Confronting with Clarity and Kindness

I’d been working with a mid-sized organization for only a few days when one of their leading team members quit with an effective-immediately resignation. No two-week notice; just “I’m out”. I was surprised by that because the team member genuinely seemed passionate about the people he worked with and the work culture. Over time I began to see this as a pattern amongst the team members and I started to understand why it existed.

The leader, Bob, cared tremendously about people. He valued people. He wanted a great culture. But he was angry. He gave too much. Over time he would begin to feel resentful and when something went wrong he would lose his temper and it could be ugly. One of his people mentioned to me that sometimes Bob’s words were like knives. 

Effective-immediately resignations, a pattern of them, can indicate a lack of trust in a leader’s ability to manage negative reality or information well. 

Bob was a good man and a caring leader, but Bob needed to develop some more effective communication and relationship tools. When Bob gave more to his people than he wanted to, he would secretly feel frustrated when it didn’t result in the changes he expected. Sometimes Bob would try to give hints to his people about what he wanted through passive/aggressive comments like; I guess I’ll do it myself…again or no one around here seems like they care… or this is ridiculous! 

Bob needed to learn to be direct and yet have a stance that communicated “I’m for you”. That might sound like: Tom, I see you haven’t finished the list I gave you, I want you to have that done before you leave tonight. Is that something you can do? or Sue, my expectation today is that you will talk with Tom and come up with a solution to such and such problem. If you and he can’t come up with a solution after assessing the problem, please let me know by the end of the day and we’ll discuss next steps. 

In both of these examples, Bob is saying, you are responsible and this is the deadline. However, he is also checking with them by asking for their agreement or asking them to come to him by a certain time if they are unsuccessful. The difference with this approach is that Bob is clear and yet warm. It’s a relational approach versus a conflict-avoidant approach. Bob didn’t like to tell people what to do or confront people when they weren’t living up to his expectations. So instead, he would often do it himself and then get angry and blow up over something that felt unpredictable to his people. 

Bob’s people didn’t trust him with negative reality. When they found an opportunity to leave they did and often without notice because they didn’t trust Bob to react well. 

Bob’s conflict-avoidant style was creating a lot of his frustrations and he had trained himself to wait until he was good and angry before confronting what was wrong. Once he learned to confront problems quickly, directly and warmly, people began to trust him with negative reality or with things they were struggling to accomplish. This helped Bob to build a much stronger culture that identified problems faster, held the right people accountable and encouraged honesty in his team members.

Confronting with clarity and kindness is a critical skill needed to build strong and effective teams.