Nothing can throw your career off faster than how you deal or don’t deal with conflict. How you determine your mindset is the most critical focus point to ensuring you leverage conflict for its positive benefits and avoid exacerbating the negative.
One thing to keep in mind is that conflict, itself, is what helps us work through diverse viewpoints and find innovative solutions. However, without trust, that conflict has an undertone of fighting. That fight may show up passive aggressively but those involved in it know that it’s there and it breaks down any chance at an authentic resolution. So how do you set yourself up to avoid the fight and reap the rewards of productive conflict? You have to mind your mindset.
The three core mind-sets that we, as humans, tend to go to during times of conflict are the Safety Mindset, Looking Good Mindset and the Strategic and Helpful Mindset. We all slide along this continuum of mindsets at different times in our lives depending on how much we are coming from fear vs. optimism.
Safety Mindset is present when our job security feels threatened. It causes us to go into survival mode and we let our fear escalate. It doesn’t matter whether the threat is real or not. The thing that matters is we perceive ourselves as being under threat. I like to compare this to how we may see the world if we were drowning. Everything looks like a dangerous shark, even a lifeguard trying to help us.
When we’re in this mindset we show up as the worst version of ourselves. We’re defensive, territorial and respond with anger or extreme avoidance. Not exactly a recipe for success. The good news is we can pull ourselves out of this fear spiral but following these steps:
1. Pay attention to how you feel when thinking through this lens. What behaviors are your go-tos? What situations tend to be your Achilles’ heel? The more in tune you are with this, the easier it will be to kick into a more rationalizing approach to the situation.
2. Work your muscle of self-awareness. This isn’t such an easy thing to do when we’ve been emotionally triggered. That is, when we perceive a threat, we tend to react with our most rehearsed response instead of stepping back and thinking through the best approach. But if you can start to track when and how you get triggered, you can start to rehearse new responses.
3. Craft a safe story. Whatever you are telling yourself about the situation isn’t setting you up for showing up at your best. So change the story. Come up with a story that says you will figure this out and things will work in your favor. If you’re in safety mode you are definitely scaring yourself with stories about all the bad things that will occur based on what’s in front of you. The ability to shift to positive stories is a skill called self-soothing It’s critical to getting your mind to be calm and focused on solutions vs. obsessing over dangers.
Looking Good Mindset is harder to spot. As we move out of the safety mind-set, we’re still operating from a sense of fear. But it tends to stem less from a perceived threat to our job security and more from feeling a threat to our social acceptance. Being ostracized from our social circles or our team on the job is tied to our need to be protected by our modern-day tribe.
In this mindset we present as our best version as long as someone else doesn’t threaten how good we look to the powers that be. This could be someone performing poorly and hurting our ability to do the job or someone out-performing us and leaving us feeling inferior. When this is triggered in us we often resort to passive-aggressive behaviors. We may not respond out of spite or take credit for work that isn’t ours. We may brag about our abilities and belittle those of our perceived competitors. Either way, we lose respect from those that witness us in this mode, including ourselves.
How do we move out of the looking good mind-set?
1. Recognize your mindset. This is tougher than recognizing when we’re operating in the safety mind-set. The safety mind-set doesn’t tend to feel all that good. The dangerous thing about the looking good mind-set is when it’s working, it feels pretty awesome. This is why some bend over backward and beat others down to win favor from managers.
2. Stop overvaluing looking good. Though looking good and winning points with the boss feels awesome, it’s a short-range game. Vying for that little annual merit increase because the boss approves of you is a beggar’s strategy. Looking good takes a lot of energy. It’s exhausting and stressful. At any minute, we can fall from grace. Often, for us to look good, someone else has to look bad. The worst part: all this posturing rarely has anything to do with our actual purpose or the goals that really need our energy.
3. Recognize when a colleague is consumed with looking good. It’s not that hard, actually, because they often come across as self-serving ass kissers and ladder climbers. They tend to be good at managing up because they are obsessed with those in power thinking highly of them. The other side of that obsession is anyone without power or perceived influence is often ignored, discarded, or—worse—used. All this behavior can easily trigger us to come from a place of judgment. And that’s not good for anyone, because if we are busy judging them, we are less likely to act strategically or be effective. Instead, see these people’s fear, and have compassion for those who haven’t figured out who they are and what their authentic purpose is. As high as they may get from looking good to the “right people,” it is an exhausting and stressful game they are playing. It will only get them so far. This isn’t about excusing behavior. It’s about not allowing ourselves to get triggered by it.
Strategic and Helpful Mindset is where we show up as our best selves. Our minds are open, creative and willing to make decisions and take necessary risks. It’s when we are calm and focused on solutions instead of getting credit or saving our jobs that we are able to do really great work. We are able to align our own goals with those we chose to work with, even if they aren’t behaving the way we’d like them to.
How do we train ourselves to approach conflict from this mindset?
1. Practice being the thermostat vs. the thermometer. Staying in this mindset requires a great deal of self-esteem, confidence, optimism and empathy for others. This isn’t just about the greater good. It’s about knowing how to leverage our mind in a way to keeps us curious and creative vs. defensive and scared. This ensures we aren’t simply reacting to our environment, we are setting the temperature for others to match.
2. Speak to the greatness in others through the greatness in yourself. When focused on doing this you will almost always get better results. This is where creativity and synergy thrive. This is where innovation and strategic solutions are born.
3. Remember that relationships—both good and bad—will last longer than any work that is in front of you today. Focus on building long-term trust and credibility. It will reap far more benefits than simply pushing your way to meet a deadline.