Welcome to Part 2 of a three part series on Resilience.
Last week I covered Building Personal Resilience. I’ve gotten a flood of newsletter subscriptions since that email went out last Sunday. If you are one of the many who missed that, you can find it here.
Part 3 discusses building Collective Resilience. This is resilience within a Team, and could easily be applied to a family.
Part 2 Building Professional Resilience
I’ll introduce 5 frameworks that help me with resilience in the professional realm:
- Emotional Intelligence
- Conflict Resolution
- Negotiation
- Compartmentalization
- Bonus framework: Vision/Mission/Values. This doesn’t relate to resilience in my mind, but it does relate to the story.
I’ll share a story that ties these 5 Frameworks into a single conversation in a tense meeting.
Recall the First Principals – a definition from Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Resilience /ri-ˈzil-yən(t)s/, noun: 1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress (like a rubber band). 2: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.
When we’re working with other people, we are exposed to their emotions.
Private frustration and confusion often manifest in public as fear and anger. This is often caused, ironically, by not feeling like they cannot show their frustration or confusion leading to a more emotional outburst than revealing the underlying emotion.
This is what happened in this tense meeting.
The Meeting
I was invited to a large, quarterly meeting, with about 60 attendees. The meeting is co-chaired by three people from various collaborating organizations. Everybody in the room essentially works for them.
This meeting typically fields some of the most difficult problems that could not be solved in the previous 3 months by the team. The co-chairs are brought these problems with a small amount of context, and asked to make tough decisions.
I co-chaired a meeting like this for over 4 years. I know what it’s like.
The meeting had several tense moments. During each break I’d hear complaints over how the meeting was being facilitated by the co-chairs.
“It doesn’t have to be run this way. I don’t understand.”
Picture a large room with screens on one end for PowerPoint presentations. The head 15 attendees sit at 3 tables in the front of the room. The other 45 people sit in chairs all facing the screens. From the back of the room you’ll only see the back of people’s heads.
At one point, one co-chair singled me out to ask me a question about how I approach my job.
He wouldn’t look at me when he asked the question. He would only turn part way around towards my general direction, presumably so I could hear him better.
“Be very careful how you answer this question, Evan! There is only one correct answer!” he warned.
He was setting me up to make an example. It felt like a strange tactic.
I could feel my body tense up. It felt so strange to be set up like this. I wondered what the “one correct answer” might be, but couldn’t solve the riddle.
So I just answered truthfully. And my answer was wrong. He jumped down my throat, yelling about how wrong I was doing my job. In front of 60 people.
My heart started to pound. I could feel my face flush with anger. I was confused on how he thinks I should be performing my role, and whether or not my role should exist at all.
I wanted to yell back. But I didn’t.
Framework 1: Emotional Intelligence
Luckily, I have been here before. And those prior experiences and research allowed me to tap into Emotional Intelligence:
Step 1: Name the emotion
By recogniting the emotion, you can detatch yourself from it and observe it objectively.
Step 2: Query the emotion
Once you have identified the emotion, query it to understand the trigger and it’s underlying cause.
Breath! <– This is the magic that interrupts the automatic response
Step 3: Consciously choose your response
Consciously, not automatically, choose your response. The one that brings value to your relationship, your personal brand, your project, and your business.
In that moment, I felt a very strong emotional reaction. I felt targeted because the scenario he used was very specific to my job. I named it: confusion and anger.
I wanted to yell in anger. But I paused.
In that pause I recognized I wasn’t going to address the situation constructively in my anger. And I didn’t think he’d respond constructively in his. I gave a slightly grudging response of concurrence “OK” and let the meeting move on.
The anger subsided. The remaining emotions were confusion and curiosity of his intentions. The emotions are easier to be constructive in. Anger is not.
I approached him during a break to discuss the situation.
Framework 2: Conflict Resolution
I applied Fred Kofman’s framework for Conflict Resolution.
For a Conflict to exist, three conditions need to be present:
- A disagreement,
- Scarcity,
- A lack of agreed upon process to distribute the scarce resource.
Solve any 1 condition and the entire conflict is resolved.
So I ask myself, “What is the scarcity here?”
I realized the scarcity was information about intentions. I did not understand his intent. He did not understand my intent.
He and I are not adversaries, we are working on the same project. The project is one of the largest and most complicated projects in the world. Because of the breadth, it’s natural to have broadly differing perspectives. But we must have a shared intent.
So I flowed from a Conflict Resolution framework to a Negotiation framework.
Framework 3: Negotiation
Here is the Harvard framework for Negotiation.
- Know the six outcomes to any deal:
1.1 😊😢Win-Lose
1.2 😢😊Lose-Win
1.3 😢😢Lose-Lose
1.4 😊😊Win-Win
1.5 🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♂️No Deal
1.6 🤷🏼♀️🤷🏼♂️Compromise - Separate the other party from the issue, negotiate the issue.
- Determine the interests beyond the position.
- Generate multiple solutions that satisfy interests of all parties.
- Decide, and make it a win-win.
If the thing you are trying to obtain is a commodity, you would just buy it, you don’t need to negotiate.
But if you cannot buy it, you are negotiating.
If you need what the other person has, you have to make them your partner, not an adversary. You each need what the other has. So the outcome of a negotiation should always be Win-Win.
And in this case, the meeting chair and I are working on the same massive project – we are collaborating, even if we are disagreeing. So we have to get to Win-Win.
If you just argue positions, you’ll never make progress. To negotiate, you have to get to the interest beyond the position. And then find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties.
His stated position seemed to be that I was doing my job incorrectly. But there had to be an interest behind his position. And I was sure it’d be an interest that we shared.
Someone had to open the conversation, so I took the lead.
“Hello! Thank you for the exchange there, I thought that was valuable. I have a couple questions if now is a good time?”
This helped set him at ease. If I approached this with resentment, he would have responded in kind. I had tapped into Emotional Intelligence which gave me time to soften and open myself up to more information. I prepared this opening line – I wanted him to see I had softened, and to give him space to soften and open up. I also showed him respect – you don’t get to chair a meeting like this without having chops. I showed deference to his leadership position and curiosity for his perspective.
“Absolutely. What’s up?”
“I agree my role is critical and needs to be executed with care. You expressed some concern over how I operate. Can I understand more about the scenarios that are most concerning to you? And what outcomes you are trying to protect us from?”
When he described the intent beyond his position, I understood where he was coming from. His earlier objection sounded like he thought my role should be canceled. But his more thoughtful response brought nuance to his earlier objection and gave me parameters to operate within.
And I believed his parameters were valuable rails to operate within. I was already operating within them implicitly, and it was valuable enough to make it explicit. I let him know so.
We parted aligned, and more cohesive that we were before the meeting.
Framework 4: Vision/Mission/Values (Bonus)
This isn’t related directly to reslience in my mind. But, this framework allowed me to scale what I learned in this conversation to my team.
My team has a Vision/Mission/Values statement.
- Vision: Why we are here?
- Mission: What we do to serve the Vision
- Values: What we will not jeopardize to deliver
I told the co-chair I was already operating within the rails he established. But I had never written that down. It was worthy to make it explicit.
As I describe above, a team’s Values are the things we will not jeopardize to deliver. And so, I updated our Values statements to incorporate these parameters discussed with the co-chair in our sidebar.
My team and I revisit the Mission/Vision/Values in our own quarterly meeting to deepen our alignment and commitment to our shared purpose. I was able to tell this story so everyone understands the history of the updated Values.
And now everyone is aligned with this other leader. Everyone has now learned from this meeting in a way that would not have been possible without implementing the frameworks above.
Framework 5: Compartmentalization
Compartmentalization is about creating boundaries between different aspects of your life.
Compartmentalizing work and home helps you stop bringing work frustations to the dinner table. And in this case, I separated the person from the issue in the negotiation framework – this is a form of compartmentalization. I also didn’t bring any of the frustration home, only the resultant victory.
These meetings happen in different locations each quarter, and it’s often the first time we’ve seen many of these 60 people since the last meeting.
There is a “no-host social” at a bar. It’s an opportunity to deepen relationships and blow off some steam.
When I arrived to the social, the co-chair sought me out. He thanked me for seeking more information and we deepened our relationship.
We were very glad to see each other again three months later.
Wrap up.
We learn these frameworks one by one, but real life is not so linear. We rarely go Step 1, Step 2, Step 3. In my mind, these frameworks are connected together, and I am learning to flow between them which gets more and more fluid as I practice. This is all part of building reslience. I’ve folded like a cheap tent in many scenarios.
It’s a bit like learning to drive a car.
When we learn to drive a car, we learn these little vignettes. We learn how to use the brake. Then we learn how to use the accelerator. And the turn signals. And the horn. And the windsheild wipers. When we first drive, we’re choppy – the car lurches forward as we are saying in our minds “OK now use the brake. Oh – ok, time for the accelerator.”
But with practice this becomes more fluid.
Eventually we can take a turn, avoid a pothole and a pedestrian all while turning on the windshield wipers with the radio on.
Professional resilience is learning how to deal with these difficult situations. It takes time. It takes reflection. It takes practice.
As a reminder, in Part 1, I described resilience cannot be built without stress.
And tools to convert that stress into learning include rest and reflection.
I (try to) reflect on every day, and then every week, and then every month.
I’m writing this on Friday, the last day in May, and I’m reflecting on the end of this week and the end of this month today.
Some of the things I search for are: What went on this day/week/month? What was hard? What did I learn? What can I bring to bear in the next time? What were the hardest conversations I had? How did they go? How could I handle them differently next time?
And of course I use the After Action Review for major events. You can read more about AARs and download my free guide here.
I cannot trace back the actual events I reflected on to deliver this performance. But I can guarantee it did not happen overnight.
And I am not always this successful.
Nobody is always successful in employing these tools. We’ll talk about that more next week.
If you want to hear another example of using Negotation to mitigate Conflict, check out this video, also available in this article:
3 thoughts on “Building Professional Resilience”