Two questions for you:
1. Do you have an initiative that you talk about as being really important to your business, but you are not making progress on it?
2. Have you been talking about it (without making progress) for a year or more?
If you can answer yes to these questions, you are not alone!
I see this stalled progress on key initiatives in my work with management teams all the time.
There are several things that stall progress, but one that occurs a lot is the human tendency to avoid conflict.
And it’s almost impossible for a team to make progress on something new, without raising, and working through some conflict.
Many teams opt for a false sense of agreement and pleasantness instead.
The problem becomes that to “maintain the peace”, you must avoid creating clarity about what you are really going to do.
You stay at the level of the high-level goal, and hoped-for outcome, but no concrete plan to actually do it.
Clarity is the secret sauce for execution.
You need to be comfortable with the fact that creating real clarity is going to expose disagreements. It’s going to expose gaps. It’s going to expose things that you need to deal with.
Once you get concrete about what you intend to do, when? how? what? who? where does the money come from? how will you measure success? and what are the consequences for not doing it? you’ll raise all kinds of opportunity for disagreement and conflict.
Once you get really clear, people will not agree.
But that’s the important part.
As I bring teams through this process of getting real clarity, taking the time to hear the opinions and debate, we reach a point where everyone can see what they need to do differently, specifically.
It becomes clear what everyone needs to do personally to achieve the big goal. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what is expected, and how they will be measured on what they do moving forward.
For example, If you just say, “we need to sell solutions at a higher level in our customer base”, everyone can feel happy, agree, and get along. People will just nod their head, smile…and nothing will happen.
As soon as you say, “but to do that means that we will take our top 5 reps, target them at these 5 strategic accounts, give the rest of their accounts to others and change their comp plan”, you are inviting conflict. But the good news is that you’ll know what you are actually going to do! So you can do it.
If you are not clear enough to cause and then work through conflict, I call this being fuzzy. Being fuzzy may be more comfortable in the moment, but it stalls progress because:
Here are some ideas for how to do create clarity and work though necessary conflict with your team:
First you need to be really clear about the desired outcome. What is expected?
Then:
But getting clarity on any one of these points opens the door to conflict.
You need to be comfortable with that and be ready to work through it.
For example one team I worked with had the goal to improve the quality of their products. Everyone agreed that the priority of the next product release was quality.
They thought they agreed, but then I asked the following kinds of questions:
Once we had this level of discussion (and conflict) we were able to create a real quality improvement plan with concrete tasks, owners, measures, and communications about it. Everyone know what to do and what to expect.
Another example to continue from above…another organization I worked with had the goal to sell higher up in organizations. They all agreed on that. But then we had the following discussion:
.
Again, once we had this level of discussion, they were able to come up with a concrete plan to make, measure, and communicate progress each quarter over the next year.
One of the most important things you can do as a leader is to remove uncertainty.
It can feel uncomfortable to be so clear that it raises conflict. Discussing the answer to all these kinds of questions out loud, with your team, opens the door to conflict, but that’s a good thing.
That is the only reliable way to move forward, and get out of the position of still talking about an initiative a year later, that you haven’t made progress on.
What do you think?
How do you create clarity and deal with conflict to make progress. Please share your experience in the comment box below.
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About Patty
Patty Azzarello is an executive, best-selling author, speaker and CEO/Business Advisor. She became the youngest general manager at HP at the age of 33, ran a billion dollar software business at 35 and became a CEO for the first time at 38 (all without turning into a self-centered, miserable jerk)
You can find Patty at www.AzzarelloGroup.com, follow her on twitter or facebook, or read her book RISE…3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, AND Liking Your Life.
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