Bernardo Fanti Consulting

Category: leadership

  • On Conflict.

    How can accepting conflict and lessons from Negotiation and Mediation frameworks help us make better decisions in life and work?

    Conflict has always intrigued me. As a third culture kid, my ability to easily connect and code switch has helped me instinctively observe dynamics in conflict and apply conflict resolutions skills in life and work. I have just completed a Mediation class through UC Davis with the goal of getting State Certified and volunteering with local opportunities to help mediate in business, in family matters, and the judicial setting. I don’t expect a hard shift into a professional life of judicial mediation, but have a strong intuition that the skills and concepts learned will apply to many situations in life and especially to managerial and leadership skills.

    The class was truly engaging, taught us theoretical frameworks, and gave us a lot of practical application with peers. It helped me grow on top of the intuitive and self-taught mediation skills I already developed through my leadership career. What struck me the most are the similarities between the Principled Negotiation concepts, frameworks for making major life decisions (where there is no negotiation with another party, but where there might be negotiation within ourselves with different competing goals or values), and frameworks and processes I use in technical problem solving and business decision making. I’m particularly interested in exploring and writing about this topic because it further reinforces my belief in and commitment to a collaborative problem solving approach to solving complex business and technical challenges, as opposed to pursuing a rigid, positional approach which I equate to top down management.

    “conflict”: when one or more parties perceive a situation in a way that suggests their own goals are incompatible with the goals of another party.

    I like this definition for conflict shared by our instructor. It’s broad and doesn’t frame conflict in a negative light. You can even frame the same definition to apply to yourself and a conflict-of-one situation – when one part of yourself perceives an important life decision in a way that suggests its own goals are incompatible with other parts of yourself.

    Conflict tends to be seen as negative, sometimes even demonized. American society especially seems to want to instill niceness, avoiding the discomfort of disagreement and debates at all costs. My own culture in Italy thrives on direct, explosive, and passionate confrontation, but is often so explosive and emotional that it loses most objectivity and becomes psychologically (and sometimes physically!) unsafe; in fact, Italian conflict rarely touches on feelings or identity, the traditional christian patriarchal society avoiding vulnerable, deeper layers.

    My own experience with conflict is a rocky, bumpy roller coaster. On one hand, I have loved to directly and passionately debate an opinion, and am not afraid of disagreeing and telling you why. On the other hand, vulnerability did not come easy to me and many of my younger years were spent acting and protecting my authentic self, avoiding conflict when it came close to touching vulnerable areas of my innermost self. As an energetic child unwillingly commandeered into projects under the stern tutelage (“top-down-management”) of my dad, I found myself experiencing another important type of conflict at a young age, now recognizing how experience, intellect, perspectives, creativity, and individual goals can often collide in the face of solving practical, technical problems.

    A PROBLEM IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
    THINGS AS DESIRED
    AND THINGS AS PERCEIVED.

    – “Are Your Lights On”

    Conflict, problem solving, and decision making in business context are deeply interrelated and can benefit from a mediation-minded approach. Since those childhood experiences, and through years in engineering and managerial roles, I have come to appreciate conflict as an important indicator of latent opportunity. Problem solving as a process goes through several differing phases, each of which can generate conflict. Identifying the problem. Understanding and refining the problem. Creating ideas and options for solutions. And, Decision Making, where we evaluate options, optimize for what’s most important, and chose the one that best balances short- and long-term needs. Since solving problems and making decisions in complex technology and business landscape requires many expert functions and stakeholders, every step of the process presents risk (and opportunity!) for conflict, and for leveraging that conflict to iteratively work toward better and better solutions.

    Where can conflict arise?

    • Differing understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve. Different perspectives, different perceptions, different layers of the problem, different specific use cases for varying personas.
    • Differing understanding of the overarching business goals and constraints. Every function and every level of leadership has a slightly different incentive and strategic goal that solving this problem might support.
    • Differing understanding of the collateral impact of a specific solution. Maintenance, operations, sales and marketing needs.

    As a leader charged with driving execution, then, mediation becomes a critical leadership skill that helps guide stakeholders through all that conflict, toward making better decisions that lead to more valuable, more impactful, and more efficient solutions. Skilled mediation, which the manager should drive but is not exclusive to managerial roles, will support individual stakeholders through those phases by:

    • Helping dig through layers of meaning and varying perceptions of facts, stories, goals.
    • Help uncover assumptions about the problem, about the goals, about the impact and viability of solutions.
    • Help navigate individual emotions that come up in each of the scenarios, openly or in 1:1 conversations.
    • Help reach and commit to a decision between varying options.

    It’s important to recognize the goal of collaboration through mediation is not to reach compromise. Rather, through helping improve inter-stakeholder communication and create a safe space for concerns and creativity, the goal is to reach Win-Win solutions that help achieve the best outcomes for all stakeholders, helping those stakeholders be part of the decision process and feel committed to the execution.

    Beyond the work and problem solving space, conflict is ever present in our own lives. We’re often faced with complex life decisions that are difficult to navigate, even if we’re not having to negotiate with an external party. What we don’t realize is that we are in fact negotiating with ourselves – with different practical nuances between the various goals, or between different core values we hold dearly that are seemingly at odds with each other, or between multiple identities within ourselves. We get stuck making those decisions because we maybe lack information, but most of the time I believe we get stuck because we approach them from a Positional, Soft or Hard, framework and lose the ability to be creative, instead of zooming out and staying focused on identifying underlying interests, negotiating fairly with ourselves, and coming up with creative solutions.

    How do we harness the conflict intrinsic in complex problem solving and channel it toward optimal solutions and healthy cultures?

    • Become aware of how conflict surrounds us and how we engage in conflict through our unique conflict management style.
    • Observe others’ conflict management style and learn to navigate differing styles.
    • Study and practice various conflict management, negotiation, and mediation frameworks and develop your own process best suited to your organization.
    • Consistently create opportunities in which conflict is welcomed, seen as an opportunity to create value, and practiced in a psychologically safe matter that creates deep engagement.

    I will dig deeper into frameworks and safety in future posts, while wrapping this post up with a short overview of the conflict management styles to kickstart us on the first step of harnessing conflict.

    The way we see and engage in conflict is influenced by our conflict management style. Measured on two axes, one for the level of cooperativeness and one for the level of assertiveness, there are five styles which we all express to lesser or greater degrees, within various contexts.

    Competing. Highly assertive and uncooperative, we see the world as win-lose, and we fight for what we want regardless of collateral, often at the other person’s expense. This is a helpful style when resources are truly limited, when we don’t need or want to maintain the relationship, and when “winning” is clearly defined and critically important.

    Avoiding. Low in both assertion and cooperation, we don’t deal with conflict at all, we withdraw. The outcome is often lose-lose, as both parties miss out on opportunities to benefit each other. This is likely the most unhelpful style and will lead to significant individual and organizational dysfunction over time.

    Accommodating. Highly cooperative, but unassertive, we hide our true needs, following orders or giving in to demands often in pursuit of harmony in the relationship. This can be a helpful style if we need to protect ourselves in a power hierarchy or if maintaining the relationship is critical. It is unlikely to lead to the best outcome for either party.

    Compromising. Compromise is often the worst of all worlds, splitting the difference, facing conflict but desiring to resolve it quickly without diving deeper into each other’s interests. Compromise often happens when neither party cares enough or has enough ownership and authority to drive better outcomes.

    Collaborating. Highly cooperative and highly assertive, this style focuses on problem solving, finding common ground. This is the sweet spot of value creation, where differing perspectives and creativity can help drive outcomes that no one previously even thought possible. It is also the style that, when repeated over and over again in a safe environment, will lead to healing and strengthening of the relationship.

    While there isn’t a single “best” style, there are styles that are better suited for certain situations, and I would like to argue that the Collaborative style is the most suited for complex decision making in environments of uncertainty and high impact (when we have the time and resources to pursue true collaboration).

    Conflict is everywhere and there is immense opportunity in reframing it as a tool for truth and creativity. Humans are flawed, buggy, feeling machines that have evolved to think rationally. Even (and especially) the most rational among us have a limited view of the world, and often don’t recognize that that view is filtered by a lens of experience, beliefs, trauma, stories. We are rarely taught the introspective and communication skills to help us dig through our own stories, communicate our beliefs and perspectives in a healthy way that is likely to be heard and valued. Diverse backgrounds and perspectives, differing opinions, and live, interactive conflict based on constructive conversation become critical in the discovery of truth, continuous growth, and iterating toward the highest levels of performance. Let’s start seeing conflict as an opportunity, a source of truth discovery and value creation! The next post will go into how Negotiation and Mediation frameworks offer a set of skills to help individuals and teams in any context dig through important facts and beliefs and model healthy communication to achieve great solutions, together.

  • On Accountability.

    How accountability is misused at work and how to change that

    Spend long enough on a team in your job and especially in a tech startup that needs to move fast and ship a lot of features, and you will have heard one of the following:

    • “Why can’t this team / this department be accountable?”
    • “We need more accountability in our company!”
    • “Let’s build this feature and let’s show some accountability team!!!”
    • “We need to hold this person/team accountable!”

    While these statements can occasionally inspire greater performance, broad proclamations like that have often instilled fear in me as an employee at any level, and I have interpreted them as lacking trust in my ability to perform my work well. I am drawn to discuss this topic of accountability because of how it shapes and is shaped by the power dynamics that exist in teams and organizations, and the resulting fear and damage to psychological safety that abusing it can create. I strive to better understand the concept of accountability and related power dynamics, and to help articulate clear ideas and powerful practices, for two main reasons. First, because accountability is important and I want to help give leaders and teams tools to continuously improve their performance and business impact. Second, to help break dysfunctional or potentially manipulative power dynamics and give individuals with less formal power the tools to engage in healthy, informed discussion and stand up for themselves or their teams.

    What does it mean to be accountable? Originating in financial activities, the word etymology itself implies a form of measuring, keeping track of, adding up and determining how the inputs relate to the outputs. Extending those concepts to a work environment with people doing work, being accountable for something implies having a definition of the work that needs to be done, committing to the work that needs to be done, and doing and delivering that work. Being accountable for something means honoring those commitments, holding someone accountable means measuring their performance, or worth, based on what they’re supposed to do and how well they are doing it. Unfortunately for the creative knowledge work environment, the term is also often equated with concepts of answerability, culpability, liability. Those terms give it a negative connotation when an unsophisticated manager attempts to increase performance by improving accountability – i.e., finding who is culpable for low performance.

    I believe that people mean well and that most of the time, we lack the appropriate communication skills to convey what we really want. I interpret those statements almost as tantrums, as attempts to articulate several different thoughts, feelings, emotions and trying to use language that we haven’t really thought through to achieve a goal we aren’t articulating well. It doesn’t mean there is not a valid, underlying problem that needs to be surfaced and addressed. And that’s our goal – to help guide the problem solving and heal the organization – to understand the underlying problems and address those very directly. While those sentiments are expressed as frustrations often without nuance, they do contain core truth that point to a lack of individual, team, or managerial performance or even a deeper cultural dysfunction.

    When I hear those statements, this is often what I rephrase it into in my head depending on context:

    • We’re losing. We’re not doing well. We need to perform better!
    • We aren’t moving fast enough, I don’t know what to do or what to say to make you move faster!!!!
    • You said you would deliver feature X by Y but we’re LATE, why!!!
    • I have this feeling that people are just checking in and out, working for a paycheck, and they just don’t care!
    • I want to motivate my employees with a powerful speech that gets them fired up toward this new project we need to deliver to grow revenue.
    • I just committed to X to achieve a business outcome, I needed to make a fast decision, and now I have to find a way to get it all done quickly!
    • These people or this individual aren’t performing, it’s clear to me and to others, I don’t know how to articulate why though, it’s just a feeling, so I’m going to use say they’re not being accountable
    • The system keeps going down, nobody cares, it takes ages to bring it back up, where’s the accountability!

    Unfortunately for those well meaning leaders in positions of power, this use of accountability often results in fear and erosion of trust. And that’s not because employees are not accountable (on average) or don’t want to work in a culture of high performance! I believe the broad, generalized use of “we need accountability” is problematic because of several reasons:

    • Most importantly, because generic statements like that meant to inspire greater performance don’t work and lead to disengagement and ultimately lower performance, certainly in the long term.
    • General statements make everyone feel like they’re not performing and their job is on the cutting block. There is no nuance and people start making up stories.
    • They create an us-vs-them mindset, generally feels directed at front-line workers, individual contributors, and rarely seems to imply managers or executive leaders’ performance is in question.
    • Employees remember plenty of occasions where managers or peers were clearly and visibly not performing and not held accountable to that lack of performance, instilling a sense of cynicism.
    • Is unfair to employees in the hierarchical power dynamic, implying it’s entirely the ICs responsibility to be accountable to X and ignoring the cultural and systemic issues that lead to a lack of performance (and potentially a lack of accountability as a driver of that).

    What should we do instead when delivery and operational performance is low and leaders perceive a lack of accountability as the source of that?

    I believe the most valuable thing we can do is to reframe the issue from individual lack of accountability to a systemic, organizational issue focused on ownership. Managers often feel the responsibility and put the pressure on themselves to hold their employees accountable when I firmly believe that, barring critical competency or personality issues, employees want to feel a sense of responsibility and have an inner drive to hold themselves and each other accountable when a sense of ownership over their work exists. Through that lens, instead of telling employees what to do and cracking the whip, managers and leaders should be the gardeners that tend the beds and create the systems to bring out the innate accountability and performance of individuals and teams.

    This type of accountability should first and foremost focus on roles and processes, instead of outcomes. Shipping a specific feature on time, or even expecting a specific business impact from a feature, is a downstream effect that we don’t always directly control. We do control the steps in the process, the working agreements, and how we show up day-to-day, and the continuous improvement of that process. Those are the things we should hold ourselves, each other, and our employees accountable to.

    What does that specifically look like for managers and individual contributors? Managers need to focus on clarity of goals and roles, and ICs need to focus on candid communication, and sharing the information they have through open feedback loops.

    As a manager, get very clear on your organizational and business goals. Organizationally, are you trying to increase overall employee performance? How do you articulate and measure that performance? Ship more volume of features? Have more customer & business impact, defined by some KPI? Ship on time? Be clear on what’s most important (and don’t say “everything”!) and articulate it clearly and repeat it over, and over, and over again.

    Equally as important is to understand the business goals – ideally, the entire cascade from vision, mission, purpose down to your 3-year, 1-year, and quarterly goals. Make it a habit to share those in exactly the same words at least in your quarterly All Staffs, ideally weekly in your department meeting. Then get even more specific on a project or feature level, what customer problem are we trying to solve? What are the business constraints that might drive schedule vs. quality tradeoffs? Context is critical here.

    Then we focus on clear definition of all the involved roles and working agreements. Most importantly, take a look at roles from the lens of the delivery process and be clear on ownership. For each step (ideation, planning, execution, ops, etc.), is it clear who has decision authority? Use a RACI (Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed) or RAPID (Recommend Agree Perform Input Decide) framework for each initiative to create as much clarity and transparency as possible, without which accountability to roles and processes is impossible.

    Lastly, one of my favorite tools as a leader to instill a sense of ownership and accountability are Working Agreements. This often forgotten tool gives the team the opportunity to discuss and decide together how they want to perform and deliver on their work. It should give everyone the opportunity to share how they do their best work and what they expect of others to be successful as a team. Working Agreements can focus on technical aspects of the work (we expect every PR to contain unit tests or if you break the build, fix it before wrapping up for the day) but should also include interpersonal aspects of the work (headphones on means do not disturb or specific agreements on Slack and email usage, how we talk to each other in standups and planning sessions, etc.).

    As a IC, first and foremost, do a self check – are you in the right role? Do you enjoy the work? Do you have the skills you need? Do you resonate with the team’s mission and the company’s overall vision and purpose? Those are important factors that will influence the sense of ownership you can have over your work, and will ultimately deeply impact your work performance (not to speak of your daily moods and general life satisfaction!). Ideally, you’re able to have candid, vulnerable conversations with your manager about these topics, but I realize that is not always the case. Life and career coaches, mentors, and friends and family can be great resources to help you talk and think through those complex topics and may lead you to decide your current work environment is not right for you to thrive.

    Learn to get clear on what you can own, and what you cannot own. Is your role clear, and do you feel the environment allows you to take ownership of particular systems, products, or projects? Speak up if the environment for ownership is lacking. This is a continuous process that happens at the meta level (organization, team, working agreements) and also specifically for each project or feature you work on. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Managers and executives are not perfect and all-knowing, and if there is a gap of expectations you should strive to speak up and address that. Educate yourself on what you can take ownership over and hold yourself (and let others hold you) accountable to, and what you cannot. In other words, create boundaries.

    Lastly, ICs in knowledge work have an incredible , unique perspective over managers that no other industry has to the degree we do. They have deep, expert knowledge of technologies and the systems that comprise the company’s products. It is your responsibility to share that knowledge to help make better decisions!

    What makes for accountable teams?

    • First, clarity on what we’re holding an individual or team accountable to, very specifically. That means, clarity of vision, mission, purpose, and specific business objectives, milestones, deliverables.
    • RACI/RAPID with clearly defined roles. Who is accountable to whom, what does each role get to decide vs. delegate. Clear definition of the authority that those roles and relationships imply. Clear definition of the team in terms of resource allocation – who’s part of the team, who’s not.
    • A collaborative discussion of what you’re committing to and at least some ability to co-define scope. Transparency and courageous engagement are critical to surface all the information needed to make healthy commitments.
    • Open channels of communication and feedback loops along the way, because no matter what you commit to, things change once you set sail.
    • Lastly, maturity to have rational, objective, psychologically safe conversations before the commitment and all along the way via those feedback loops.

    In the next essay, I will go deeper into additional requirements that will make the process of establishing ownership and accountability much more impactful, likely to succeed, and enjoyable for all!