Coaching Through Conflict

As a leader coach, I specialize in working with successful people who have hit a bump in the road and want to grow. My primary goal is to help them overcome that obstacle by clarifying their goals and helping them find effective ways to achieve them. By doing so, I aim to empower them to lead their careers with more ease and confidence.

Earlier this year, I got to coach a qualified and dynamic leader. I will call her May for confidentially. May was stepping into a new role as a VP. She is smart, she works fast, and she has vision. She immediately saw several powerful areas for improvement and started to reorganize her team. Her vision was excellent and as you can imagine, she met resistance, primarily from a valuable direct report, Teri. May came to me to work through this resistance because Teri was key to the success of the change.

In the initial sessions, we uncovered that a primary challenge was personality and communication. May is a direct communicator who does not soften her language, and Teri tends to be methodical and conflict-avoidant. Teri felt affronted by May’s direct conversation style, so the more May approached her, the more Teri withdrew into her shell. Instead of facing her head on, Teri would avoid May, she would work on irrelevant tasks, or spend days deliberating over simple decisions.

What is the best approach for May to use? Coaching is about asking questions and letting the person being coached find their best answers. I asked questions like: “What is the ideal outcome of this change?”  “What are your ideas to help Teri understand the change?”  “What may be holding her back?”

When I asked, “What advice would you give a colleague in the same situation?” a light bulb went on for May. She remembered a former boss, Wallace, who had a similar situation and how he handled it. Wallace realized that the problem was with him. He, like May, was dominant and appeared to some as overbearing. Because of this, his team withdrew from him. To solve for this, Wallace worked on softening his communication, slowing down, and showing up with curiosity.

May used this as a model and she began to work on softer language grounded in curiosity. She began to seek to understand Teri instead of just being annoyed.

As with all of my coaching calls, May had work to do between our calls. Each week, she worked on changing her tone and her language to meet Teri. She agreed to track how many times she showed up with curiosity, to seek to understand Teri. As she did this, she started to build trust with Teri and uncover Teri’s fears and perspective around the change. She learned some valuable insights from Teri’s experience at the company and made changes to her plan. As a result, the plan was better.

After six months, Teri is on board with the change and they are working well together. May still needs to be aware of her language and dominant style. She still tends to want to just get it done as quicky as possible, and she is learning how to lead others while maintaining momentum.

It has been an honor to work with May. She could have just fired Teri, but she needed Teri on the team. May could have continued with her dominant ways, but this could have adversely affected the culture. Instead, she courageously looked at herself and asked, “What can I control”?  She did the work to change her approach, and I am confident that this skillset will set her up for the rest of her leadership career.