agree with that." The room kind of goes, "Uhhh..." Because the energy drops. It's almost like, "Really? She said that? Aren't we supposed to get along well?" So for the leader to jump in and just clarify to everybody around the table, "That's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. We all have permission to do this."

Margot [00:03:06] Right. Reminding them how important it is to actually do that piece, and to say things that way so that they can continue on with that behaviour builds positive reinforcement.

Jim [00:03:17] And ultimately, it's not just the leader, it's anybody around the room that would say, "Oh, that's a good point. And this is, this is getting out more perspectives. This is exactly the kind of conversation we need to have." It's just healthy. It's especially healthy at the front end of really building trust because people tend to think it's not accepted. The old norms were: Don't interrupt people, don't challenge them, especially the leader. Don't make anyone look bad. So consequently, we only get, like, half or a quarter of the ideas on the table because people feel like they're not allowed to say these things.

Margot [00:04:01] Right. And the more often the leader does it, the more often others are going to feel permission themselves to do it. And then you get to a healthier place with the whole team.

Jim [00:04:11] Right. So real time permission is a really great approach. And having a conversation as a team about, "Hey, does this make sense? Would this be an approach that we should rally around and try?" And if the team says, "Yeah, let's let's do that," now we've got a shared understanding, a norm about how we're going to do conflict.

Margot [00:04:36] Exactly.

Jim [00:04:36] That's what we're trying to build: a collection of these norms.

Margot [00:04:41] So another one would be Removing the Back Door.

Jim [00:04:44] Yeah. The idea being that, if a decision gets made, it's not acceptable for someone to go back to the leader and say, "Hey, I know we've said this, but I've got a few more concerns about such and such." And, "I think we should reconsider it", or "I think we have to do this". And the leader would just say, "Oh, I'm sorry, we removed the backdoor. We're not having this conversation."

Margot [00:05:12] Right. And then the team member is aware that he or she needs to speak up in meeting with those ideas.

Jim [00:05:19] Right. And the team leader, if that's the person that they came to, needs to say, "Oh, please. That—actually you're making a good point, but because we agreed that we're going to remove the backdoor, we just can't go there. Which means please make sure you make the point when we're in the meeting.".

Margot [00:05:38] Right. That opens it all up for healthy debate.

Jim [00:05:41] Yeah. But, on an earlier episode, let's reinforce it—this notion that Silence Equals Disagreement. Talk about that because it isn't the way most people think.

Margot [00:05:58] Yeah, I think that most people think that when someone doesn't weigh in on any decision or any conversation, that in fact they're just agreeing with what others have already said, when, in fact, the real truth is that they might not be agreeing at all. They might be disagreeing and just not speaking up.

Jim [00:06:13] Yeah. So. Knowing, though, for the whole team to know where everyone is rather than presume is just a better way to do conflict. So when we make a decision, we are not presuming people are with us. Worse, if they aren't, we're not setting ourselves up for it to kind of be, "We're all rowing in separate directions.".

Margot [00:06:39] Right, and that's what happens too. After the meeting, if everybody's agreed to something, some people haven't weighed in and they in fact disagree, they're not gonna be working on the say in the same way that everyone else is. They're not committed.

Jim [00:06:54] Yeah. So, conflict norms can refer to the idea of getting more of the content, the perspective and the views, the pros and cons into the conversation. But another part of doing conflict well is converting from there to an actual decision. So obviously people think that it's just about yes and no. Are we all in favour? Yes or no? But there are some other approaches that we can take. Let's talk about Roman Council. How does that work?

Margot [00:07:28] So that's basically a call out to the group and a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Jim [00:07:36] Right.

Margot [00:07:36] Yes or no.

Jim [00:07:37] Or thumbs across the middle, which is undecided or still some questions. And that's a way to get a read. It's a little bit more than just yes or no. And we find teams like this because it opens up the door for someone to flag that "I'm not really committed yet", which which simply means the conflict conversation isn't actually done. But there's another technique that we find is very popular with the teams that we work with, this notion of Fist-to-Five...

Margot [00:08:09] This is my favourite.

Jim [00:08:10] Talk about how that works.

Margot [00:08:11] So you call out whatever the decision is and everyone holds out their hand with a number of fingers showing. So you have a total of five. So five is complete agreement. One would be disagreement or none would be complete lack of agreement, absolutely against.

Jim [00:08:28] Just the fist.

Margot [00:08:29] Right. So if you have five, you're going to move ahead. If you have four, everybody... You're on board, you're going to go with that. Even three means that you have agreement, you're not in disagreement, you're OK to commit. Two and below means we need to revisit.

Jim [00:08:48] Yeah. One of the things that teams like about this is that it's a tool to quickly determine if we are close to the decision or not. And it's amazing how many times teams discover this and say, oh, we should do fist to five and we suggest they go, "1, 2, Show!" Where they are, it's like kind of like pumping their fist: once, twice, and then on the third time they show the fingers. And then everyone around the room is threes, or more often fours and fives. They realize, "Oh."

Margot [00:09:22] "We're all on the same page."

Jim [00:09:23] "I guess we've got to a decision here." And they might save 15 minutes because there's still energy to talk about the topic, but it's really just talking in circles. It's not like new information coming out. So. But, it's a great tool to confirm: we need to talk more if there's twos, and even if there's a lot of threes it's, "Hmm, we could move ahead." But if it's not enough to make it feel like we're there. Oh, well, let's just explore this a little bit more. OK, so we've talked about some techniques to get more conversation on the table. We've talked about techniques for moving from the conversation to a decision. But let's talk a bit about behaviours agreeing what is okay and what is not as helpful. Sometimes people are a little bit stymied. They just don't know what is acceptable. Like, let's take this thing about emotion. Some people feel like it's not acceptable, it's not professional to let any emotion be shown while you're in a meeting.

Margot [00:10:37] And that might be true for some teams. But other teams showing a certain amount of emotion, particularly in passion of the topic that they're discussing, is completely acceptable. Sometimes the decision is that passionate or joyful or happy emotion is acceptable, but angry emotion is not acceptable.

Jim [00:10:59] Yeah. So, talking about this is helpful and people are sometimes surprised that what they learn. So, another one is strong language, and sometimes people start laughing about this. They say, "Well, I'm probably bad at this, I probably I probably use the F bomb as an exclamation point every now and then... Does that upset anyone? I never thought to ask the question."

Margot [00:11:28] Right. And deciding that as a team together makes everybody feel more comfortable about what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, whether or not they're offending others. Some teams we've worked with have said no, absolutely no strong language. Other teams we've worked it have said not the F bomb, but anything else is open for interpretation.

Jim [00:11:48] Or they've said strong language is fine if it's in a positive setting, but if it's out of anger, it's not acceptable.

Margot [00:11:57] Right.

Jim [00:11:58] So. The answer is whatever the team discovers, that fits for them. But if they don't talk about this, then it's awkward all the time.

Margot [00:12:09] Another one that gets a lot of debate is the idea of excluding team members from difficult conversations.

Jim [00:12:15] What would be an example of when somebody might be wanting to exclude someone from a difficult conversation?

Margot [00:12:23] I think that if there's any chance that the person might be receiving some sort of discipline out of it, if it's some sort of a performance issue that that person is affected by, that often they want to exclude that person from an initial conversation around it.

Jim [00:12:41] Yeah. Yeah. And you've got to figure out what to do. Let's admit that we would challenge people to be more inclusive than exclusive.

Margot [00:12:52] Absolutely right.

Jim [00:12:54] So that everybody's on the same page. Here's one, we had a situation where we worked with a team where the leader of the team actually would sometimes get upset, would stand up, stomp over to the door of the meeting room and leave and slam the door shut, and everybody on the entire floor would hear this. This is expressing anger with indirect actions rather than with words. Talk about how important it is to talk this through.

Margot [00:13:30] So, I think a lot of people are very intimidated by that kind of action. I think that that's pretty much ensuring an emotional shutdown for many people, to be yelled at. That does not encourage strong debate, that encourages running away from the conversation, moving away... Retreat, rather.

Jim [00:13:51] And it was very messy because there was a power dynamic in action here, too. So, yeah, people didn't think they had permission to challenge this behaviour. They didn't like the behaviour. Some of them truly were shut down, like actually scared by the behaviour. These are the things—we're saying, "Teams, if you're going to do conflict"—and that's, by the way, that was on the outside edge of what conflict could ever look like—"whatever the interactions is looking like, you should talk it through so that you're all on the same page.

Margot [00:14:27] And the thing is, that leader may not even—that may have been a complete norm in his or her background life.

Jim [00:14:35] Right.

Margot [00:14:35] So he or she may not even have realized that that kind of behaviour was causing others around them to shut down. Additionally, people will be resentful and talk behind the leaders back about this. And that just undermines that leader in every sense.

Jim [00:14:53] So. Conflict norms. We believe that if you would just have some good conversations about how to behave and techniques that you will use so that you get all of the thinking on the table and then you convert that conversation towards a decision, a commitment, it will take you far as a team.

Margot [00:15:15] Right. That's the healthy debate.