This week’s post is a guest article by Ben Brandall, a writer for Process Street.
Last weekend I found myself in a cafe, alone and without a laptop for around 2 hours. With just my phone, I wanted to do something worthwhile so I decided to organize my tasks properly — something I hadn’t done in a while.
I realized pretty quickly that my task management system made no sense at all.
Hollywood would have you believe that workplace conflict is awesome. Movies depict the best offices as filled with macho dudes in suits screaming at each other, throwing around insults, and somehow also getting fantastic results.
That’s entertaining, but let’s look at the facts: a 2010 study revealed that the average U.S. employee spends 2.8 hours a week dealing with disputes at work, resulting in losses of $359 Billion across the American economy. In reality, conflict pulls people away from their jobs and kills productivity.
With that in mind, your instinct might be to ruthlessly stamp it out wherever you see it. But that’s not always the best course of action. You need to recognize that not every workplace conflict is the same. It’s like criminal justice—a first degree crime is sentenced differently than a second degree crime. The context, causes, and intentions should influence how you deal with conflict in the workplace.
Here’s a rundown of three of the most common types of office workplace conflict, what they mean for your company, and how to solve them.
Consider the cliche job interview question — What’s your biggest weakness?* What’s the worst answer you can give?
“I’m a procrastinator.”
Probably no quicker way to ensure you’re “not the right fit” for that job. No matter what the job is.
Procrastination has become one of the ugliest words in modern work. It’s practitioners are stigmatized more than employees who make bad choices and blow up the company. They at least were doing something, the thinking goes.
But what if we’re thinking about it all wrong. What if the impulse to procrastinate is one of the more valuable tools we have?
Given a choice between solving puzzles for free or for pay — which would you pick?
If you want to stay motivated and solve more puzzles, the surprising thing is that you should do them for free.
In the early 1970s, psychologist Edward Deci wanted to study how money affects motivation. In one experiment, he paid one group $1 (that’s about $6 today) for each puzzle solved within three sessions, while the control group received no payment. In the middle of each session was an eight-minute free period in which people could continue puzzling, read magazines, or otherwise spend the time how they wished.
It was the paid group who chose to spend less time working on puzzles in the free periods. The extrinsic monetary reward made them lose intrinsic motivation, where the reward is the activity itself.
Over forty years later, managers still rely on the old model of dangling external rewards like money and prestige to motivate their people — but in today’s era of knowledge work, this model is increasingly misguided. If you think your people are going to continue to put in their best efforts with monetary rewards, you’re sabotaging the most powerful sources of motivation.
In many ways, work is getting increasingly solitary.
We’re rejecting meetings with colleagues as inefficient time-wasters where nothing gets done. Technology is mediating communication, replacing face-to-face interaction. Remote work means that we’re often physically alone even when we’re working on a team.
The upshot is that even when we’re working together with colleagues on a team, it can feel like we’re working alone. Yet social contexts can be powerful motivators at work. Without them, we can get disengaged and feel like our work doesn’t matter.
It turns out that, even in the absence of working physically together with a team, it’s possible to evoke the power of social context with one single word. Stanford psychologists discovered that saying this one word inspired individuals to work an incredible 48% harder by using social context to fuel intrinsic motivation.
In 2005, Zappos was on track to beat its yearly sales goal of $300 million.
But that was just the beginning. Before Zappos became the household name it is today, CEO Tony Hsieh held a long-term vision for the company that went beyond the gross merchandise numbers. His ambitious goal to hit $1 billion in sales by 2010 was part of a larger plan.
In a remarkable email update Hsieh wrote in 2005 to Zappos investors, employees, and partners, he explained:
Rather than maximizing short-term profits, we’re taking a long-term view and focusing on building the business for the long haul. We’ve grown quickly over the past 5 years, but we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible.
But it’s not the numbers that are the most exciting… It’s the opportunity to build a company culture and consumer brand that is centered around the service, not the shoes or the handbags.
One of the most captivating things about this email is to actually see the seeds of Zappos’s distinctive company culture germinating — especially knowing that the vision that Hsieh lays out in this decade-old email has come to pass, and then some.
So how did Hsieh actually translate his vision for Zappos into reality and resist the siren song of those short-term profits? How did he corral his employees to stick with him for the long haul? The elements are all there in that email.
“Thanks for pushing me.”
That’s what Kawhi Leonard — at twenty-two, the third youngest Finals MVP in NBA history — told his coach, Gregg Popovich, during the celebratory hullabaloo of this year’s Spurs championship.
To developer Kevin Lamping, Leonard’s simple utterance of gratitude is a meaningful example of the power of coaching, the difference between “managing the good” and “coaching the best.” Their multimillion-dollar salaries, Kevin observes, isn’t quite enough for players to motivate and develop themselves. It’s that critical outside perspective that helps push, challenge, and support you to improve, which is why elite performers from Olympic athletes to opera singers at the top of their fields still have coaches.
Of course the best bosses take time to develop their people. It’s even been proven by Google with its extensive analysis of over 10,000 observations about managers across over 100 variables. Their first and foremost evidence-based rule of good management? Be a good coach.
Then why isn’t coaching more often treated like part of the manager’s job rather than a nice extracurricular activity?
So you want to build a billion-dollar company, and it’s because you want to make people’s lives better by solving a problem while hitting it big, rich, and famous. Sounds like a winning combo of incentives to drive you to achieve startup success.
It’s not like both motives can’t coexist. Humans, complex beings that we are, walk around with a jumble of intentions, impulses, and aspirations in our heads — instead of one clearcut reason for why we do things.
The thing is, you would think that having multiple motives would result in, well, more motivational power. When you can hit two goals with one activity, don’t you just have more incentive to do the activity? If you want that promotion because you get to expand your skillset and increase your prestige, doesn’t that help drive you even harder to go for it?
There’s one problem. There’s a tricky truth about motivation that might be preventing your best performance.
When I first joined iDoneThis, I hated our weekly meetings. They were demoralizing and amorphous. We rambled on, drowning in circuitous discussions about product that led nowhere. The meetings became a chore, making us feel like sulky high school students waiting for the bell to ring.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner noticed a similar bad meeting phenomenon of tending to “devolve into a round robin of complaints.” His unconventional solution was to change up the meeting format by promoting something you wouldn’t expect: gratitude.
When we think about our work and what we have to do, it’s almost always about pushing. Push yourself, push harder, push through the pain. But pushing won’t get you through every door.
When you take a look at the routines and rituals of super-productive people, they often turn out not to be about pushing at all, but pulling and drawing energy back into yourself. These recharging routines are about creating “me-time” — not in some selfish, diva way, but in an effort to care for and re-center yourself, to protect at least some of your time from being dictated by others.
Me-time routines are renewable fuel, a sustainable antidote to burnout and life as a work vampire.