Does anyone like confrontation?
Okay, maybe some of you do. Or at least, some of you don’t mind it.
But I’m willing to bet that the majority of you don’t like it and go out of your way to avoid it.
I used to avoid confrontation. I mean, I still don’t like it.
But I have experienced enough over the years to get as comfortable with it as I can. I’ve also made a proactive effort to improve my ability to carry out hard conversations as effectively as possible. I’ve tried to improve myself so that my dislike of confrontation doesn’t get in the way of me being an effective manager and leader.
And that’s what it ultimately comes down to – avoiding confrontation will, at some point, get in the way of you being an effective manager and leader.
So, let’s look at a few ways that you can overcome this challenge and reframe confrontation so that you approach it in a much more positive and proactive way.
Reframe confrontation
First things first, let’s mentally reframe what confrontation is in the context of being a manager.
When we think about confrontation as a manager, a few scenarios spring to mind:
- Telling someone that they are underperforming in their role.
- Letting someone go from their role.
- Addressing minor misbehaviors with someone.
None of these are pleasant conversations to have which is why we can describe them as confrontational.
But let’s describe what these things actually are.
You are doing your job.
You’re not doing these things to confront someone.
You are doing these things because when you boil it all down, your job is to drive high performance from your team and get the best out of them.
If this isn’t happening, then it’s your job to address it and fix the problem.
This is a very important distinction to make and one that you need to focus on. Of course, “doing your job” doesn’t mean that you forget the emotional side of these conversations or use it as an excuse to be unkind to people. But you need to keep that perspective so you focus on what is actually important here.
You need to acknowledge and manage your own challenges
If you struggle with confrontation, you need to be honest with yourself about that. If you think you can handle it and actually you can’t, then the chances are that you’ll just quietly avoid any form of confrontation and not do your job effectively.
Don’t pretend that you’re fine with it when you’re not!
Instead, remember that one of the best things that we can do for our progression and development is to lean into our strengths and manage our weaknesses.
In this case, a manager who avoids confrontation is a weakness that we need to manage.
But if you’re in denial about it in the first place, you’re never going to take the time to think about ways to improve it.
Get ahead of the curve
The best cure here is actually prevention. Whilst you’ll never, ever be able to avoid hard conversations that make you uncomfortable, there are things you can do to make them less likely to come up in the first place.
You can reduce the chances of scenarios like the ones above coming up if you are effective at things such as:
These are the fundamentals of being an effective manager, not just because they help you do your job, but they will help you avoid small problems becoming big problems.
Cut through the noise and focus on the core problem that you’re solving
This leads on from the idea that we’re not confronting someone for the sake of confrontation. We are doing our jobs.
We can drill into this further by reminding ourselves that at its core, we are trying to solve a problem. This means we must relentlessly focus on what the problem is and how to solve it.
I really like this quote from Ben Horowitz in The Hard Thing About Hard Things:
“Beat the politics out of the situation by bringing up the problem clearly, then forcing everyone to focus on it.”
Whilst we’re not talking about politics as such, the point still stands in that any worries about awkwardness or confrontation should be put to one side because we’re focusing solely on solving a problem.
In practical terms, this means that when you’re thinking about and planning a conversation with someone that feels confrontational, you need to focus on the problem you’re solving and find a way to bring this problem up as early as possible in the conversation.
Plan the conversation in more detail than seems reasonable
Part of the reason that we dislike confrontation is that it feels uncomfortable. We simply don’t want to have a conversation that makes us uncomfortable.
One effective way to overcome this is to get comfortable with what you need to say to someone in advance, so you are confident heading into the conversation. This can overwhelm the feeling of being uncomfortable and keep you focused on what you need to actually say and do.
When you’re just getting started with managing people and are very nervous about hard conversations, I’d suggest spending longer than you feel is necessary on planning the conversation.
Over time, you’ll get more comfortable and need less time to plan.
When it comes to the planning itself, my suggestion is to use a technique that I’ve found useful for years when it comes to having a hard conversation.
I’ll sit down and pretend that I can only have the conversation via email. So I’ll write the email as if I am actually going to send it to the person in question.
Obviously, I’m never going to send it!
But I’ll write the email with loads and loads of detail about the problems that I need to address.
Once I’ve written the email, I’ll read it a few times and pull out the 2-3 key points that I need to make sure that I mention. These points then go into my notebook and are the points that I’ll focus on during the conversation.
This helps remove the uncomfortable feeling as I go into the conversation because I have something else to focus on.
What is your fallback position?
Finally, it’s worth having what I call a fallback position when it comes to “how you do things”.
This is basically a north star or a guiding principle that I keep in mind whenever things get difficult.
In Ride of a Lifetime, Bob Iger talks about his ten principles of leadership and one of them is “Integrity” which he describes as:
“Quality and integrity of your people and your product. Set high ethical standards for all things, big and small. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
For him, this helped him when difficult situations presented themselves. No matter what, he’d try to approach everything with a strong sense of integrity.
For you, it may be something such as:
- You always do the right thing, even if the right thing is the hard thing.
- You are always kind in how you do things, even when you may upset someone.
- It’s all about respect.
- You never ignore problems.
Whatever it is, having these kinds of principles in the back of your mind as you encounter hard situations that may feel like confrontation, they can overwhelm the feeling that may lead to you avoiding the conversation altogether and help make you a more effective manager and leader.
