The Manage IT Newsletter - Benefiting from the proper handling of conflict:

This issue contains information on how you can assess your ability to handle conflict and learn techniques for turning confrontations into opportunities for building the relationships you need to succeed.

Welcome to the July 2005 issue of the "Manage IT Newsletter."

In this issue we will focus on how IT managers and professionals can turn confrontations into opportunities for success. Should avoid conflicts or race into them with a bloody war cry? Are their other alternatives? What do masters at confrontation handling do to get the most out of conflicts? Read on and learn more.

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With warmest regards,
Joe Santana,
Co-author Manage IT
http://www.manageitbook.com
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In this Issue
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Focus Topic - Benefiting from the proper handling of conflict
Closing Comments and Announcements
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--------------------------- Focus Topic -----------------------------
Benefiting from the proper handling of conflict

An unavoidable by-product of IT professionals and managers drawing closer to the business side will be an increase in the opportunity for confrontations due to differences in perspective. Stepping up to these confrontations is certainly not easy. We humans are wired to see confrontation as demanding an either flight or fight response. Since running away does not appeal to most of us and fighting or confronting often ends in a more painful situation, with neither of these approaches promising much success, the general impulse on the part of most human beings is to avoid any situation that can lead to confrontation.

Nevertheless, as many have found, appropriately handling the right confrontations can actually present the best opportunities for building strong business relationships. For an IT manager or professional that is seeking to advance their career in the 21st century IT organization, seeking and successfully handling the right confrontation is, I dare say, a vital skill.

So here is the good news. There are many learnable options for effectively handling confrontations without resorting to running away or fighting. I recently came across an excellent book by the writing team of Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, titled "Crucial Confrontations" that in my opinion is one of the best works on this topic. Specifically regarding the ITO space Joseph Grenny states that, "Through a systematic study of IT and other leader's, we've found that those who exert the most influence in organizations are those who are best at handling crucial confrontations." He adds that these are IT leaders who effectively respond to "those uncomfortable occasions where we have to step up to some broken promise, violated expectation or bad behavior."

Before, however, we start discussing the options for successfully selecting and handling the right confrontations, I invite you to take a look at how your current confrontation handling skills are serving you.

To that end, please respond to the five questions listed below on a scale from 1 to 5 to indicate the following:

Strong No
Mild No
Neither Yes or No
Mild Yes
Strong Yes

Create three separate lists and ask yourself the same set of questions relative to your dealings with:

* Peers
* Subordinates (your subordinates as well as you peers subordinates), and
* Your superiors

1. Do you regularly seek relationships with business groups, especially those that might be most critical of you and your team?

2. Do you confront important issues as they come up in a manner that results in fixing the problem and a better relationship with the person originally in conflict with you?

3. Do you feel that when you engage in conflicts that you permanently resolve problems relative to broken commitments, bad behavior and lack of accountability with your subordinates?

4. Do you feel that when you engage in conflicts that you permanently resolve problems relative to broken commitments, bad behavior and lack of accountability with your peers?

5. Do you feel that when you engage in conflicts that you permanently resolve problems relative to broken commitments, bad behavior and lack of accountability with your boss?

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That this quiz now and then come back and read the rest of this article!
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So how did you do in confrontation quiz? If you scored a 25 on this test for any of the three groups, you are effectively seeking and handling conflict within that group. If you scored a 15 or lower with any group, you probably feel your sphere of influence shrinking within that group (If it hasn't it probably will). Regardless of the outcome with any of the three groups, I believe you will find the tips that follow to be of value to you in your quest to become a better "confrontationalist."

Based on experience and the collective advise of experts, here are the six essential steps that I recommend you take to improve your confrontation handling skills:

1. Get all the facts straight in your own head, first. At first this may seem trite, but the fact is that as human beings, we have the tendency to color our reactions and respond to our interpretations. Essentially, we hear about or see a situation, we tell ourselves a story about why it happened, this engenders a feeling in us and then we act motivated by that feeling. For example, say a business unit leader sends you an accusatory email, copied to your peers and superiors. You may automatically assume that she dislikes you and is trying to get you ousted from the company. That of course will make you immediately dislike her, which in turn will influence how you respond. Some of your choices in this emotional state will be to either come across as hostile (fight) by sending back an equally or more vicious email. Or you might withdraw and shutdown (flight) feeling in jeopardy, and lay low to await a safe way of taking retribution (By the way, for most CIOs that I know, the latter is the less likely response). What you are responding to, however, are not the facts but how you feel about the story you told yourself. The solution to letting your initial "stories" get the best of you is to explore other potential stories that lead to other feelings and potential conclusions. In the example above, the business unit leader may be responding to their own story about how they think you feel about her. Or perhaps, this is her attempt to secure resources from one of the people copied on the email. Or perhaps, the failure of this project would have an extremely disastrous impact on her operation that she is fretting over. By exploring other potential "stories" you will avoid making assumptions based on your first story and letting your emotions trigger what may turn out to be a response that is completely off the mark.

2. Decide if any aspect of the situation presents an opportunity for a confrontation that is worthwhile pursuing. While I am encouraging that you seek out and deal with confrontations, not all battles are worth pursuing. After, you tell yourself all the potential stories that may be behind a particular behavior on the part of a colleague another question to ask yourself is "should I pursue any of these factors as a point of confrontation?" A simple way to decide what to pursue and what to ignore is to ask yourself, how does this impact my strategy for my ITO?" If the answer is zero to minimal, you may want to pass and not waste your energy on a low return effort. On the other hand, if the impact if high you may want to invest your time in putting together and executing a strategy to effectively address this confrontation.

3. Decide specifically where you wish to focus your confrontation. As part of your strategy, break down all of the sub-conflicts that arise as a result of your confrontation and pick the one you wish to pursue. For example, in the case of the accusatory email, you have a number of sub-topics for potential pursuit. One is the substance of the email or what was said. Was it true or untrue? The other is the fact that this negative information was broadcast to a group of people. The third could be that this is not the first time this person does this and so on. In planning to talk to this person, you should select no more than one item as your focal topic for confrontation. Base your selection on the history of the situation and the sub-topic that you feel is the most important to address. Do not try to "cover all the bases." A blanket approach will only dilute your efforts and potentially lead to only venting with no resolution on any of the issues.

4. Open your confrontational discussion by describing the gap between a commitment or an expectation and what happened. Keeping with our example of the accusing email, let's say that you choose to hold your confrontation on the fact that the email was sent to a public forum. You can schedule a meeting, pickup the phone or go to the other person's office and get straight to the heart of the confrontation by saying, "you and I work within a phone call (or short walk) away from each other. Yet, you choose to send an email out copied to ten people to convey your thoughts on why you think this project will fail due to my lack of personal participation in the process. Can we talk about why you did that?" No accusations or assumptions, simply a statement of facts followed by a question.

Remember your goal is not to attack or trick them. You don't want to make them feel defensive, by opening with a statements like, "You made me very angry when you sent out that accusatory email to ten people in the company without first checking your facts." Always avoid opening any confrontation in this manner, with your judgements. On the other hand, you don't want to come across as weak, patronizing or plain silly either by saying something like, "I really like you and your team. So why did you send out the stupid hateful email? Nice office." This so called "sandwich conversation" fools no one.

5. Next, listen and be flexible. The next few words that come out of the other person's mouth may raise another more important issue that needs to be addressed or provide insight into why the other person did what they did and/or any combination of results. At this point, the most valuable thing that you can do is to listen carefully adjust if needed and keep the discussion focused on getting to the facts in a non-judgmental way. For example, the business unit leader might tell you that two of the people copied on the email are holding her personally responsible for the outcome of this project. She wanted them to know that even though you were not involved personally day to day, that you were in fact responsible for this project. At this point, you might state and ask: "So, let me see if I understand you. You want these two people to know that I am responsible for the project as the head of IT. You choose to send out an email copied to ten people stating that you thought the project would fail due to my lack of personal participation in the process in order to convey that I am responsible for the project to these two people. Why did you believe that it was necessary to convey that I was letting the project fail in order to establish that I am responsible for the project?" Based on the next response, you can continue to drill down into how to get to the root of the issue and address it.

6. Finally, make sure you close the confrontation in a manner that motivates a positive commitment to action. One of the things you want, as an outcome of your confrontations is a commitment to actions that resolve the conflict in a positive manner. In order to motivate yourself or someone else to act, you need to lower the pain associated with the action and increase the pleasure. In the case of our example, the final action might be to jointly meet with the two senior executives to discuss your role and ownership versus the role and ownership of the business unit leader. Also, another action might be a note from the business unit leader to the original ten people that summarizes your discussion, agreements and partnership (Not quite a big apology, but certainly a show of willingness to work together as a team). A few things that will lower the pain of taking the right actions are having a clear idea of what you will discuss with the two senior executives and having a clear position to communicate in the note. (You may for example volunteer to draft the message for the note). Factors that increase the reward or pleasure for taking these actions is knowing that you are both building allies and increasing the chance for a successful project for which both of you can receive credit. Make sure you clearly build and communicate these so that there is commitment to the actions decided upon during the confrontation.

There are very clear reward resulting to IT pros and managers that effectively managing internal ITO and ITO to business conflicts. Nevertheless, even with excellent techniques, handling conflicts will still present moments of discomfort. To that end, if you have not effectively handled conflicts in the past (ran away or exploded in anger), I recommend that you start small and work your way up to bigger confrontations. As you face bigger and more uncomfortable confrontations, I advise you to take heart from the words of Thomas Paine the US Patriot and Political philosopher who once said, "The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

For more resources on this and other IT professional and management topics, I invite you to visit my web site at http://www.joesantana.com.

As always, my best toward your continued success!

JS

--------------- Closing Thoughts and Announcements ----------------
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I hope you enjoyed this issue of the IT Managers Newsletter and as always I look forward to continuing to serve you.