This article is an excerpt from an interactive discussion with Organizational Psychologist and Executive Coach Dana Scannell, PhD and Dr. Rose Madrid Swetman, of the Center for Transforming Engagement. Dana and Rose share the challenges they hear as they do consulting work with teams, clergy, nonprofit leaders,,and people that used to be leaders and are now deconstructing their faith.
ROSE: So Dana, I don’t know if you’ve ever been brought into a leadership team where there is high conflict… If so, what what do you do?
DANA: Have I ever been, it’s more like welcome to my world! You guys should put a suitcase in my briefcase and come into some of those experiences. Most of the time, unfortunately, organizations don’t start proactively. I’m sure you find this, they call you when there’s a problem.
Because that’s what we do, right? That’s part of the nature of the beast. And the first thing that we get to do is try to dispel and pull down fear. What’s gonna happen? Who’s this outside person? What are they doing? What’s this?
Diagnose Before Moving into Action
So just 101 – we have to work to understand.
Tell me what’s going on. Tell me the story from your lens. Tell me the story from your perspective. They’ll say, well, you’re just gonna talk to everybody else, NO – What we talk about is confidential.
So I have to be willing, and have the backing of leaders, to keep that confidence. And then to synthesize the questions or some of the findings with the leader.
We’ve got to level set, we’ve got to have some individual conversations about what’s really happening. And to get a sense of the team dynamics? Is it one or two players that are feeling threatened?
So addressing conflict, the first step is figure out what the conflict is really about. Then we can formulate a plan. If I go to the doctor and I have a rash, you know, on my hand, the doctor’s gonna take a look at the rash. I don’t want the doctor to say, oh yeah, that’s quite the rash and walk out the door. Like, I want some help, right?
Building Trust & Rapport
Diagnosis is step one, but I actually want some treatment. So how are we gonna progress to that next stage? We have to build trust, we have to build rapport.
And then we have to start looking at what’s gonna work. So if I walk into a church that’s having some challenges with leadership or challenges with women in ministry, or I’m having challenges with elder led versus congregational led, whatever those challenges look like.
In nonprofits, I’ve got everybody with the best of intentions, but they struggle with each other and they start to forget that the opportunities that we get to do are serving others, fighting with each other, and that we all have great ideas.
Sometimes I walk into these organizations, and what do I do with that? Well, I’m gonna accept the fact that conflict is a natural part of our experiences. So it’s not unusual, it’s not what’s not working. Because the minute we start to frame it that way, it’s gonna be a really tough uphill battle.
Gaining Understanding
Next, especially around teams, we must be able to understand how we got here and how are we seeing things. And that’s where those kind of tools, those assessments, those things can help paint pictures for people to understand thinking of other people. I honestly will always have some type of assessment that we’re using.
It could be a spiritual strengths assessment. It could be lots of things. It’s not just a personality assessment. What is our gifting? These allow me to call out the positive. Where are our differences that are naturally misaligned?
And how do we understand, oh, you’re not just being difficult with me. You see the world differently. I now understand it’s not personal. It’s just, we see the things, we’re seeing the same picture, but we’re calling it out differently. How do we start to level set?
Then, how do we start to appreciate those differences and start to see those through a different lens and say, oh my gosh, you’re really good at that and I’m really good at this. If we could combine and try to collaborate, I’ve had some amazing examples of people with deep conflict where one is – I really don’t like this person and I don’t trust them. I don’t like them. I will never trust them.
After starting to see things through the other’s lens, borrowing the lenses so to speak, and gthey et to see things through other people’s perspectives. Something shifts. It doesnt maginally become perfectm and it’s still gonna be bumpy at times. That’s part of managing expectations too. This isn’t gonna be easy. Like, okay, we’re done. It doesn’t work like that. If we set that as an expectation, we’re gonna be disappointed.
We Can’t Avoid Conflict
ROSE: It seems to me, you meet a lot of people, especially in the helping professions like clergy, pastoring churches, nonprofits, therapists. that in many ways, because of what how we’ve been taught and formed in our own traditions in church, that conflict is not good, that we should avoid conflict at all costs, right?
And so it’s important to have healthy conflict in teams. Teams need to learn how you manage conflict because conflict can be healthy in order to move towards our collective goals and priorities together. You wanna talk about that just for a moment?
DANA: Love to, I’m glad that you mentioned that because conflict avoidance, because a lot of people are conflict avoidant. And again, through our church traditions, through other learnings and our experiences, we’re taught that we keep things to ourselves, right? We’re taught to stuff it.
And the problem with stuffing it, is it doesn’t go away.
Imagine I have a wound and I have the attitude that eh- it’ll will be fine. Then, it starts to turn more and more pink, and more and more red. And it starts to be covered over, and it starts to bubble and now it hurts. Well, what am I gonna have to do? I’m gonna have to clean it out.
I have to deal with it or it’s going to cause a bigger problem. And that’s what happens in all kinds of organizations. We see the festering of things. We see the things not being addressed.
I dont believe we have to go running toward conflict. I had a coach that I heard once say that we have to mind for conflict. We have to look for conflict. Well, I don’t want to create conflict, but I do want to acknowledge that we’re going to have differences and therefore we’re going to have conflict.
If I try to sidestep it and don’t deal with it, it starts to build up. This is where you see organizations go sideways. You see people that didn’t feel comfortable speaking up and they go, oh yeah, we’ve known about that for years. How many news reports are we going to hear about people having failures?
Whatever kind of failures, leadership failures, moral failures, church leader failures. I think it’s because there isn’t a safe place or a safe environment for us to be able to provide enough self-care for leaders to be able to take care of themselves and be taken care of, to be cared for.
And I think that’s one of the biggest things. I have conflict in my church. I have conflict in groups that I lead, you know, not just coach and work, but people that I’m responsible for. I had somebody recently with a marriage problem, and they’re saying, well, should we be stepping out of leadership? I said, well, let’s talk about that. The church hasn’t done the best job of embracing people’s challenges. Instead, we are mpore apt to think, let’s take them out and shoot them.
I think that’s the worst thing we can do, not just for the church, but for those people. That’s where we have sometimes taken such deviations from what God intended. That was not Jesus’ model. Let’s go love the people into places of health, not ostracize them. But we have to get proactive about that. You can tell I’m a little fired up because I’m a little passionate about this idea of being proactive to care for our leaders and them have self-care.
One of my coaching responsibilities is to ask – my team, lead pastor, the Seattle school board, other nonprofit boards – how are you? What is going on in your world? Where are the places that we need to be praying? Where are the places we need to unpack? How much time have you spent with your spouse, with your family?
Asking those kinds of questions will reinforce what we want for them to take care of, so that they fill their tank. I don’t know about you, but my car doesn’t drive very well if the battery doesn’t get charged or the gas tank gets empty.
Same for people. And I don’t think we are doing a great job as leaders and overseers, and all the kind of roles we play in helping people not just acknowledge that, but actually proactively do it. Because otherwise, it’s going to lead to some hard – things blow up and people say, oh, see, there it is.
This does such a disservice to everyone involved.
A major part our work at the Center is to develop healthy, trustworthy teams and organizations to tackle your community’s most pressing problems. Learn more about our programs for teams and coaches.