Confronting confrontation

“I am not good at confrontations.”

If you don’t like confrontation, get better at it

I hear that phrase so often, and I always assumed that people mean either that they don’t enjoy them – which, frankly, is the healthy way to feel about confrontations – or that folks were sort of cowed when conflict loomed.

Shrinking.

I assumed that people who say “I am not good at confrontations” actually meant that, when a situation starts gathering steam or when events transpire that need a reset, intervention or sudden pause… that they melt into a quietness that diffuses the moment. Squandering the opportunity to reset, for sure. Wasting the opportunity to be heard or to set the record straight or stop a bully or halt a lie. But avoiding conflict.

That’s what I have always assumed.

Boy have I been wrong.

20 years in the workplace have taught me that, when people say “I am not good at confrontations,” they mean to insinuate they detest conflict, but what they actually mean, whether they realise it or not, is that they are bad at it.

That when a confrontation looms they don’t… confront it… so to speak. They participate in it when it’s inevitable, when the conflict cannot be side-stepped or it gets too much to contain, but they do it in a way that doesn’t see it through. They partake but don’t resolve. The conflict is there, in a way that guarantees it will resurface.

All the pain, none of the progress.

A confrontation isn’t a day at the beach. It is not there to be pleasant (unless you are a sociopath). It is there to be useful.

Sometimes it can be side-stepped, and I have seen it done masterfully.

Sometimes the only way to avoid the conflict is to accept the consequences of whatever is happening and weigh up whether you value the quiet life more than whatever it is you are losing in the situation you are not confronting.

For instance, a confrontation is needed when a client says ‘you are not being cooperative’ after you refuse to accept an arbitrary change in what they have agreed to pay you or when your invoices are never paid on time.

A confrontation is needed when a colleague consistently ‘forgets’ to invite someone to a meeting and then accuses them of missing it. Conveniently ‘forgets’ deadlines and then blames their assistant, or yours. Innocently fails to have opinions or contributions until their boss is watching or behaves like an inert body in the name of ‘policy’, not saying no but not expediting either.

A confrontation is needed when a supplier fails to honour their SLAs and commitments and has outages that affect your business that are not treated with the seriousness you require.

All of those situations are unpleasant. Unhelpful. And while you could probably survive doing nothing in each of them, if they are constant and consistent, you’ll probably want to do something about them to affect change. Long-term change, for all involved. To avoid that constant grating feeling of looming confrontation.

That is the point of a confrontation: stopping the natural or anticipated flow of unhelpful events to provoke and secure a different outcome.

Such a confrontation is unpleasant for sure. But they can be helpful. And yet that is not what tends to happen.

What happens mostly, driven by the brigade who profess to not like confrontation, is worse in every conceivable way because it perpetuates the situation that breeds confrontation. For people who don’t like it, they sure ensure we have plenty of it.

Observe:

First, they do nothing for a bit too long.

They let the problem build up and annoyance fester.

They get silently angry. Oh, they are angry. They seethe. But silently.

Whatever it is that is causing friction or concern, they let it linger.

Repeat itself.

Build up.

Occur again and again and again until the aggravation and annoyance is palpable.

When that angst has built itself up to boiling point, they have an outburst. They talk about outcomes in a public forum. They make an angry call talking about what happened on this particular occasion. How things feel on this particular occasion. What may have happened if this occasion was on a Tuesday and not a Friday.

They contemplate angrily the worst possible outcome.

They don’t, you will notice, talk about the pattern or the reasons behind the issues. Just what the end result was.

I used to work at a bank a few years back that had two different internal systems for raising tickets. For IT issues, for new phone lines, for travel budgets. You name it. All of it was to happen through one of those two systems.

What fell under each system was not entirely clear. The art of navigating this set up was arcane and mystical.

In fact, the best way to navigate the system was to know one of the admins.

The second-best way was to have someone insanely senior cc-ed on an escalation email after failing to navigate the system for a while.

Neither way was efficient, you appreciate.

The first way was a hack (and my preferred method, admittedly).

The second way was a very high-calorie way of doing mundane work that inevitably entailed the wrong kind of confrontation. You shamed people into doing the thing that hadn’t been done because the process was obscure and hard to follow.

Never in all my time in that bank did we have the conversation about changing the policy, scrapping one of the systems, making sure we don’t have this angry meeting about approvals every few weeks.

We could have, you appreciate.

After my boss yelled at their boss about how we’d raised three tickets and followed up five times for each and we were getting nothing back on whether they had the right information. After we all made a big song and dance about how they were holding the work back and how they were busy and we need to understand that there is a process.

After all that, after we talked about outcomes and impacts and personal conduct and that guy who is unhelpful. After all the specifics had been discussed and some of the anger was spent and some concessions were made, everyone felt awkward and… stopped.

OK fine, that’s OK, we got what we came for. Thanks, have a nice day.

Only we will be back here in a week or two.

Because we just had a confrontation but did it so very badly.

When the anger is spent and the specifics discussed, that is the moment to push through and say OK, there’s a pattern here. The specifics are illustrative, but this is not a one-off. Shall we discuss what we need to change? Not what we need to hack but what we need to do differently to not be back here.

Why are the invoices never processed on time? Do you need us to submit earlier? Would it focus your mind if we started implementing penalties?

Why are you hiding behind a policy that is not relevant, dear colleague? What is it your boss is looking over your shoulder at and how can we work together without wasting each other’s time or indeed causing you problems with your boss?

Is the policy itself still serving a purpose? Should we change it so we control the right things in the right way?

In the silence we all sat in while seething, assumptions were made. Discounts were made. Conclusions were reached.

But none were discussed. Not when we were silent. Not when the dam broke and the outcomes of the issues and the silence were addressed.

Not when we went back to an awkward, bruised silence after the specifics were resolved because we are all trying to act normal now.

Because confrontation is uncomfortable, and we were not good at it.

Only what we did there wasn’t confrontation. It was conflict.

Of the least constructive and by axiomatic extension most repeatable kind.

Confrontation is what could have happened if we addressed the issues before the blow up, through the silence, to an outcome that is repeatable and solves the root cause of what could have been conflict. But wasn’t. Because we had the confrontation and solved it before the blow up had to occur.

So, I would suggest having the confrontation, having the conversation, discussing patterns and not just outcomes. Exactly because nobody likes conflict and the best way of avoiding it is to prevent it. And the way to prevent it is to do it properly when the need arises.

That’s the message boys and girls: if you don’t like confrontation, get better at it. So you can at least only have it once and move on.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.