Culture Focused Practice

Hey, hey. Welcome to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. I am your host. I almost said lovely host, but that's, you know, TBD. Actually, it's just debatable. It's just straight up debatable. I am your host, Dr. Tara. Vossenkemper. And today we are going to be talking about probably one of my favorite things, kind of, we're gonna be talking about the role of diffusing conflict, the role of leadership, excuse me, in diffusing conflict.

Conflict is one of my favorite things. That sounds nuts. So just hear me out. enhances relationships. When it's done well, it enhances relationships. Conflict, first of all is unavoidable. It's inevitable. It is bound to happen. If you're telling me, no, it doesn't happen at my practice, either you are not aware of it or somebody is shielding you from it, or you are very oblivious.

And I mean that with love and a little bit of like poking fun. I mean, it, it absolutely does happen. It does. It's, it's unavoidable. It has to happen. There's no other way. So when I say conflict, also what I'm talking about, I, I'm including in this, like I'm thinking of conflict as an umbrella term.

Any moments of tension, any sort of friction between people or within a group where I. There's a problem and not everybody's on the same page, and so you're sort of debating, you're working through things. We might even loosely like very, very loosely say that a debate is kind of conflict. It's a little bit of conflict.

I would say that's a very mild form of conflict, but regardless, it's a little bit of conflict. So conflict is unavoidable and it can be a very healthy thing when done well, it has to be done in a healthy way. It has to be done well. It has to be done appropriately. When that does take place, the outcome is that you have a better relationship with the person.

You have a better dynamic among the group. You have more insight into yourself. You have more understanding of the people around you. You have clearer boundaries, maybe about your own like internal thresholds with regard to something or about a system at your practice? It can, we will get into this. I mean, it is a very, it can be a very positive thing again, when it's done well.

So just for context, my specialty in clinical work, I've, I've been a therapist for years and my specialty is high conflict couples. Couples on the brink of divorce, couples, you know, sort of their last hurrah coming in. It's like their last, like, this is it. We've done this before. It's never worked like this is, we're throwing everything at, you know.

So I have, I see how transformative healthy conflict can be in my own experience, my own personal life. I know how incredible it can be to, to be eng engage the, the after effects of engaging in healthy conflict and working through shit that you, you know, just bubbling up inside. Or you can tell it's happening out here somewhere, out in front of you, somewhere with another person.

I'm, I'm not saying that I love being in conflict, so the experience of being in conflict with another person. Super unsettling. I will absolutely not lie to you and say that that's a fun experience. If it is for you, that says a lot about you, but I am also not willing to say that the discomfort should be more important than the outcome of working through the problem, so.

You might be uncomfortable, you probably will feel either unsettled or uncomfortable or just really like, oh God, I don't wanna, you know, you might, if you tend to withdraw, you might really wanna like shut down and move in the other direction. You can't do that. You can't do that as leadership at the practice, as leadership at either your group practice or as leadership at a group practice.

It is, it's our responsibilities as leaders to help diffuse conflict. I would say when applicable, when relevant, when appropriate. You know, you're not gonna get involved in every single little thing. So let's go through this then. So we are laying the foundation. Conflict is inevitable. It can be a very healthy experience when you do it well.

And I will leave, I will leave that there. So here are a couple of common mistakes that leaders make when it comes to being in, involved in conflict or lack there of.

I guess one is being too passive. If you are taking a totally hands off approach to conflict at your at, I'm gonna say at your practice, at the group practice, that can be problematic sometimes. Excuse me. There are moments when. Letting something ride is okay, but if that is the default approach, that's probably not gonna work long term.

So being too passive is one thing. Micromanaging is another. So kind of the opposite of being too passive, I would say, um, is being way too involved just at every single little tiny step of the way, trying to control the entire narrative, trying to control how people should feel about it, just, being overly involved. Also not gonna work.

The third thing is just avoiding the issue altogether. So if I, you know, in the beginning, I think I said something about if you say we don't have conflict, yes you do. It's yes, you do. I would also maybe pause it or I would hypothesize that in saying we don't have conflict, sort of a way of avoiding the issue altogether.

Either feigning ignorance or, you know, putting your head in the sand to avoid it altogether, which is. Like we said, not a good thing. That's a very common mistake that that leadership can make, that leaders can and do make at practices.

There's a few things, so think about this as like a mindset or the next few points I've got about.

Four things I wanna talk about here that are regarding the mindset for engaging or helping diffuse conflict, having a mindset for conflict resolution. One is that it's, it's your responsibility. It's our responsibility as leaders to really set the tone for conflict. So even in the, in the I, I would actually, I'm gonna use this podcast as an example.

This episode, even in the beginning of this episode, saying conflict is one inevitable and two, when done well, it can be very healthy. I know this for a fact. This is supported by research. This isn't just me spouting off nonsense bullshit, which I also am prone to do and I like doing sometimes, but this is, this is true.

It is just, we know this. This is what research tells us. So it's your responsibility to set the tone. And so by me saying in the beginning, conflict is inevitable and it can be done healthy, it's also uncomfortable in the middle of it. Doesn't mean it shouldn't happen. That's part of setting the tone. I. I have that approach in life everywhere, but also at my practice, I know things are going to come up.

My team knows things are going to come up. I don't care when things come up. They know I don't care when things come up. And if they don't know, they learn pretty quick. You know, new folks might not know, but as they're part of the team and they witness, you know, as they're part of the meetings and they see how somebody might bring up something they're uncomfortable with or they or it's something that they're unhappy about how it's done and how leadership responds. Then they understand, they get it, you know, they have a felt sense for what that's like. And then they're also likely to believe and and embrace that conflict is okay. It's okay to be unhappy about stuff. It's okay to speak up about stuff.

So we leadership sets the tone for anything conflict related. . . Second thing is emotional intelligence is very, very important here. I'll not say it's be all, end all type of intelligence, but it's really important to have some sort of emotional intelligence whenever you are engaging in conflict.

when I say emotional intelligence, here are specifically the things that, I mean, one is self-awareness. This is hard because most everybody thinks they have self-awareness. But if it's a bell curve, if self-awareness is a bell curve, we know that some people are gonna fall below that curve, like on the lower end of things.

So self-awareness is something you need to be aware of your own well, your own shit, honestly, when stuff's coming up for you, your own triggers, your own temperament, your own tendencies, your own, again, internal thresholds for things.

That's one thing. Another is, uh, regulation. So if you are getting worked up about something, which is going to happen, and again, it's inevitable and it's okay, we have to be able to regulate. Regulate might not mean in that exact moment where you are able to bring yourself physiologically bring yourself back down.

So thinking too conflict is of course, it's like content. I mean, you know. Interpersonal related, but it's also, there's something internal with conflict where we have physiological happenings in our body. You know, we have physiological arousal when certain things come up. It's sort of, um, I'm not going to say outside of our control, but I will say our body will respond to certain things, whether moments in a conversation, certain topics, certain if somebody says something in a certain way, I know that if, if I, if I get a hint of judgment without somebody voicing it, like a hint of, um, not judgment. I don't care if people judge criticism without seeking to understand my, I'm, I'm pissed. I'm, I'm angry. Like right away I have like a, you know, a response. I cannot, I cannot operate from that moment. I know myself enough to say like, I gotta take a minute.

Like, I, I can't actually either have this conversation right now or respond to this email, or I can't talk to this, I can't talk about this topic. That can also be regulation where I say, you know what? I actually need a, I need some time to think about that. Like I need to take a few minutes. So regulation doesn't mean you have to bring yourself physiologically back down in the moment to continue that exact conversation.

You might say, I need to take a few minutes. The important thing about regulation, about bringing yourself back down is that you have to reengage in the conversation. So if you are saying you need a few minutes, hold true to your word, take a few minutes, bring yourself back down, and then re-engage in discussion.

So the discussion still has to happen. Whatever the conflict is, you still have to be able to engage in the process of diffusing it or, you know, head it up, whatever it might be that your, your role is in that, you know, discussion.

So again, one is self-awareness. Two is regulation. This is part of emotional intelligence, so we're talking about mindset for conflict resolution.

First and foremost, you set the tone. Two, you need emotional intelligence under two. Two A would be self-awareness. Two B would be regulation. We have to be able to regulate two C. The last piece to emotional intelligence is sometimes you just need to listen. Listening is also another one of those things, and again, my background is clinical.

I know how shitty people are listening. You think you're good at it, you're probably not. And I don't mean I'm not, you know, no shade. Like I'm not trying to shit on you or something. But listening is really hard to do. If you cannot, if you can't capture back what somebody has said to you with accuracy, you are not fully listening.

So when I'm talking about listening, I'm talking about set your own agenda to the side and fully engage and try to get inside that person's head. So if somebody comes to me with something they're mad about, which happens, I have people that do come to me and they are upset with me. They're upset about something that's happened at the practice, they're upset about why haven't moved on something they're upset about how I something I said what, whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. Somebody comes to me and they're upset about something and they. Say like, it really bothered me that this thing took place, or I really don't understand why. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, whatever it might be. I have a couple of options. One is I could just respond back, well, I told you why.

I told you that we had to do this and this and this, and immediately that tone, that response, it sounds defensive. It is defensive. I'm like, doubling down on, well, I already said this, so I'm gonna tell you again. Instead, that's just doubling down. That's not good listening. Instead, I might say, okay. So I'm, I'm hearing you say that you're confused about why we're not doing blah, blah, blah.

Tell me more, like, what do you understand about this and what is your confusion? Can you try to just expand and I'll, I'll help, I'll help to solve this for you. Like, I wanna come up, I wanna figure this out with you. Much different. I'm, I'm literally just inviting that person to share a little bit more.

The caveat to this. So this would be, I was think sometimes I think in lists, you know, or like, uh, decision trees or like logic trees, logic flows. If two, the emotional intelligence and then the subcategory is, um, knowing when to shut up and just listen. The nested under, there'd be two C one, you know, roman numeral, little roman numeral one would be.

Certain ways of engaging aren't appropriate. So if somebody comes to me and they say, you know, you're a real piece of shit for this. Absolutely. I'm not gonna say, yeah, tell me more about how I'm a real piece of shit. I'm gonna say, hang on a second. I know that you're mad, but you we're not having this conversation in that way.

Like, I need you to use better language. No coming at me, no character attacks. Don't call me names. None of that's appropriate. Tell me what you're mad about and then we can try to work from there. So I can cut off some of the shitty language and still stay focused on what is happening. Still try to solve it with them.

So one, you set the tone. Two, emotional intelligence is very, very important. And again, under emotional intelligence, self-awareness, regulation. Just listen. Practice listening. Three. So now we're past that. We're gonna get into still more mindset. There's four things here. Three is that. You don't have to win.

I think about this all the time. Your goal isn't to win in conflict. There's not really winning. I mean, there's no winning in conflict. It's literally about being understood. That is the way to navigate conflict most effectively. My goal in helping people with conflict and diffusing conflict. Is to help them feel understood, and I still have to hold the lines and the parameters of the practice.

So just because I understand where somebody's coming from, I don't need, I don't need to win because my responsibility is not, it doesn't matter if I quote, win end quote an argument. What matters is that my people feel understood and the priority of the practice, I'm still have to hold the practice.

Again, I hold the lines for the practice. So in some ways it almost is not about me. It's about being sort of a channel for what needs to happen. Like I can hear where somebody's coming from. I can even validate. I can understand. A lot of times I do where I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't really like this thing either, and I have no better solution for the situation given all of the factors involved.

That's just it. So it's not about, it's really not about winning and so, sorry. I'm so sorry. One more thing I will say about that is you don't need to win if you're your leadership at a practice, like by default, you're setting the vision and directing, you're charting the course. That ultimately, I always think, like I always end up thinking to myself at the very end of the day, the practice is what I want it to be.

That is the win. So again, for conflict resolution, if we're talking about mindset, we don't need, it's not about winning. It really is about being understood, feeling validated, and for each person. In order to do that, we have to both be heard and and hear. So we have to listen and be able to, you know, speak clearly.

Okay. Last piece to mindset and then we're gonna move on to some common scenarios. Last piece to mindset is psychological safety.

Nobody's gonna speak up if they don't feel safe. So psychological safety, emotional safety. Your a amygdala. Hi is always looking for safety. It's always scanning the environment for threats. Your brain is absolutely hardwired to assess for safety. Even without your conscious awareness. If you don't have to be aware of this for it to be happening, it is happening, period.

So we have to make sure that people feel safe enough to speak up. And if they don't, then the conflict is still there. Remember, conflict is inevitable. Conflict is still going to be there, but it's not gonna come up and it's not gonna be able to be worked through, massaged out, solved, fixed, none of those things are gonna be able to happen.

So psychological safety is paramount for conflict to even arise to the surface in such a way that we can seek to solve it. So that's your mindset. You set the tone. You have to have some level of emotional intelligence. You need to be able to, you need to be working on that. Again, emotional intelligence, being self-awareness, regulation, and knowing when to listen. Goal is not to win the argument. And psychological safety is very important.

Here are some common scenarios. We're gonna, we're gonna do a hard shift, then we're gonna talk about common scenarios and how leaders should step in. So one is, um, I'd like, I like this one. I think it's funny. One is a passive aggressive email chain.

I do not do passive aggressive well. It, that is definitely something that, hmm, it pisses me the fuck off. That's what it does. It just really gets under my skin for a lot of reasons. But one is that passive aggressive feels like, and I would argue, is absolutely a lack of ownership on the person who is communicating in that way. It's basically not saying what actually needs to be said and one of the, well, I'll say one of the core values at our practice is authenticity and candor. And so passive aggressive, I would contend is the exact opposite of authenticity and candor and that there's just no place. There's no place in my life. I do not do passive aggressive.

So passive aggressive email chain. Here's what happens. You've got two employees, and this is maybe like a full, full team email chain. This is kind of cringey to even think about, kind of embarrassing. You've got two employees who are just throwing shade via email.

You can sort of detect some undercurrent of something. Poor leadership would be ignoring it. You're just like, oh God, please stop. Just stop emailing. Will someone please do this? Everyone's talking about it behind the scenes. Good leadership response. You have to call it out. And again, I would say this is where you could lean on your values at your practice if you have core values, which you should, if you don't, that's a side note.

If you do have them lean into your values, what values not being lived out and what's happening again? One of our values is authenticity and candor. So my response to this email thread, if I, my inbox is the bane of my existence. So if I get onto this email thread and I see all these passive aggressive emails going back and forth, my, and I will, I'm gonna reply to everybody who's been involved up to that point.

It's gonna be, Hey, there's something happening in this email that doesn't feel very good. We're gonna stop this thread, but specifically I wanna chat with these, you know, parties. These parties who have been involved and we're gonna figure out what's going on. In doing that, I am letting everybody know, everybody on the email thread, this isn't okay.

I am not gonna solve this in front of everybody 'cause it's not everybody's business, but we are saying this is not okay. I am going to let the people who were doing it specifically, again, in sending that email for example, I'm gonna let them know I'm gonna follow up, we're gonna talk more about this, this isn't done, and then I'm going to get them together. We're going to sit and talk together, and I'm gonna say, what the fuck? Y'all like, what the fuck was that? You need to, we need to talk. Tell me what's going on. I'm gonna help figure out what's actually happening. I'm not gonna own the conversation, but I'm gonna help them talk about it in a way that's actually effective.

I, I'm not going to by own the conversation. I mean, I'm not gonna be too micromanage, which is a common leadership, you know, that's a common mistake that leaders will make in diffusing conflict. But we need to figure out how are we, how are we, what's happening? What's happening? What's going left unsaid that needs to be said.

How did we get to a point that we're resorting to shady emails in front of the whole team? What happened that this wasn't addressed earlier? How was this missed? Maybe by leadership or like from the, the two or three or four, whoever is involved by the parties involved. So, in, in doing that, again, we're sending the message to the whole team that this is an okay, but the details of how we're gonna work this out isn't, that's not everybody's business, but everybody then still knows we will address things as we see them.

We'll do this together, we'll do it as a group. I get the relevant people together, we sort it out. Again, there's friction there. We're sorting things out. There's something going on, we're gonna figure it out. And then when we walk away, ideally that thing doesn't happen again. And if something similar happens, we have, we have the, the start of a file system where we are like, oh yeah, remember this happened before.

Okay, let's figure it out again. What was actually, what was going on? Then? What's going on now? And so you can sort of rinse and repeat, so to speak. Okay, so that's one common scenario.

Second common scenario is, this is actually one of my favorites. Um, 'cause I've worked with a lot of people on this where they say these two people just aren't getting along. They're, it's like a personality. They just, their personalities don't mix. And they, this person is more this way and this person's more like this. And it's usually someone's more type A and someone's a little more like laissez fair or a little more type B. And I'm being very, very broad brush strokes, you know, intentionally so.

So we've got, uh, it seems like personality clash, but in a lot of cases what's actually happening is that it's a systems issue. So employees are clashing, they seem like they're not getting all along and they're like, they, but they have to work together 'cause they're involved in like, uh, either overlapping or, or interconnected processes or systems, or you have a big enough practice that you have multiple people in.

Um, you. Two roles that do very similar things, like just as you know, customer support for like a big company, you need more than one person doing customer support. And so you have multiple people working customer support, you know, and it's the same thing. It's one role, like they're doing the same thing, but you need a couple bodies. Ew, that sounded gross, but you know what I mean.

You need multiple people in, in those roles. So how poor leadership, a poor leadership type response would just be. It's a personality issue. They just don't get along. You know, it's just a personality clash. I will not disagree that some people are less likely to get along than others. You know this. I love people and there are some people that I just don't vibe with. I don't click with in the same way as I do others. That does not explain conflict necessarily sometimes, but very rarely I would say. Does that explain conflict? Good leadership would figure out. What is going on? So when I'm talking to person A or person B, and I might either get them together, or in some cases I might say, you know what?

I just wanna talk to you individually. I wanna get a feel for what's going on. Or if I'm consulting with leadership at a practice, I might say, tell me what typically happens. What usually happens is that the problem is that they don't have clear understanding of where one person ends and the other begins with regard to their role.

And so looks like, or it feels like we just don't get along, but really you don't have clearly defined systems and processes that's very different than people not getting along. The reality is that if your hiring is on point, most of your team will be getting along. Most of your team is going to like each other, but if you don't have clear systems, you're setting them up to fail.

You're setting them up to have conflict because there's not clarity in a process or a system. So your role, again, good leadership, would be figuring out what the real issue is, figuring out what's the real problem, and then fixing that. Then connecting with them together at this point. And that's when I would also talk out loud about, look, I know there's been some, you know, distress between the two of you, a little bit of, um, upset between the two of you about, you know, we might say that you might have thought it's about each other's personality, but what I really think is going on is that I did not, and I will take ownership, I did not have clearly defined roles.

So your frustration, Jane, about joe's lack of doing X, Y, Z. It's not about Joe. Joe was doing what was expected of him, but I did not clarify with him that I actually need this instead of that, and that impacted you directly. This is on me. That is my responsibility. It's my responsibility to set the roles and set clear expectations and et cetera.

So. It's not always a personality clash, I would say, again, rarely it's personality clash in terms of, well, I guess it depends on the size, but in size of your practice is what I meant. If you have like 300 people, you're gonna have personality clashes. But for mid, even like small to mid-size group practices, usually not personality. It's usually a systems issue.

Number three and number three scenario, a staff member or an employee or someone on the team who's always stirring the pot. This one's a little bit trickier, I think, because they don't usually do it in front of you. So a lot of what you might be getting as leadership is hearsay.

You might be just hearing little grumblings or rumblings or some like tremors of, uh, now I'm thinking of Kevin Bacon and Tremors. What a great old movie. Just such a cheesy, such a cheesy old movie. So some tremors or some trembling or some sort of, you know, noise about, and one person's name keeps popping up and it's like, I think something is happening with this person.

Like, there's something that's happening that there's a lot of little, little moments, not havoc necessarily, this person isn't wreaking havoc, but there's some grumbling, you know, there's something happening. Poor leadership would just avoid it altogether. Just let it slide like, yeah, no, it'll take care of itself.

No, it won't. This person is not going to automatically or just stop doing the things that they've been doing. It will not take care of itself. Good leadership, what you should do, or what I would encourage you to do a good leadership response is to talk about it directly. So, and again, thinking about what are your core values?

What can you lean on to say, look, authenticity and candor, I need to, I need to talk about this with you. Um, and you might say to this person also, like, I wanna hear from you directly. What you say is gonna vary based on what's happening and what you've heard, and, you know, all of that. I'm always a little uncomfortable about voicing if I'm, if I'm directly having a conversation with somebody about like they're stirring the pot. What makes me uncomfortable is directly using another person's story to me, because I don't want that person to necessarily feel thrown under the bus. I don't think that's fair. What I can do is say, I've heard you might not be very happy about some things that are going on at the practice, and so what I really want to do is, I wanna do a couple things with you. This is me talking to this person's what I, what I might say. One, I wanna understand what you might be unhappy about and I want to just talk through it and get a sense for if there's anything to do, I wanna get a sense for what might make you feel better in the role that you're in, or what responsibilities or changes you might want to see that are within the realm of possible and realistic.

And I wanna figure out how we stop this from happening. Because it's not in accordance with our values, doesn't, you're not, this is not living out values if I'm hearing from other people, rather than hearing directly from you. And I don't like the notion of there being a little bit of, you know, distress or upset being spread to other people.

I don't like the feel of that at the practice. I don't think that's really fair for others. It puts other people in compromising situations. It can make other folks feel uncomfortable. But more importantly, what I value is hearing from you directly because it matters to me how you feel while you're here.

Maybe in general it matters, but also you know specifically while you're here and then talk with them about it. Tell me what's actually going on. Level with me. I get the sense that you're not happy. Let's explore. Like, tell me what's going on. Who knows what it could be. It could be that they feel resentful. It could be that they want to be paid more. It could be they did a bunch of work and they didn't feel like they were. Celebrated for it. It could be any number of things. It could be that they don't wanna be there anymore and they just haven't accepted that that's happened before, where someone is just sort of upset and like pissy and a little bit like pa, like they're doing all these little things and so you're finally, you're talking with them and it's like you just gotta level, like, what do you wanna be here?

That's, I've asked people that like, it doesn't seem like you wanna be here. I. Do you want to be here? Do you want this role based on what's expected? Are you, are you a part of this? Like, do you wanna still be a part of this? I've had people say, no, I don't want to anymore. Boom, there it is. Like that could be it.

That could just be the conversation. It's like, okay, let's figure out what to do then. Let's figure out how to transition you out. Or it could be, again, something else entirely.

So there's a staff member who's always stirring the pot. We want to make sure that we are addressing things with them directly, which would be good leadership, and not just letting it slide, which would be poor leadership, a poor leadership practice.

So a couple more things and then we're, I'm gonna wrap this up.

Here's a couple things to help you get through. So thinking about these as like practical strategies. Practical strategies, excuse me. Talking is so hard sometimes.

Number one, whatever hypothesis or assumption or character trait or thing you think is happening, don't assume that you are correct. You might have a hypothesis.

The goal in research is not to prove your hypothesis, it's to seek to disprove it. That's what we should try to do. You might say, I, I'm thinking that this is probably going on. I will not assume that's correct. I'm going to seek to disprove myself because I wanna know what's actually going on. So the, the maybe short way of saying this is that you should be. I'm always saying should, I would encourage you. I think that it would behoove you. I think it would be beneficial for you to lead with curiosity and not assumptions. Check every assumption you make. Question it. Just ask out loud. I, I wonder if this is it. Like this is what seems like is happening, but I don't actually know. I wanna hear from you directly.

Check any assumption you have. Lead with curiosity. That's number one. There's four things here. Number two. And again, these are practical strategies leading with curiosity, not assumption. And again, even if you have hypotheses, seek to disprove them. Do not seek to prove them.

Number two, model healthy conflict resolution.

Healthy conflict means engaging in conflict without horsemen. And the four horsemen are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. And so I'm not gonna get into depth with all of those. Even though I really, really want to, I'm not going to, but what I'm trying to say is avoid horsemen at all costs.

Engage in self-regulatory practices. Try to stay grounded. If you need a minute, take a few and say, you know what? Let me just take a few minutes to breathe. I need to bring myself back down and then I wanna reengage and then do that and come back. All of that healthy conflict stuff you're doing is also modeling for your team.

So they understand, okay, this is how, this is how we do it. So when you model healthy conflict, your team will follow suit.

Number three, use structured feedback. So what I mean by this is. If we're engaging in constant feedback practices, then we're usually don't have stuff that's gonna come up. It's already known. If you don't have structured feedback, I would look into the EOS world. We do a variety of things with feedback, including, of course we have weekly meetings that are structured and agenda and all that, but we also do, um, quarterly conversations and of course, biannual. Biannual reviews. But you want some sort of structured feedback for people to be able to regularly check in and provide feedback about how they're doing, what's going on, what concerns they might have, and feedback is not, tell me how you are.

Feedback might be something more specific like, Hey, the quarterly conversations from EOS, for example, the two prompts are what's working and what's not working. That's it. Those are the two questions. Each party answers the ques those questions, and it's a two party conversation. So when you are engaging in feedback, don't ask about what's going well.

You can sure ask about that, but also you need to ask about what is not working for the person. What is not going well? What frustrations have you run up against in the past month or quarter or week? What concerns do you have? How are you feeling about your role still? Last time we talked, you were real enthused. What's your level of enthusiasm at this point? What have you noticed that you think could be fixed? What sort of holes are you noticing as you're going through your processes in your roles? All questions that are engaged at being proactive about seeking out the issues finding the issues before they, you know, come to the service in a more negative way.

Ooh, last thing, and this is it. Oh my goodness gracious. A lot of talking. Last practical strategy is gonna be knowing when to step in versus when to empower. You don't have to be involved in every single conflict. You don't have to diffuse every single thing.

The point at which leadership steps in, from my perspective, is the point at which the first round, the first line of defense, which would be addressing it directly amongst the two hasn't happened, or where it's escalated and it's something that's like spilled out over the entire team, like a passive aggressive email chain or like somebody being real snarky at a meeting out loud or like I'm hearing upset about something from like a variety of people the same, upset from a variety of people. At that point, I'm gonna step in, but if there's a concern that my biller has with something my client care coordinator is doing, and my billing biller comes to me and says, man, Tara, I'm really, I'm really upset about this thing.

I might say, you know what? Why don't you talk directly to client care? Just have a conversation. I want you two to try to hash it out first. If it doesn't go well. Come back, follow up with me and we can try to figure out what's going wrong. I might talk with my bill biller initially also to get figure, excuse me, to figure out is this a systems issue?

Is this a, is something like personal coming up for her, like something that she needs to work through? Is this a, her feelings hurt about something? Does she feel ignored in her role? I'm gonna help her figure out what's going on. Then I'm gonna advise her. I'm gonna coach her. I'm gonna help support her to talk directly to my client care.

I want them to work it out. In doing so, if we go back to remember what are the, sort of those assumptions, what, whenever we're, uh, the mindsets, excuse me, we want conflict to be resolved. When it between people, I want this to happen between the two of them specifically because I know if they can do it, that enhances their personal relationship, but also their working relationship.

It only serves to enhance what they're doing together and they're in this together. So I could theoretically get involved or I'm gonna, I could empower people. That would be always the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, I really want you to go directly to that person. I'm gonna help them figure out how to do that effectively.

But then I'm gonna let them do it. And so they get to have accountability and ownership and pride in doing this thing. And again, if it goes well, which in a lot of cases it does, then they have a better working relationship and it's theirs to own. It's not because I stepped in and I made them, you know, I made it better.

I want them to also have like pride and ownership in being able to work through things. So we wanna also empower our team to solve things directly when it's appropriate and when they can. And we can do this with supporting them. By supporting them. There's a lot of stuff here. I hope that it made sense.

My, my thought is that it, well, who knows? I hope it made sense. I, again, I love conflict. I could literally talk, I probably could talk all day about it. I mean for hours and hours. It's so fascinating. And specific issues that people have, like specific conflict moments. So great. We did not even get into, we maybe a little bit with like the emotional regulation stuff stuff, excuse me.

But we really didn't get into your internal like, um, your internal felt experience of conflict, how it lives in your body, how your history with conflict. It absolutely informs how you engage with it at your practice. And so there's a whole component here that's specific to just you, you, the listener right now.

Specific to just me, me, how conflict lives within me, how I engage with it. That's a whole different conversation though. Again, I just, conflict is so incredible.

So let's wrap this up. We know, again, leadership is not about, it's not about preventing conflict. It's not about avoiding it. It's about accepting it as inevitable and helping ensure that it's done well. I have faith that you can do this if you really want a healthy practice. There's a lot of things, right, but one of the things to do if you want a healthy practice is to engage in healthy conflict resolution and if you notice smoke, get to it before it turns into giant flames and burns everything down.

I mean, just engage in healthy conflict, model it for your team, and they'll do the same.

If you are seeking more support, find me at the Culture Focus Practice membership. Go to taravossenkemper.com. Click on work with me, and then Culture Focused Practice membership. It's a steal of a price. It's a monthly, it's a subscription thing. You join us for a, you join us, excuse me. Every month you get a live q and a, a live training, almost always with me, but I'll also, I have guest experts on, you know. A private group and a portal with a bunch of resources. Not only resources, like documents, sheets, things like that, but also resources like previous trainings.

So even if you join, you'll have access to a lot of resources there. Oh goodness, you stayed with me. Subscribe, also, that's my second ask. Subscribe, stay up on what's happening. If you have specific things you wanna talk about, specific questions about conflict, leadership, culture, EOS, any of those things, organizational health, team engagement, employee morale- those are all the things that I love and that is the full intention of this podcast.

So drop me a line, go to my contact form, again, taravossenkemper.com. Drop me a line, let me know what you think or just, um, keep listening. It's great seeing you. Thank you for being here with me and I'll see you next time.

Bye.