You Knew You Were Right

On being right

Whenever we disagree with someone, nine times out of ten we are right and the other person wrong. What’s intriguing is that everyone else is also right 90 per cent of the time. Well, you don’t need a PhD in maths…

The truth is, we typically have confidence that our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting are, if not entirely correct, then at least of merit, even desirable.

When colleagues are wrong

Commonly, we struggle to get along with people who operate or see the world in different ways. Take, for example, three managers about to let some team members go.

Andrew wants to see the lay-offs over and done with, so everyone can go back to work. He has customers to call, and no time for pointless meetings.

His peer Joanne cares about risk and doing things the right way. She thinks Andrew is a cowboy. He insists she is a tiresome bureaucrat.

Meanwhile, Charlotte worries about how redundancies will affect employees and their families. She wants the company to find other ways to cut costs.

For Charlotte, Joanne’s bloated processes are why the firm needs to reduce headcount in the first place. Andrew is an idiot for not seeing how people who are worried about their jobs struggle to meet sales targets.

At the same time, Andrew and Joanne agree on at least one thing: that Charlotte is clueless when it comes to doing business. Why is she not off running a commune?

Conflicts get personal

Some disagreements emerge when people have different rational opinions or aesthetic preferences: what location makes sense for our new office? Which brand design will command attention?

But Andrew, Joanne, and Charlotte are experiencing another kind of conflict. They each see the other two as ‘difficult’ because they are caught in a clash of core values: the situation has become ‘personal’.

Even when discussing a (to many) familiar work question, such as how to manage lay-offs, people may experience not mere disagreement, but a sense that what they care about is disregarded by others.

Understand conflict

Our values or motives are formed early in our lives and have a bearing on who we are, what we think, and how we behave. They shape how we see and respond to people and situations, at home and in the workplace.

When individuals feel unable to act in line with their deeply held values, they experience the personal frustration clear in how Andrew, Joanne, and Charlotte are interacting. Conflict causes both inner distress and outward enmity.

Familiar to everyone in the workplace, such conflict harms relationships and slows productivity. It makes change an uphill struggle.

Conflict is likely when at stake are who benefits and the nature of outcomes or work. For a new office, the City or Canary Wharf may be less emotive than Luxembourg or South Sudan (GDP per capita of US$141,000 versus $251).

Creative ways forward

Interpersonal conflict dislodges people, performance, and outcomes. But it is possible to avoid such negative encounters; or, if they do occur, examine the role of motives and find creative ways for everyone to uphold their values.

Smooth relations make two demands of all parties: self-reflection and honest dialogue. We use the Strengths Deployment Inventory, or ‘SDI’, to help teams and individuals explore how motives shape their interactions with others.

The diagnostic does not give all the answers. But it does offer a simple vocabulary that we use to pose relevant questions, foster open communication, and bring clarity to actions at both individual and team levels.

Make dialogue easier

In the language of the SDI, we each have a blend of three ‘motives’, or core values: Performance, People, and Process.

🔴 – Individuals such as Andrew, whose dominant motive is Performance (denoted by the colour Red), seek to accomplish tasks and achieve results; they like to set goals and take decisive actions; they value rewards.

🔵 – Those motivated more by People (Blue) desire to help others; Charlotte directs her energy toward the protection, welfare, and growth of people she believes will benefit from her support.

🟢 – Process (Green) revolves around creating order and thinking things through; individuals such as Joanne seek to be practical and fair; they welcome structure and take time to deliberate.

⚫️ – No one is fully Red, Blue, or Green. We are each a blend of motives (the SDI reveals the weights). People motivated by flexibility sit in the Hub (Black), where Performance, People, and Process exert broadly equal influence.

We find workshop participants relate to this view of themselves and their colleagues. Often they say, ‘Yes, I see lots of Green in myself,’ or ‘It’s true, my boss over there really is very Red’. The vocabulary makes dialogue easier.

N.B. There is no right or wrong here: all motives are equally good. The vocabulary provides a constructive means to talk about differences.

Three stages of conflict

When our values are undermined, we pass through up to three stages of conflict.

In stage 1, we consider the other person, the problem, and ourselves. In stage 2, we see the problem and ourselves. Finally, in stage 3 we are aware only of ourselves.

To safeguard relationships, we must seek to resolve conflict at stage 1, where we still see colleagues’ needs. In stage 2, words we cannot retract may be bandied around. By stage 3, we are hurling printers at each other.

We typically respond to conflict in three ways, where we seek to:

– assert our view
– accommodate others
– analyse the situation

You likely know people who behave in these ways when they are under pressure. Responses may aggravate a conflict.

The point of all these ideas is to encourage awareness. A conversation about motives reveals what causes friction at work (and at home), the value of different people’s contributions, and ways to work together more easily.

Strengths, a brief footnote

The SDI also shows how we deploy a portfolio of 28 strengths at work (each associated with one of the motives or the Hub). How we use, and overuse, our strengths is a question for another day.