First on your preparation list for dealing with conflict should be to consider whether you are dealing with a process problem or a content problem. For example, a CEO and his chief financial officer came to us complaining about their long-running battles. The CFO—younger and female—liked to debate the finer points of every financial statement and quarrel about how things should be reported. She relished arguments and details. The CEO often reacted quickly and intensely to her. He didn’t have time for all those details, he told us. He just wanted her to handle their problems.
She carped that he didn’t take her seriously. They both whined that the other drove him/her nuts. The CEO said the CFO never gave up and always had to be right. “She tells me what to do,” he complained. The CFO said the CEO treated her as if she had nothing valid to say. “He won’t listen to me and avoids our meetings,” was her rebuttal.
We got the picture and while we were used to hearing about the standard CEO/CFO tensions, this conflict was all about process and style–the way they handled issues. We worked out a plan with the two of them: they agreed to specific times and time limits during which they would discuss the company’s financial matters and came up with a specific agenda about what the CEO did and did not want to discuss.
When they came back for a follow-up session with us, they agreed that they had a much more peaceful month. In the car coming to our offices, however, an argument had erupted.
The CEO had been musing about a recent meeting they’d had with the board of directors and some things he felt he hadn’t done as well as he should have. He just wanted to ventilate and have a sympathetic ear. The CFO jumped at the chance to critique his performance and inform him of all the ways she believed he hadn’t presented her numbers as well as he could have and all the details they should have included. They were off to the races and the conflict spiraled downward from there.
Of course, the argument started all over again in our offices. We let them fuss for a while so we could observe their process. We finally stopped them and reminded them they had agreed to work on not always thinking it’s the other’s fault–our project for the week. “What were you each doing wrong in the argument?” we asked them, shifting our attention from an argument over the facts to a discussion about process.
After we persisted for a while, the CEO admitted he had overreacted, yelled, and been too caught up in countering the CFO’s argumentative points. The CFO admitted that she was telling him what to do rather than asking what, if any, feedback he wanted, and that she had been judging him as well as been
overly critical. Then she added, “And I have another point to make …,” and she started up again about how he had misrepresented her numbers at the board meeting.
This was a great chance for us to point out that their respective views of the CEO presentation was the content (a fleeing, resolvable topic), and we were not trying to resolve the content or we would have to convene every day for every new issue. We were not judges charged with determining right and wrong,
fault or blame. We had agreed to work on what was really bothering the executive team: the habitual dysfunctional process.
Once the two finally begin to consider what they were doing wrong, they did a pretty good job of self-criticizing. The lesson didn’t take hold immediately, but over time they learned and improved.
