More Human Conflict

At the heart of the challenge to experience more human conflict are deep and profound questions for all of us to wonder together about.

Am I formed or forming?

Am I right or wrong?

Am I experienced as likable, or am I experienced as unlikable?

Should I let others influence me or should I stand on my own?

Am I intrinsically good or only in relation to others that are less good?

Who am I? Who are you? Who are you to tell me who I am?

If you are right, I must be wrong, and how can that be right?

If I fail, am I a failure?

Is it worth it?

When I die, will anyone notice?

Do I matter?

In many schools, conflict is to be avoided. It is hidden, it is taboo, and having conflicts openly is often viewed as having had something go terribly wrong. Professionally, it is looked down upon to upset people. In fact, I would argue that negative emotions, in general, are systemically extinguished. In most environments, school people are trained to be nice, to be compliant, and to respect authority and status.

We say things like, “I don’t want to rock the boat” or “I don’t want to make waves.” or “I wish someone would tell Brian to stop _____________.” In this example, the someone is never you. So, more accurately, it should read, “Someone else should tell Brian to stop ___________.” Early in my career, one of the most poignant examples of this was when I had to be the person to finally talk to Brian. I will never forget the look on his face when I explained how he was being perceived by his colleagues. He had worked at the school in question for seven years, and nobody had told him about ____________ until I did. By this point, he was in trouble. His relationship with his colleagues was mostly unrecoverable, and he was shocked. His first thought, “Why didn’t they say something?” Honestly, in that, moment, I wondered the same thing.

When given the opportunity to report out on how things are going we say, “ we are fine” or we think, “it will be fine.” This seems reflexive, even when things are slowly and quietly building, and we are less and less fine. This reflexive fineness is a disconnection from self. We are sometimes lost in our fake fineness, and operating in this type of culture does not feel human.

It doesn’t occur to us that we do want to make waves.

We do want to rock the boat.

But we don’t. We paradoxically admire people who take these risks, as well as scapegoat them systematically to ensure they, not us, go down when things get messy. If you are a school leader reading this, and you want your community to have more human conflict, you are asking people to put their identities at risk.

In tandem, we view people at all times with an unconscious filter that is constructed by our own self image. The more we accept and allow our own selves, the more likely we are to see others for who they are, and not who we want or need them to be in service of our own self-image.

In a professional or personal setting, if one doesn’t believe they matter intrinsically, they will always be searching for confirmation that they do matter. This search is largely unconscious, and it will happen in every interaction, meeting and show up in every relationship. People who disagree or see the world differently will disconfirm that one matters, and so we will see this as conflict. When this occurs, people do one of three things:

Fight: They seek to crush another person’s perspective to ensure their sense of self continues to matter.

Flight: They disengage so as not to risk finding out that they don’t matter by being crushed by someone asserting a disconfirming thought or opinion.

Freeze: They stop all action, and instantly split off their real self from their contrived self. They send their contrived self out to deal with the mess, and they will hide your real self from view. The contrived self, like a chameleon will adapt to ensure they are seen in the best light, and your real self will have to watch.

Conflict tests our ability to stand in our own bodies, in stillness, grounded in the face of emotion, complexity and it registers with our central nervous system. Our bodies can sometimes respond without our permission, and it can feel out of control. Our brains process this as danger, and pump our bodies full of stress hormones. We may even get red, feel our heart race and exhibit physical symptoms of distress. Our human alarm says, “Danger.” In order for educators and educational leaders to have more human conflict, we must confront that doing so is much more complex and systemic than just learning different conversational protocols.

In order to have more human conflict, we actually need to be more human. To be more human, we must acknowledge we are human in the first place.

As school leaders, we have an opportunity to reframe our job to help our schools and school leaders become more human, and therefore, more capable of human conflict. Here are some suggestions to consider:

Do your own personal work: Whether you practice mindfulness, have an executive coach, go to therapy, have a journaling practice, participate in a Truth-Seeking Pod, or just sit quietly and reflect on who you are, the simple act of reflecting on why you are seeing your work world the way you are will help you get more clear on what you need to do to show up more authentically. The most powerful move you can make in this category is seeking help outside of yourself, because the act of doing this, in and of itself, is an acknowledgment that you need help. Admitting you cannot do this on your own is a step towards learning, and it directly refutes the ego’s approach which prefers its reflection in solitude. It is much easier to lie to yourself if nobody is around to hear the lie.

Create systems and processes for your direct reports to do their own personal work and then ask them to do it: Like you, your direct reports need help. They need you to help them redirect their frustrations and challenges back inward. At Leadership + Design, we call this being more exploratory than confirmatory. Example: When one of your direct reports comes to you and says, “I need help, my team is just unwilling to change.” You can consider replying with something that helps them look inward like, “Why do you think this is bothering you so much? or What do you think is preventing you from having more direct conversations with them about how you are feeling? If they ask you, “What do you think I should do?” You can reply, “I think you should think about why you are asking me instead of yourself. What is preventing you from taking action and then learning from what happens?” As a coach, I am often asked what to do by my coaching clients, and my favorite response is, “I trust you.” This speaks to the next suggestion.

Hold your colleagues capable in your mind: When you think of your colleagues, do you implicitly trust that they will do what they need to do to be their best self? Will their missteps and mistakes inform their learning, and will the lessons they need to learn be worth the effort? When I consider whether or not to surface critical, yet uncomfortable topics, do I trust that they will handle themselves emotionally? If we are honest with ourselves,we don’t do not hold our colleagues capable. . We doubt them, we overcompensate for them, we shield them from the truth, or we try to minimize their discomfort. We may even resent them for being weak and making us look bad or work around them/ Instead of telling them how we feel, we will lie and say everything is fine. We tell ourselves that we are shielding them from feeling bad, but in reality, this is really to shield ourselves from the possibility that sharing these things would lead to us being perceived badly. If we are honest with them, they may be honest with us. This is scary.

Openly model vulnerability: The best way to do this as a leader is to collect feedback anonymously, then read that feedback with your coach or with the person you have chosen to help you. After processing the feedback and doing your own personal work with it, take the worst comments, the most judgmental assumptions or the comments that made you doubt yourself and your worth, and read them out loud to the people that gave them to you in a group setting. If you are a teacher, read them back to students. If you are a division head or principal, read them back to your faculty, and if you are a Head of School, read them back to anybody that will listen. Talk with people about how the comments made you feel, and what you are trying to learn from them. Acknowledge the feelings, the thinking and then repeat this behavior at least twice a year.

This last suggestion may feel hard, but if you can do it, you will find that over time and with practice, you begin to enjoy closing the gap between what you think you are doing, and what others think you are doing. You will realize that you are happier being yourself and finding out how that is perceived than pretending to be someone else, avoiding the conflict, and managing what it feels like to know that you are playing it safe or worse what it feels like to manufacture a contrived version of yourself in service of being liked.

More human conflict is about being a learner, not a knower, and it is an act of risk in service of trust. The worst case scenario is people tell you they don’t like you and they disconfirm your existence and worth. This sounds horrible, but the experience, if you are lucky enough to have it, is actually a gift because it will force you to confront whether you matter to yourself, and if you don’t, that is the only work to do anyway, so you might as well get started. You must matter to yourself independent of others' judgments in order to matter to others. If you or your people need help in this work, give us a call, and we are happy to pair you up with a coach that can help.