Discussing challenging topics with oncology colleagues is vital to fostering healthy workplace relationships, but it’s not always easy. However, learning some basic strategies can help to efficiently resolve conflicts not only in your professional life, but in your personal life as well, according to Ryan Soisson, founder and principal consultant at Soisson & Associates.
“My role in life is to help groups, organizations, teams—sometimes even individuals—solve problems,” he said at the AONN+ Virtual Midyear Conference. “Inherent in that is being able to talk about our issues and challenges, and doing so in a productive way.”
For many of us, a lot of overlap exists between our personal and professional lives, and according to Mr Soisson, all of the practices that should be used to effectively handle a conversation with friends or family are the same practices needed to conduct a conversation at work.
Why Care?
An estimated $359 billion worth of time is spent managing unresolved conflict in the workplace each year. That’s about 2.8 hours for each employee each week. “I don’t know about you, but carving another 2.8 hours out of my week is not easy,” he said. “So conflict is big in all of our worlds.”
Additionally, about 20% to 40% of manager time is spent on conflict. Thinking about this from an organizational perspective, that’s an enormous amount of time, he noted.
Putting the statistics aside, people care about workplace conflicts because figuring out their resolutions often keeps them up at night.
“I coach a lot of leaders, and about half of the coaching conversations I have are related to a difficult conversation that’s either not going well, that somebody is avoiding, or that has already happened,” he said.
According to a book called Difficult Conversations, put out by the Harvard Negotiation Project, “difficult conversations are not about who is right. They are about what is important.”
“This is my favorite quote that I’ve seen in the literature I’ve encountered about managing conflict or having effective, difficult, powerful conversations,” he said. “And I think this is the crux of almost all of our challenges around difficult conversations.”
If difficult conversations were about who is right, they would be a lot easier to resolve, because that would suggest that a “right” answer exists. “You don’t have a lot of difficult conversations around what day it is,” he noted.
But when values enter the conversation, they become a lot more challenging. The tricky part lies in the fact that many individuals do, in fact, treat these conversations as if they are about who is right and who is wrong.
“Given that a lot of consequences flow from these conversations, we end up trying to argue our case and show that we’re right,” he said.
The problem is, even when a person feels beaten or “bested” in a difficult conversation, they’re not likely to admit defeat and change their stance on an issue that’s important to them. Rather, most people go over the conversation in their head, perhaps sulk for a while, and then prepare for the next iteration of the same difficult conversation. Most of us can relate to these types of exchanges, and many of these conversations can persist—with friends, family, or coworkers—for years.
How Do We Have These Difficult Conversations?
According to Mr Soisson, there are typically 4 crucial moments in a difficult conversation. “These are 4 places where you need to try to get it as right as you can in preparation for these conversations,” he said.
The way most people prepare themselves for these types of conversations is all wrong, he continued. Arguments are honed, and counter arguments are readied, as if they’re preparing for a public debate. “This tends not to be the best way to go into a difficult conversation,” he added. “Again, you’re not trying to win an argument; you’re trying to solve a problem.”
The parties having these conversations shouldn’t be on the defensive; they should be working together toward a resolution. “So preparing a case like a lawyer going to court is probably not helpful,” he said.
Step 1: Check Your Motivation
Are you trying to prove your case and achieve your preferred resolution, or are you trying to learn and understand where the other person is coming from, sharing exactly what your needs are in the situation, and working on moving forward on a problem? Coming into the situation with a motivation for learning and problem-solving tends to lead to better solutions, he said.
“You may have a lot of passion and interest around a particular issue, and you may really feel like you’re right,” he noted. “But be careful about how tightly you hold onto your ‘rightness.’”
Step 2: Prepare
Ask yourself some challenging questions, such as “What might Monica see that I don’t? What might I learn if I listen carefully to her? How might I encourage her to see my point of view? How might we problem solve together?”
Step 3: Open the Conversation
State the case or bring the issue to the surface. “You’ve usually got about 30 seconds to set this up nicely, or wildly blow it,” he said. “And our human nature tends to work against us in opening the conversation.”
According to Mr Soisson, people tend to beat around the bush or talk in circles for several minutes before getting to the point of their argument. Instead, see how quickly you can get to the issue, and put it out there in a way that is not one-sided or judgmental, he advised. For example, “Monica, you and I see the value of our patient intake process differently. I feel like it’s working well; you’re feeling like it isn’t. Can we talk about what we can do?”
When the issue at hand isn’t broached immediately in one of these conversations, you might just be causing the person to “reload.” When this happens, they are no longer listening; they are only waiting until you are done talking so that they can make their counter argument.
Step 4: Dialogue
“What we tend to do is talk at people and state our case, when what we need to do is ask a lot of questions,” he said. The point is to hear how the other party feels once they know where you stand on an issue, not to convince them that you are right.
The crucial final phase of a discussion gone well is resolving the issue. Once both parties feel that they’ve been heard and clearly understood, how can they find a common ground?
“What we very often do is retreat to our original position and defend it, but what we need to do is figure out what the other person needs,” he said.
Figure that out based on their interests in the disagreement. For example, if one person wants to sleep with the window open and one wants it closed, what do each of them really want? Maybe it’s cool air with the window open, or feeling safe by having it closed. “Having a dialogue around getting more cool air in while increasing the safety in the house is way different than having a dialogue around who’s right about having the window open or closed,” he said.
According to Mr Soisson, when people negotiate in this way, everyone gets more of what they need. “And remember that even in our most visceral debates,” he added, “there’s a lot of stuff that we fundamentally agree on.”
