Unwind Workplace Conflict: Discover Key Techniques for Conflict Resolution Success with Liz Kislik

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Make sure to check out the podcast notes for access to our exclusive 12-person mastermind. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the show. Welcome back to Grow Your Impact Income and Influence, the number one show helping you reach millions. Today, we are going to be talking about how you can unwind conflict in the workplace.

If you work in a place where you don't get along with your boss or your coworkers, or you know somebody who does, maybe they come home and they complain about work all the time, today's show is going to be for you. Alternatively, if you are an entrepreneur who is building a business and you're trying to figure out why your team always quits on you, why you're having a hard time hiring the right people, you're going to want to listen to this show. My guest today, Liz Kislik.

See, I got it. I got it. Liz has been doing this for a long time and she has helped numerous businesses overcome this. She has a TED Talk with more than a quarter million views or half a million? Half a million views. Liz, you don't just wake up one day and become great at handling conflict. How did you get here? It wasn't on purpose. I hate conflict, Steve. I would rather avoid it myself.

But if you have to get things done, sometimes you have to figure out either how to navigate it or how to end it. So it was by needing it that I started to observe which things seemed to work better and which things just made more. Okay. So tell me the story. Like there has to be a story. There's a moment somewhere where you like, oh my goodness, I just can't do this. And you had to figure it out. What's that story? Okay. I'll give you this one. So I was a young manager.

I was very young, responsible for too much. I ran a 300-person call center when I was 23. And I was in a meeting with other executives, and the meeting was getting out of hand. Tempers up, voices up, and I was afraid I was going to cry. That was no good. I had to get out of there. Didn't know what to do, did whatever came to mind. I said, I hear my mother calling me. And I got up and walked out. And this was pre-cell phone. So this was an odd, odd thing.

And I went to the restroom and I washed my face and I composed myself. And I came back. And it was so startling to people that they were actually waiting to see what my mother had to say. That I would know that she was calling me. And I explained that we had gotten out of hand and that we weren't accomplishing anything and we needed to refocus. And from that time on, anyone could invoke my mother. Nice. And it became code. That's like your safe word. Yes.

Okay. That's correct. All right, got it. So from that point forward, You obviously started getting better at communication. You started learning how to de-escalate situations, which I think is honestly, my girlfriend and I were talking about this yesterday. I think it is something that is needed in today's world more than ever outside of the workplace.

Even I think the workplace we have, she left an organization where management was in her terms absolutely horrible to go work at a place where she's actually getting paid slightly less but she has a much better work environment and that i think is key but then you also look at the world that we live in right now people seem to be much more interested in how i am different from you than how i am the same as you and at the end of the day we're all humans i don't want to steal your thunder, though.

I want to hear how you actually help people do this, because I don't say that my mom is calling. I just tend to get up and leave the conversation. So leaving is a way to get out. The question is whether it gets you more of what you want than staying in and coping. And part of the issue, Steve, is when we label something a conflict, but we've already decided we're fighting. There are loads of ways we disagree all day long, and we just kind of work it out, and we don't think too much about it.

We label differences, disagreements, confusions as conflict because we feel angry, we feel violated, we feel we want to fight. So, thinking about what is our real goal is where I'd like people to start. What are we actually trying to accomplish? Because usually people are fighting in service to something they believe or they want, sometimes even wanting the same thing.

And if you don't bring them back to that thing they want, say, for example, serving our customers better or operating more cost-effectively, if we don't come back to that and agree on the big picture, it is unbelievably easy to fight about the details.

Got it so what do you do you think most conflict in the workplace then is caused by a different like a miscommunication or a missing of hey we're on the same team or do you feel like it is sometimes one person has a drastically different goal like the business might have the goal of growing xyz right let's just pick a health and fitness business right it has the goal of growing the gym, but the manager's goal might be to have the hottest looking people work there,

or it might be, I want to be in total control. I'm a control freak and I want people to do what I say. Is that usually what causes the conflict? Is it that, or is it more of a misunderstanding or miscommunication? I'm going to give you a third thing. So much conflict is driven by unseen structures.

Ooh, I like it. Okay. So if that manager had received a fabulous orientation, an ongoing contact from the manager's superior about the mission, the values, how we work here, what we care about, then already everybody's on the same page more but if that structure doesn't exist you've got a problem or say that the manager's goal is to prevent accidents keep the place clean and reduce complaints but there is a salesperson whose goal is to get as many people in as quickly as possible.

May be over-promising. Well, those goals, those individual goals are in conflict. The structure for recognizing, compensating, working with those two individuals may actually pit them against each other.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, they're both showing up to work wanting to do what they think is right and feeling like they're constantly butting heads now i'm i have to like shine a flashlight on maybe there's that sounds like an idyllic situation right like of course they want the same thing but they're seeing something differently my experience in corporate i left corporate in 2013 so it might be a little bit dated at this point.

But when I was in corporate, it was much more like, Hey, these are my goals. I don't care what your goals are because it's a huge corporation, right? I worked, I won't say who I worked for, but it was a huge corporation. I mean, we had 20,000 employees. We had a ton of middle management and like, it was kind of the wild, wild West. So how do you, how do you correct that? If I'm a person, like, let's say I'm, I was a manager there.

I was a manager and the other managers could care less than I was a manager or what my goals were. How do you, how do you deescalate conflict there in a way that makes you a team player and sets good boundaries? Okay. So you've got to be working from two angles at the same time. The first one is still structural. The fact that you all couldn't care less about each other, that means the executive leadership or the ownership doesn't care.

They may think they do, but they have not thought through the logical conclusions of whatever they're setting in place, okay? They are actually encouraging you to work against each other by not shifting those cultural norms. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is more individual and interpersonal, and it has to do with the skillfulness with which we approach the conflict. And that's every individual in general.

And to go back to your other question, sometimes you have the kind of monkey wrench or fly in the ointment that is one person who's actually a jerk or actually manipulative or actually trying to set people against each other. And when you have that kind of person, it is the management's responsibility to do what you do in a business.

You coach them till they improve or you counsel them out yeah if they're that bad they either have to improve or they have to go and i'm saying that in a way that sounds harsh. This is a business why are we paying them money to damage the business doesn't make it, they're not helping the they're not ultimately helping the business reach their goals they might be i mean in my my memory of this was they were very good at hitting their numbers they were very good at like the very technical detail,

but they were so bad at everything else. Everybody hated to be around them.

So they, they cost money. Right. At the end of the day. So let's pivot this a little bit because this show is for entrepreneurs. If it's an entrepreneur looking to build an organization, most of the people here have small teams think somewhere between three and 10 people. How do they build the best culture for their business moving forward? Cause I think what happens a lot of times they start as one, this, this was my path. And I think it mirrors a lot.

You start as one person, then you hire somebody. they're not a good fit and you burn through a couple of people to find one person that is somehow a rock star and then there's two of you and then somehow you get to a team or three or four but it's like things are falling through the cracks things are kind of a mess how do you push all that aside and actually build a great culture my path i had just had to keep finding it became the interview

process and then it became daily meetings and aligned goals but i would love to hear your process because you know more than I do by far. So that really sounds terrible, what you just described. That's awful. Very painful, time-consuming, costly. So the first thing, this is so hard, is actually self-knowledge.

What do you need and who are you going to work with? Well, because of how you are, if you're the founder, you may do various kinds of practices and work on yourself to improve, and you should. And you still have to be aware of how you work and make sure you hire people who can take it and who you can respect. So the fact that you focused on interviewing, that's really important.

Part of interviewing when you are the founder or you're running a small operation like that is really being much clearer than you would think about what it's like to work here and what's really going to happen.

And let the majority of people self-select out if they are not going to be right, if it's not the environment they want, if it's not the pace they want, if it's not the specific tasks they want, if it's not the combination of hybrid or in-person, whatever it is, be so clear that they can make no mistake about what you meant. That's very important. And then, of course, you have to, I'm sure you've talked about behavioral interviewing at some point in your podcast.

You have to do that and listen for their stories. And where do your warning lights go off? Oh, that doesn't sound like I would want to deal with that. Because if you hire somebody because they have the technical capacity, but you can tell at the beginning that they're going to rub you the wrong way, you are only hurting yourself. It is better to stumble along without until you find the right person. I would agree with that. Do you like the disc? Do you like the Colby? Do you like any of those?

So I don't like any of those for hiring, actually, because anything that purports to be about personality and style, you can be a deep introvert and be an excellent salesperson. So the stereotypic things that tend to come up in those tests, a person who wants to do sales and is an introvert and can actually do it, I don't care that they're an introvert. I'd rather have their skills as those skills exist.

I like those things when you're working, those assessments, when you're working with groups because they give you a tool where you have common language and common definitions. And so then you can have crisper and more understandable conversations about what is actually going on. That totally makes sense. I like that. I do think there's some, I totally hear you with the introvert and like the introvert can be a great salesperson.

I have found DISC to be very helpful to understand people and to understand how their brain works in terms of how they assimilate information and how they act in their day. That's not to say that somebody can't be a great salesperson and have a different DISC profile. I would like to go back to the piece that you said about clear communication, because I think this is something entrepreneurs, this is how I showed up for years until somebody coached me out of it.

Entrepreneurs show up and they're like, I've got 900 tabs open in my brain. I'm working on 50 projects and I expect everybody around me to do the same thing. I expect them to think that way. And where both when I worked for the corporation and in my entrepreneurial journey, the warning sign is, well, I didn't understand what you said, or I did what I thought I heard you say you wanted done. And now we're fighting about it. That should signal to me that I was not being clear.

But where you see a lot of entrepreneurs fly off the handle is, I told you X, Y, Z, what do you mean? Why isn't it done? Right. How do you help coach people to be clearer and to have clearer communication?

Because at the heart of what you do, I think it really comes down to clear communication. That's a good point. And we will get right back to today's show. If you are looking for clarity in the sea of overwhelm that is out there when it comes to business, make sure to check out the show notes for our workshops, our webinars, and our exclusive 12-person mastermind. All right, let's go ahead and jump back into it. So I'm going to put a finer point on the way you describe that.

We expect mind reading and we expect matching. Right? So the mind reading is, yes, all the open tabs in the brain, and we're going a mile a minute, and we're only telling a tiny fraction of the story each time, because we know what we're doing. We know everybody knows what we want. So we think it's just natural that they'll get it. that's a complete lack of self-awareness. Right. And second is the matching. I'm fast and I'm sparky. I have lots of ideas, very innovative.

Okay. So that's how I think of myself. If I see somebody who's not fast, I think, well, I'm, I'm not saying somebody thinks this consciously, okay? But I think I'm fast and have millions of ideas. What's wrong with them? Why aren't they that way? As opposed to thinking this person is careful, this person is thorough, this person questions me when I need to be questioned to make sure they get the job done. We are looking for instinctive matching. It's actually not helpful.

So that's why we need the self-awareness more than anything and the ability to self-regulate so that we can pay attention to whether it's by disc or any other assessment or just observation. Situation, this is how my employee is. If I want good work from my employee, I have to go to where she is. If I just wait for her to get how I am, if people could operate that way, the divorce rate would be much lower. Well, you're touching on a couple things.

The first thing is this is the same communication tactic that makes relationships work well only in relationships it's more that person isn't trying to understand me or that person doesn't get me or and we actually put up i i lately i the dating scene right now people actually put up walls because it's more important for people to be different i'm different i'm not like that and they want to be different let's leave dating though, because I do think what you're,

what you are talking about has a lot of overlap. What I think drives this is people's ego. My girlfriend at her last job, the CEO slash founder had a monstrous ego and he wanted everyone around him to match and mirror him. Well, this is how I am. And you have to respond to me. And if you don't, you're in the wrong. And to your point, it's not about right and wrong. There is no right and wrong. It's this is how I am. That's how you are. How do we work together to make sure

that we're understood? Because at the end of the day, employees want to do a good job. I think you're actually making a point about pain and power. Oh, there we go. Because it just happens that that guy was the CEO, so he could treat people badly when they didn't match and mirror. He had the power to do it. Bad behavior is an expression of something that's unsettled in the person.

People who are grounded have good self-awareness have good brain practices compassion practices of any kind they're not horrible to other people i mean everybody may have a bad day or a crisis they're not horrible to people even when they have power power does make you more horrible that is a true thing i mean there's research that shows that it can power i think magnifies who the person is so if you if you maybe have some to your point character flaws

that maybe you haven't dealt with or things from your past wounds yeah they may not be you know that's good i like wounds it's going to magnify that i want to go back i want i want to stay on this point though of how. Because I don't, I want to leave the egomaniac out of it for a second. Okay, good.

And go to just the normal person. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially the ones that listen to this show that have three to five employees, they're like, I'm trying so hard, but isn't it my employees job to do what I tell them to? Isn't it their job to try to work? Like they're not doing it out of egomania and they're not doing it out of their, I don't believe they're horrible people. I believe that they believe I'm the boss. I'm telling people to do things. Why aren't they doing it? Good.

That normalizes it a lot. I think just as we've touched on, first of all, if you're not clear enough about what you want them to do, even if you think you have been, they actually can't. So that's one thing. The second thing is, what is it you actually want them to do? A very common situation is they never bring me any suggestions. They never have a solution to a problem. I have to spoon feed them. Okay, I hear this.

Most people have ideas. It's possible somebody else ruined them before they got to you in a prior job. But if they came to you and it sounded like they had ideas and suddenly you feel they're not having ideas, you got to look at what you did that told them it wasn't safe to share those ideas. And you may not have done anything that seemed very big to you.

It could actually be a bad facial expression when you were having a bad day and they just happened to be thinking really hard, trying really hard, and you cut them off because you were distracted by something else And they thought, I'm not telling him another thing. So how do you have that conversation? Because I think that I can think back to examples when I was in corporate. I can think back to examples of that in entrepreneurship. And I can think of examples of that in dating relationships.

So how do you fix that? How does, and I think it comes down to part of it is taking responsibility and saying, you know what, that's on me. But then how do you actually go about fixing it? All the theory in the world doesn't matter if you can't have the conversation. So the self-awareness, absolutely, you need that at a baseline. And then you could start in this circumstance by saying two magic words. I noticed. You know, I noticed you stopped commenting about these things.

Or in our Monday meetings when I ask who has input, you never say anything. And you used to say stuff. Can you tell me what's going on? Have I done anything to make you feel you should be shutting up? So you're opening it, tell me anything you want, and I'm putting it on me, because it might be on me. And if you do both those things, please tell me, and I know I may be responsible.

That creates a lot more room for somebody to gather up their guts and tell you the person who could fire them, that they actually have a beef. I think I'm going to add one third point. Oh, please. And it's that you have to be willing, regardless of what they say, because they are going to give you feedback. You cannot take it personally or get upset because if you ask, right, if you ask for, Hey, tell me where I did something wrong. And they tell you, and you're like, I didn't do anything wrong.

What are you talking about? I don't like immediately that's just going to crush them. But I think what you're saying is correct. I like the interest of, Please tell me more. Yes. Lean into it, right? And then you're talking about stage two, which is your reception of what they give you. You can't force yourself not to be upset. But again, you can notice that you're getting upset. A lot of this is physical. Learn your body's reactions. You know, some of us turn red, plench the jaw.

I know one guy, he would start tapping on the table. We all have those things. Notice that that's happening and you can say, oh, this is hard for me to hear. Totally legit. This is hard for me to hear. I realize I'm having a reaction. I'm calling it out because I don't want you to think you should stop talking. I am taking it in. Even if it's hard for me, it's important for me to hear it. And I appreciate it. That's great. keeps the dialogue going.

And then there's a stage after this conversation, if you want me to talk about that. Well, I think what I would like to kind of wrap this up with is take me on a journey from somebody who had a really hard time with some of the stuff that you were able to help and, now has course corrected. Because I think some people, I think the other story that I hear in my head that I think people would say is, well, that's just how I am. I'm busy. I've got a lot going on.

I don't know that I could actually make this change. I just want an employee who listens. And I think if you're saying that, one, you have to take ultimate responsibility because it is your business, not somebody else's. And two, you have to actually sit down and know that it's possible. I do believe it's possible. Anyone can. It is possible.

It is possible. I do want to say that for anybody who says, this is just the way I am, go stand on the corner and sing, I got to be me. But don't try to get other people to do what you want, because you will lose. You can frighten some for a short period of time. You can't sustain it for the long haul.

Okay. So for the person who wants to change, I'm thinking of a particular woman who is candid to a fault and expects that back, is tough-minded, didn't really have patience with people who were, you know, more mousy or whatever, and who often spoke in a somewhat harsh way. I just asked her to tell me what she was observing in her team. And she talked about the people who were unhappy and the ones who weren't working. And we identified the costs. Identify your costs. Let it freak you out.

How much is not getting accomplished? Or who left you for somebody else? Get freaked out and say, you know, might be financially worth it for me to see if I can adjust this.

Then commit to different behavior you don't need to hire somebody like me i mean it helps a lot but you don't need that you need a buddy you need somebody that you can say this is what i'm working on and i want you to help me and then you make your team your buddies and you tell them i've recognized that this is my pattern or habit and i know it's not great for you and i want to change, And so here's what I want you to do.

I want you to call it out or raise your hand, or you can have a code word. Anybody can invoke my mother if they want. I love that. So here's how you cue me. And maybe we'll have to stop the meeting. I can't promise that I'll be excellent right away because this is a lifetime of being this way. But I have confidence I can do better if you help me. Awesome. I love it. I think that is a great, great way to move forward. Liz, I know you have an e-book on your website as well as your TED Talk.

How can people find you if they're interested in learning more about this? Maybe they just want to take in some for themselves to see if this would be a good fit. How can people learn more about what you do? Thank you, Steve. If they go to my website, which is lizkislik.com, L-I-Z-K-I-S-L-I-K.com, they'll find that ebook. That will also get them my monthly newsletter.

I have years of blogs on there, articles for Forbes and Harvard Business Review, and I, There's just a ton of material about how to make it easier and better to work together at work. Awesome. If you guys want to check that out, it is listed in the show notes down below. You can find Liz's website.

We will also link your TED Talk. Liz, tell us just a little bit about what you covered in the TED Talk. Okay. So this was about why there's so much conflict at work and what you can do to fix it. And because of the limited time in that format, I focused on a handful of significant points, one of which was indeed pulling out the difficult person if there is a person who is the crux of the problem.

But that most of the time, it's the part of the iceberg below the water that is locking in place whatever the ookie communications are at the top. And that it takes real examination of that because often it is not just two people. It can be entire departments or functions that are at war with each other because it's unexamined and we're operating out of longstanding habits. And then how you find allies to accomplish what you want and how you move forward together.

And then you need a handful of communication techniques just like we've been talking about today although there are some different ones in the TEDx to make it easier to get your point across without poking a hole in anybody got it I love it well Liz thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us guys if you enjoyed the show make sure you check out the show notes And until next time, take action, change lives, make money.

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