Confrontations - Doing it the right way

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”

— Ronald Regan

As a recovering introverted nice guy, the thought of confrontation or conflict is really daunting. Whether it be with a direct report, a colleague, or my direct leader, just the thought of having to challenge someone in their performance, opinion, or quality of their outputs, is enough to raise my blood pressure and activate the feeling of butterflies in my stomach.

I’d play out multiple scenarios in my head weeks ahead of the confrontation. Even if it’s me needing to give feedback to someone on a job poorly done, I’d agonise over the situation, hoping that the person would come to their senses and recognise the poor outcome themselves, thereby making it easier for me. An alternate scenario is where I find myself having to tidy up the mess that was created, get really angry inside, and mentally visualise all the ways in which I’d let that person have a piece of my mind, direct and unfiltered.

Inevitably, when the confrontation occurs, none of the scenarios I’ve visualised and agonised over actually play out. In most cases, I maintain my professional and polite facade, focusing more on what to improve upon in the future. The person I’m speaking to never really gets a sense of how pissed off I am, or how wrong I think they are. The gravity of the situation that needs to be conveyed is almost always lessened due to my overarching desire to be nice, avoid an argument, and maintain a good relationship.

Ultimately, the person would repeat the error/behaviour, since the way I conveyed my displeasure was so indirect and tangential. When the error/behaviour repeats, I’d end up resenting the person since I now feel disrespected on top of being angry, not to mention having to tidy up their mess. As you can see, this is a downward spiral that is difficult to recover from. The spiral ends when I’ve exceeded my own tolerance and activate the formal performance management process to move the person out of the organisation.

However, there is a proper way to effectively confront someone in the first instance and not trigger the downward spiral. I’ve been practising it over the last six months at work with my direct reports, colleagues, and my leader. It’s not a miracle cure and there is still an element of discomfort in the conversation. But the level of discomfort is greatly reduced as you focus on the feeling, behaviour, and importantly impact.

Feeling - Behaviour - Impact (FBI)

“Effective confrontation with any other person requires these three things in any order: speaking to your feelings, how a specific behaviour of theirs affected that, and the impact that behaviour might have in the future.” - Simon Sinek

If you’ve attended any sort of management training, you’ve probably been taught how to confront someone effectively. These topics can take many forms, ranging from “effective communication” through to “effective confrontation”. I’m willing to bet that in any of these courses you’ve attended, the instructor almost always tells you to focus on the facts of the situation and focus on communicating how it made you feel. When I look back at the courses that I’ve attended in the past, including what I’ve learnt in my MBA degree, everything centred on this principle “… don’t judge the other person, focus on how they made you feel… “

However, as you can see from Simon Sinek’s simple framework of FBI, it’s clear that communicating how you felt is only part of the picture. There are two additional components needed in order to really drive the message home. Otherwise, you could just come across as a sensitive person. While in most cases, people will respond to that, they are mainly looking to avoid triggering your sensitivities rather than realise that something they did was actually done wrong.

Here’s why the three elements combined are so powerful:

Feelings: Most males run from this word, thanks mainly to the Hollywood interpretation of what it implies and how a male should behave in the workplace. However, recent leadership studies have found more and more, that effective leaders (male or female) are more willing to express their feelings AND importantly, not let these feelings take control of their behaviours. Why do effective leaders do this? Because leaders are human too, and the expression of feelings (without losing control) brings honesty and the sense that you are being genuine. It’s OK to acknowledge that you’ve been disappointed, or let down. It’s OK to convey that you feel miserable because a project isn’t going your way. It might actually help to rally the team around your cause and come up with a solution. So get familiar with you feelings, and practice expressing them. Don’t suppress your feelings. If you suppress your feelings, you’ll come across as robotic and non-genuine. Then when you finally “blow up” emotionally, it will appear irrational and people will lose respect for you.

Behaviours: This is one of the most important elements. You need to call out the specific action, event, or behaviour that you are wanting to confront. By doing so, you bring the focus onto the action/event, rather than create the potential for the confrontation to be seen as a judgement on the person. Remember, we’re not challenging the fact that someone has a different opinion (since this is the core to diversity and the value that it brings) but the way in which they went about communicating their difference of opinion. By being specific with the behaviour or event, it helps that person to know exactly what you’re talking about. Otherwise, it’ll quickly disintegrate into a generic conversation, that’s now spiked with emotions, and quickly becomes something very destructive like “… you ALWAYS do this …” followed by the response of “… what do you mean ALWAYS, I only did it once … “

Impact: This is the most important and often missing component from the standard management / leadership training courses. Traditionally, I was taught that I should articulate the behaviour and it’s impact on my feelings. When in fact, this third component should focus on the impact if the behaviour were to continue. This is important because it reinforces the focus on the behaviour and its implications and not focus on the person you are confronting. This removes their natural defensive posture and creates a situation where the two of you combine to jointly tackle the problem.

My personal example

I’ve been trying to uplift the performance of one of my Divisional Managers for a while. He’s not a bad guy. He wants to do better, he wants to be promoted, and he knows the technicalities of his job. These things have combined to stop me from putting him through performance management. I can see flashes of brilliance but they are few and far between. Unfortunately, his mindset is stuck in the 1980’s approach to leadership and his ego makes it difficult for him to see where he’s going wrong. Even when confronted with feedback from customers, he is defensive rather than seek for opportunities to improve.

Over the last six months, I’ve been applying the FBI approach to try and help him improve. Yes, I’ve had to overcome my natural annoyance of having to put so much time and effort into someone who on the surface doesn’t appear to want to change. However, I bit the bullet and challenged myself to give it a go. I specifically focused on his tendency in Board meetings (he thinks only the Board members’ opinions count - unless their feedback don’t agree to his) to make a point for the sake of being seen to be making a point even if it comes across as contradicting what I’ve just said. I can safely say that he doesn’t have the intent of deliberately contradicting what I’ve said as his boss but he’s just so focused on making a point, he doesn’t think about how it should be worded to support the point I’ve made.

So each time it happens, I know apply the FBI framework:

“In our Board meeting, when I spoke about Event X, and you raised Point Y, it makes me feel like you are deliberately trying to contradict what I’ve said. I worry that it makes us look splintered as a team and will dampen the impact of all future points (since the Board may think, does Divisional Management have an alternate view). If this continues, I will stop bringing you along to Board meetings.”

The first time I did this over the phone (thanks to COVID 19 and everybody working from home), there was just silence on the other end. When I pushed him to respond, he’d just give me one word answers. It was awkward and very discouraging. For about a week after, all of our conversations were short and awkward. But to my surprise, he setup a follow-up meeting two weeks later and wanted to continue the conversation as he recognised that I was genuinely trying to help him improve.

The journey is by now means over as I’ve can only see the first green shoots of action but not yet the outcome. However, it’s fair to say that had I not adopted the FBI framework, I’d likely have watered down the conversation and be heavily resenting myself and him. It is likely that as I write this blog, I would be kicking off the performance management process. The FBI approach is not a magic bullet and I may still end up taking him through performance management. But at least with the FBI approach, I know that I’ve given it a good genuine shot and have done my best to help him improve.

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