“Technology and social media have really changed our industry because residents have access to so much more information – and the ability to rapidly share that information throughout the community. This is a good thing for communities – it keeps us all on our toes.”
–Lisa Cox, CMCA, AMS, LSM, PCAM, Community Manager, Sienna Plantation Associations
by Liane Davey
I recently stood in front of an executive team, allowing their unproductive to-ing and fro-ing to continue a little longer. It was a gold mine of examples I could use to teach them how not to have conflict. Within 10 minutes, they’d managed to take a routine issue and turn it into an all-out row, with yelling and swearing and more than a few hurt feelings and bruised egos. What they had failed to do was get to the root of the problem and get aligned around what they were going to do about it.
This type of situation is all too common on teams. Although productive conflict is a hallmark of high-performing teams, many teams struggle to communicate dissenting opinions without triggering resistance and defensiveness. They fall into unproductive conflict by invalidating one another as they argue. Do any of the following sound familiar? After someone speaks, you make no reference to what she said, instead jumping straight to your counterargument (or going off on a complete tangent). Your points become more polarized as the conversation goes back and forth. Maybe you question your coworker’s motives or his relevance, competence, preparation. Or you use a passive-aggressive approach, turning your body away from the person and toward all the other people in the room. Each of those behaviors sends the signal that you don’t value what your coworker has to say. You are invalidating him.
It may be difficult in the moment, but if you can validate your teammate’s perspective, expertise, and feelings, you will keep the conflict focused on the issue, avoiding the pitched battle that comes when you intentionally or inadvertently invalidate someone.
When you’re in the middle of conflict, how you can validate the person you’re trying to discredit is probably the last thing you’re thinking about. Rather, you’re likely sending strong signals that you don’t value the person. You’re not modeling openness and curiosity; you’re retrenching and focused on proving that you’re right.
There are many reasons why this happens. First, in service of our jam-packed agendas and back-to-back meetings, we often rush conflict. The more rushed we are, the more directly we get to our point and the less likely we are to use time to reiterate someone else’s perspective. Second, we’ve created organizational cultures focused on producing results, and along the way we’ve devalued empathy. We reinforce people who drive projects through (even when they drive them through other people). Third, we feel exposed in the face of opposing perspectives. As we worry about the merits of our arguments, we find it safer to shut down the debate than to leave room for a dissenting opinion. Finally, we’re human, and we still strive to be understood before seeking to understand, even 27 years after Steven Covey warned us about doing exactly that.
Notice that I didn’t include more sinister motives among the reasons for invalidating your coworkers in conflict. It’s not that everyone has good intentions; it’s that the vast majority of people do. The most likely reason you invalidate your coworker’s perspective is because you don’t want her to slow you down or to show you up, not because you’re trying to take her down.
So how do you approach a conflict by validating rather than invalidating?
Validating someone you’re having an argument with simply means giving credence to the debate and to the debater. Rather than negating the other person’s perspective, you accept two things: 1) it’s valuable to hear different perspectives and to ensure the team is thinking an issue through fully, and 2) the person you’re arguing with is adding value by presenting a unique point of view.
The minute you accept that the conflict is productive and that the person you’re in conflict with is worthy, the nature of the conflict will immediately change for the better. The tone will improve as the conflict becomes centered on the ideas rather than the individuals who are presenting them.
Small changes in the language you use will demonstrate that you value the other person and her perspectives. Try using one or more of the following in your next conflict:
“I think this is a really important issue that we need to talk through openly.”
“Thanks for raising this issue. I’m uncomfortable with where we’re heading and would feel better if we could talk it through as a team.”
“I think it took guts to put that on the table. I respect that.”
“You come at this from a very different perspective than I do, so it’s natural that we see it differently.”
You can also validate someone by repeating back to them what you heard them say:
“From your perspective, this is about ____.”
“What you want us to factor into the plan is ____.”
“What I heard you say is ____; is that accurate?”
The important thing is that your words and body language demonstrate that you value the conflict and the person involved. That doesn’t mean you agree with his point. It does mean that you’re listening and adapting what you think based on his contribution.
The next stage is to pivot the conversation to introduce your perspective. Any of the above options makes redirecting easy:
“I think this is a really important issue that we need to talk through openly. Here’s how I’m thinking about it…”
“Thanks for raising this issue, because I’m uncomfortable with where we’re heading. My discomfort stems from…”
“I think it took guts to put that on the table. I respect that, so let me reci
procate. Here’s what I’ve been thinking but not saying…”
“You come at this from a very different perspective than I do, so it’s natural that we see it differently. My perspective is based on…”
“From your perspective, this is about ___. For me, it’s more about ___.”
“What you want us to factor into the plan is ____. I don’t see it that way. I think ____. That might be because I…”
“What I heard you say is____; is that accurate? Now I want to make sure you’ve understood my perspective so we can work toward a solution.”
If you go first in validating the importance of the debate and the value of the person you’re debating with, you will reduce defensiveness, keep things issue-focused, and greatly increase the speed with which you get to a mutually agreeable solution. Give it a try in your next argument.
Liane Davey is the cofounder of 3COze Inc. She is the author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and a coauthor of Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on Twitter at @LianeDavey.
So much of the news we read about community associations is negative. We’re always looking to report on and share good news from associations. We know common interest communities are wonderful places to live and people love living there. I know you’ve got a story to share! Did you host a charity fundraiser? Did you have coffee with the local cops? Are you planning a community event this summer? Let us know so we can spread the word about how you’re doing good in the community. Email us at info@camicb.org or share a story in the comments! Brag a little! We want to hear it.
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“The way we communicate with each other and the accessibility homeowners and Board members expect has increased dramatically over the last few years. Now, more than ever, people want and need more communication and they want it the way they want it. This means managers must be flexible with how they communicate with their stakeholders.”
–John Hammersmith, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, Hammersmith Management, Inc.
by Nicholas Petrie
Pressure Doesn’t Have to Turn into Stress
When I was in my late twenties, I was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Doctors operated and told me to hope for the best. I returned to Japan, where I was working, and tried to forget about it. The tumors returned a year later, this time in my liver. After a long search, the surgeons found a new procedure to remove them, but I knew this was, again, perhaps only a temporary fix. I was a mess for the next six months. The hardest part of my illness was my constant anxiety about it coming back.
Then I met a man who changed my outlook. Dr. Derek Roger had spent 30 years researching why some people in difficult situations become overwhelmed, while others persevere. He taught me everything he’d learned, and as I started applying it, my anxiety subsided, even though my situation didn’t change. In fact, the cancer came back about five years ago and remains relatively stable in my liver. But I no longer worry about it. Derek became my mentor, and over the past 10 years we have trained thousands of leaders to overcome their stress.
The process starts with understanding that stress is caused not by other people or external events, but by your reactions to them. In the workplace, many people blame their high anxiety levels on a boss, job, deadlines, or competing commitments for their time. But peers who face the same challenges do so without stress. Derek and I often meet executives who have high levels of pressure but low levels of stress, and vice versa.
Pressure is not stress. But the former is converted to the latter when you add one ingredient: rumination, the tendency to keep rethinking past or future events, while attaching negative emotion to those thoughts. Of course, leaders must practice reflection — planning for the future or reviewing past lessons — but this is an analytical, short-term process, with positive fallout. Rumination is ongoing and destructive, diminishing your health, productivity, and well-being. Chronic worriers show increased incidence of coronary problems and suppressed immune functioning. Dwelling on the past or the future also takes us away from the present, rendering us unable to complete the work currently on our plates. If you ask ruminators how they are feeling, none will say “happy.” Most feel miserable.
To break this stress-inducing habit, Derek and I recommend four steps:
Wake up. People spend most of their day in a state called “waking sleep.” This is when you pull into the office parking lot but can’t remember the drive there, or when someone in a meeting asks for your opinion but you’ve missed the last few minutes of conversation. Since all rumination happens during this state, the first step is to break out of it. You can do this physically: Stand or sit up, clap your hands, and move your body. Or you can do it mentally: Connect with your senses by noticing what you can hear, see, smell, taste, and feel. The idea is to reconnect with the world.
Control your attention. When you ruminate, your attention gets caught in an unproductive loop, like a hamster on a wheel. You need to redirect yourself to areas in which you can take useful action. Here’s one exercise we encourage executives to use: Draw a circle on a page, and write down all of the things you can control or influence inside it and all of things you cannot outside if it. Remind yourself that you can care about externalities — your work, your team, your family — without worrying about them.
Put things in perspective. Ruminators tend to catastrophize, but resilient leaders keep things in perspective for themselves and their teams. We tell people to try three techniques: contrasting (comparing a past stress to the current one, i.e., a major illness versus a missed sale), questioning (asking yourself “How much will this matter in three years’ time?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?” and “How would I survive it?”) and reframing (looking at your challenge from a new angle: “What’s an opportunity in this situation I haven’t yet seen?” or even “What’s funny about this situation?”)
Let go. The final step is often the hardest. If it was easy to let it go, we would have done it already. We find that three techniques help. The first is acceptance: Acknowledge that whether you like the situation or not, it is the way it is. The second is learning the lesson. Your brain will review events until it feels you’ve gained something from them, so ask yourself, “What have I learned from this experience?” The third is action. Sometimes the real solution is not to relax, but to do something about your situation. Ask yourself, “What action is required here?
While struggling with cancer, it took me a couple of years to train myself to follow these steps. But ultimately it worked. My stress levels went down, my health improved, and my career took off. More heartening, I discovered that everything Derek had taught me could be taught to others, with similar results.
Nicholas Petrie is a senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership and the lead researcher and creator of its Change Equation, which shows leaders how to change in ways that minmize stress and maximize results. He works with CEOs and their teams to create resilience strategies for organization
Florida — The Suntree Master Homeowners Association, one of Brevard County’s largest residential developments, may soon have one of the strictest policies in the State of Florida when it comes to allowing sexual offenders and sexual predators to live there.
The association is asking residents to amend its housing restrictive covenants, which would bar known sexual offenders and sexual predators from owning or renting there. Technically, it’s asking residents to approve expanding the zone of protection of city and county ordinances by restricting sex offenders from residing within 3,000 feet from places where children regularly congregate, essentially covering all of Suntree.
Do your associations have policies like this? Share in the comment section.
Are you attending CAI’s Annual Conference & Expo? WE ARE! CAMICB is All in to Win for the 2017 conference. Come see us in Las Vegas May 3-6, 2017 at Caesars Palace! CAMICB will be hosting a headshot lounge! CMCAs and non-CMCAs are welcome. Come meet the CAMICB Staff and Board. Stop by the headshot lounge or our table for some giveaway items.
Check out the details on CAI’s website: https://www.caionline.org/Events/2017Conference/Pages/default.aspx
See you in Vegas!
–Linda Warren, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, The Warren Management Group
Are you attending CAI’s Annual Conference & Expo? WE ARE! CAMICB is All in to Win for the 2017 conference. Come see us in Las Vegas May 3-6, 2017 at Caesars Palace! CAMICB will be hosting a headshot lounge! CMCAs and non-CMCAs are welcome. Come meet the CAMICB Staff and Board. Stop by the headshot lounge or our table for some giveaway items.
Check out the details on CAI’s website: https://www.caionline.org/Events/2017Conference/Pages/default.aspx
See you in Vegas!