Encouraging Psychological Safety through Conflict

In this episode of the Inclusive Growth Show, I was joined by Merry Brown, Workplace Conflict Restoration Consultant. Merry talked to me about how facilitating conversation around conflict encourages diversity and psychological safety.

To get us started, I asked Merry if she could tell us about the work she does as a Workplace Conflict Restoration Consultant.

‘I am a Workplace Mediator. When you have two or more parties that are locked in a conflict that they’re unable to solve, it’s always nice to bring somebody in from the outside who is there to help facilitate conversation. It allows for the parties to efficiently discuss what’s going on and make a plan to move forward.

I love this work. It’s magical what happens when people listen to one another and are heard. In conflict, we often result in making stories up about the other person, which eventually makes us think they’re unreasonable. It’s very hard to work with somebody that is unreasonable, so the mediation process is an opportunity to de-escalate what’s going on so we can find a path forward.

That’s why I call my work not just resolution, but restoration. Sometimes in a conflict we simply need to resolve it, but if we are in a prolonged relationship with somebody, we need more than that. For example, if I am in conflict with somebody at work and that gets solved in a win-lose, and we show up to work on Monday, we have both lost because now we’re supposed to work together. We haven’t worked on the relationship dynamic, so we can’t effectively collaborate as a team. All we want is belonging and psychological safety.

When somebody comes to mediation, it often means that something has gone terribly wrong and there’s a big problem. It’s usually something that’s been going on for months, a year or longer. If people had the training, empowerment and organisational structure in place so that everybody is expected to deal with their conflicts when they first arise, then many of the escalated situations wouldn’t have occurred.

For example, if immediately after I was talked over at a meeting, I saw somebody roll their eyes at me, or somebody took something out of the fridge that was mine and I said, “Hey, I noticed this. Tell me what’s going on.” It would encourage dialogue.

To help address the issues addressing conflict, I pivoted into transformational culture work, which I refer to as being preventative healthcare. We ensure conditions that will empower every individual in the organisation to allow for conflict to be addressed early, often, swiftly and justly. Let’s empower management at every level to be able to see what is going on and to act appropriately so conflicts don’t escalate.

I go into organisations and help them create an environment that is best for them. Healthy work environments arise through intentional sustained effort. I do a lot of training on how to initiate a difficult conversation.’

I really like what Merry is saying about empowering individuals to manage conflict. Currently, I am reading Radical Candor and I’m learning it is about the ability to, with care, challenge one another.

I endorse Merry’s point about empowerment as it relates to Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He explains that once you have openness and candor by building trust and resolving conflict within an organisation, it’s then up to the team to commit to holding each other accountable and focusing on results. That’s the pinnacle of a high performing team. You can’t achieve that focus on results if you don’t manage conflict well.

Merry agreed, adding ‘When I was reading the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, it made me a little bit uncomfortable because of the push in it. We’re in a work environment, what are we going to be requiring of people? Though this is the rub, if we want a high performing team, we need to be honest.

A Radical Candor is not rudeness, brashness or bullying. It’s the opposite. The radicalness is the courage to actually talk about the elephant in the room, the courage to not participate in magical thinking. I think also the courage to embody the vision of the organisation. If you have a great vision, it’s going to take and require something of you. That means being a part of a team.

Within the culture that I’m a part of in the United States, many of the people aren’t team players. The culture is very individualistic, “How do I get ahead?” That’s the paradox. I actually get ahead individually at work and in my society when other people get ahead. When we work together, it benefits everybody.

I wanted to know more about how Merry got into this space.

‘My career began a couple of decades ago teaching philosophy, which I love. In my work as a philosopher, I always think, “What are my students going to remember about the content?” They might remember Plato’s Cave, or they might remember some interesting tidbits about being a brain in a vat or something like that.

What I want the most is for a development of critical thinking skills, “What is this argument? Why is it good? Why is it bad? Why does it resonate with me? How do I articulate my point of view? How do I listen to somebody else’s point of view and engage in a dialogue?” This is the Socratic method back and forth. It’s not arguing, it’s a conversation, a dialogue which requires both the parties to be able to listen and respond. A dialectical approach. I’ve always understood my work as a philosopher being this critical thinking skill piece. I’ve always been very interested in civility in culture because without civility, we don’t have conversation.

In 2018, I became a Rule 31 Mediator in the state of Tennessee. Every state has a different mediation if you’re going to be working with the court system. I wanted to teach during the school year and in the summer do some of my mediation work because I’ve always been interested in helping people come together. It didn’t work out that way because I have three kids and if you teach, you still do things in the summer. After 5 years of thinking about a transition, mid pandemic, I decided to.

I really love philosophy and teaching, I was always a lecturer, but I don’t have a PhD in philosophy. I’m married to somebody who does have a PhD and he’s a Tenure Track Philosopher at our local university. There’s a very strict hierarchy in universities. Although everybody was very nice to me at this place that I worked at for 18 years, I was never a voting member because of my status.

That no longer became acceptable to me. I wanted to be able to participate in a real way in the organisation that I was in. I knew that wasn’t going to happen here, so I questioned myself, “What am I going to do next? I live in a small town, I’m not moving.”

There are options for out of work philosophers and what I wanted to do specifically was Workplace Mediation. In that work, I wanted something even more, which is preventative. I want to prevent people from coming to mediation or litigation. I want to be a part of the solution of bringing about healthy work environments.’

I like the preventative approach Merry has mentioned because whenever I talk to heads of HR about inclusivity and they are dealing with, an employment tribunal for example, it’s a situation that you simply don’t want to be in because it’s so soul destroying for everybody involved. It can be really damaging to your brand. It can cost you a lot of money. It’s important that when it comes to creating inclusive work cultures, you focus on the preventative measures that you can take and be proactive because you don’t want to end up in a tribunal or a mediation situation.

I asked Merry, ‘When it does come to the training that you do within organisations, what is your main focus?’

‘My main focus anywhere I go is my mantra, “Conflict is normal and expected, let’s deal with it.” You are going to experience conflict. You have experienced conflict, you may be in it right now and I will guarantee you, you will have it in the future. Conflict is normal. It happens internally within us. We are conflicted. “Should I do this, or should I do that? I want a clean house, but I don’t want to get off the couch.”

We have all of these internal conflicts, and we are going to have conflicts at work. If we are serious about diversity, we should expect that we are going to have more conflict. Conflict is not bad and it’s not the problem. Conflict is good, we want healthy conflict.

You are not doing your job if you’re not speaking up. If you hear something that you don’t think has the right perspective, all the information, or you know why something may not work, your job is to speak up. Bring that information forward at the right time and in the right way. That is good conflict.

The first thing I want to do is let everybody know that we’re going to have conflict. In fact, we should want conflict because that means we are bringing a diversity of opinions and of voices. It encourages psychological safety because people feel like they can speak up without fear of retribution. This is good.

The problem is unmanaged conflict, that is what I try to get across. Anytime I get an opportunity to speak on any kind of training that I do, I say it over and over again because I want people to hear it. It’s normal. That doesn’t make it easy. If it’s a conflict for you, if it’s a difficult conversation for you, then it is difficult. That’s fine. We can do hard things. This is just another part of your job. It is psychologically hard, but you can do it. Your organisation is expecting you to do it. Let’s learn those tips and give you that training and continued support.’

I think it’s important how Merry has distinguished between internal and external conflicts. I talk to a lot of senior leaders who have this internal conflict of, “I don’t know how to say something because I’m worried about causing offense or embarrassing somebody, or making myself look like I don’t know what I’m talking about. I should be seen to know what I’m doing or what I’m talking about because of my position and seniority in the organisation.”

We know that with diverse teams, we have increased conflict because we have people coming from different walks of life, lived experiences, perspectives, and personalities. That diversity of difference naturally brings conflict with it. We also know that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams when they’re managed well. It’s a difficult job as a manager because you’ve got to get the balance right when managing conflict in order to have a high performing team.

My next question for Merry was, ‘Could you share some examples of how resolving conflict has improved some situations within the workplaces or clients that you’ve worked with?’

‘One thing I’ve noticed is the setting of expectations. In whatever team you have, you automatically have some diversity. Not everybody has the same background experiences. It’s good for everybody. The setting of expectation, ‘What does it mean to disagree here? How do we disagree well? What does that look like? What are some concrete examples of what we expect our meetings to look like? What is too far? What is not far enough? What will happen if somebody crosses boundaries? How will we address that? How will people know?’ This takes willingness to have a conversation and initiation of dialogue to set expectations.

I wrote a book called How to Be Unprofessional at Work: Tips to Ensure Failure. It’s 80 tips of what not to do at work. I’ve been contacted by a variety of organisations who have been taking a tip a week because it opens up dialogue about low stakes issues. That means they’re talking about work culture.

For example, one tip is to lie. Clearly, we know that’s unprofessional. So, what should we do instead? Why do people lie? They lie because they don’t want the consequences of their actions They lie for a variety of reasons. It’s fear. If we don’t want people lying, what should we be doing instead and why? How are we going to handle mistakes here? How do we view honesty, integrity and trust? How do we achieve that?

It’s the day-to-day mechanics of having conversations, but also setting and resetting expectations. I’ve found in the organisations that I’ve worked with that success comes from working through the process. As soon as somebody is sitting in my office or I’m talking with them, their organisation is already changing because they’re changing. They are no longer okay with the status quo.

Conflict resolution is never about me. It’s about the practitioners, the everyday person, the manager who is now going to say, “We’re not doing that anymore. We’re doing something new.” It’s a mind switch. Is this 180 a way of moving from a disempowered state? Even as the leader of the organisation, they don’t know what to do with these big personalities. They don’t know what to do with this drama.

Change comes through embodying, doing and seeing. Now you are setting an example and you’re not taking the gossip. In fact, you are redirecting and noticing the good. It is very simple and it’s in the every day in which I see these changes.’

I like the practicality of Merry’s point and how an organisation has taken Merry’s book to talk about how not to do it a week and have that as a discussion.

The people that typically listen to this podcast are heads of HR or they’re diversity and inclusion leaders. I was curious as to what specific advice Merry would give them about managing conflict well within their organisation.

Merry responded, ‘I love this question and I love HR professionals. I feel like they get a bad rap because they deal with all the explosions that have occurred. People come to HR when they need disciplinary action. What is the HR professional supposed to do?

The first thing I would say is, have a conflict management system. Be proactive. Hire an Ombudsperson. Somebody who specifically is in your organisation, that does something different to HR. An Ombudsperson is somebody there who will listen and maintain confidentiality. It’s not an official reporting but they’re able to help direct you to the resources in your organisation and to brainstorm ideas that empower you, so that you can make the changes necessary. The Ombudsperson will report the trends in the organisation to the CEO, or the president, which will allow them to make the structural changes required.

I would ask anybody in this space, “What is your plan?” Not, “What is your disciplinary plan when something has gone wrong?” That makes this us versus them. If we want an inclusive organisation, then what can we do when somebody has a gap in behaviour or performance? All of us, at times, don’t do our best work. Sometimes we have bad days. How can organisations plan to treat people well from pre-hire to retire, or fire? How do we treat people well when there’s a conflict? What is the individual person supposed to do?

I would ask people working in HR, “What is the system? What is the continual training and support that you are giving your employees?” People need a place or a person to go to. A person to talk with off the record who can help them think about what their alternatives are and what they want to do at this time in their life. Have a plan.’

I thought that was brilliant advice from Merry. My final question for Merry was, ‘What does inclusive growth mean to you and how might that link to the work that you do around conflict restoration?’

Merry replied, ‘To me, growth denotes a realism that we need to be moving forward. “This is the goal, and this is what we want,” but how do we realistically reach our goal? Look for those wins and continually work towards being better tomorrow than you were today. I love that imagery.

It makes me think about John Rawls, a Political Philosopher. He talks about the Veil of Ignorance. He states in order to set up a society, we need to put ourselves in the original position behind the veil. This means you don’t know who you’re going to be in society. You don’t know if you’re going to be rich or poor and you don’t know how your body and mind are going to work. You don’t know what your desires are going to be. You know none of this. You could be anybody in society.

I love that thought experiment of thinking about universal design and thinking society is for everybody, every single member. It’s not just for the haves and the have nots. If we really believe that, then how are we going to move forward?

To me, inclusive growth is really thinking about other’s thoughts. For example, I know that I won’t need a wheelchair ramp, but I do know that other people need it. If we’re retrofitting a building for a restaurant, do I really need to put in a bathroom that will accommodate everybody there? Yes. Think about the other.

That plays into conflict management because conflict shuts us down when we think it’s all about us, our pain and how we’re managing it. Actual conversation and dialogue is interested in others. In society, if we think about best practices, organisations and society at large, it’s me and you together, reciprocal altruism. It isn’t just about me, and it isn’t just about you. It’s partnering together.’

To get in touch with Merry Brown, she recommends reaching out through her website, Third Party Workplace Conflict Restoration Services. Alternatively, visit her LinkedIn where she’d love to talk to you and see if there’s any resources she could share.

If you need any support to develop your organisation’s inclusive culture, then feel free to reach out to Toby and his team. The best place to start is either through their website at mildon.co.uk or just drop the team a line on LinkedIn.