Conflict Management Addressing Systemic Business Environment Risk
Conflict Management is often overlooked and avoided at all costs, it is the biggest taboo subject at medium to large corporates, where being politically savvy, avoiding conflict and managing upwards were the key to a career success.
All of these trends and associated behaviours are being significantly challenged in recent years, where the latter has driven a significant increase in the inability to deliver where approx. 60% of large transformations fail. Gartner reports 57% of boards and CEOs are looking to increase their risk appetite, as they aim for and are looking for innovation, where the latter requires a significant resilience and ability to deal with and resolve conflict. We are however, as a humanity going further and further away from resolving conflict, in fact social unrest is at its highest ever level across the Globe.
Typically within a company, the execs are coached to adopt one of these conflict management styles: The Consulting style, The Questioning style or The Delegation style, all of which, are used with a certain degree to keep the C level exec away from direct confrontation and accountability. Many CIOs default to restructuring the IT organization in response to strategy shifts, performance issues or crisis situations, rather than conducting root cause analysis of the conflict and / or resolving it. Therefore, this results in restructuring costs multi millions every 2-3 years.
Below are the 3 key types of conflicts we see organisations face:
The hero, irreplaceable key subject matter expert "SME" that often have very technical skills pitching themselves as irreplaceable. This type of person apportions blame and shies away from collaborating with others, therefore impacting negatively on vendor and other Third party relationships. Many organisations have started addressing this via major Agile Ways of Working transformations, setting our cross functional teams, value streams, squads etc in order to eliminate this risk, enabling collaboration between business and tech.
The control and demand hierarchy or classist system. This is very common; for example, the Finance or Risk Director very aggressively directing over technology's teams and CTO/CIO suite particularly causing major issues when accountants lack basic tech skills. This type of conflict has a big bearing on personal, and other biases, being the major reason behind some of the investment decisions causing the GFC (Global Financial Crisis). Some big organisations have already started addressing this; for example, EY announcing a school leavers recruitment programme and the UK government announcing objectives to achieve better meritocracy in 2016, others making senior leadership appointments looking for the servant leadership style etc.
Current social media influences e.g. from cancel culture, instant gratification, the anger and mental health crisis exacerbating an inability to agree to disagree, and resolve issues amicably. There is also the increased mental health crisis, an unstable environment caused by the pandemic and climate change is about to accelerate this exponentially.
Stanford University reports on the increased anger during and post the pandemic. The increase in crime rates globally is not coincidental, there is a real rage anger in our communities. I have on a personal level, been very surprised by some behaviours from well-to-do and highly educated people, and of the simple inability to hold a face-to-face or a telephone conversation in order to resolve issues.
These phenomena have been exacerbated by the demise of the traditional moral and family compass; people used to live in multi-generational families with strong emotional support. One would go to a weekly community gathering where people will share and have their feelings validated, being reminded the importance of reconciliation, forgiveness, kindness and mediate for internal peace - all of which are gone but hopefully not forgotten. We face unprecedented threats not only to our lives, but this could escalate into an internal domestic conflict as we are already seeing with unprecedented protests in NZ, and globally there is an increase of civil unrest also.
Research has shown an increase in frustration, agitation and anger throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic anger, or "panger," is a real mental health concern many people are dealing with.
The Coronavirus pandemic with its extreme disruption of normal daily life and uncertainty for the future, compounded by several other crises (economic distress, racial tension, social inequities, political and ideological conflicts) puts us all to the test.
These are significant issues in our communities that will destabilise corporate and financials ecosystems as we are already seeing the environment businesses operate.
What could a few of Propelius recommendations look like:
Large corporates need to improve on their corporate social responsibility investments and community projects
Conduct root cause analysis of the issue(s) / conflict and share lessons with senior stakeholders. Be prepared to listen and have frank conversations without apportioning blame and do not assume what has worked in the past will work again
Align all of your IT operating model components to desired outcomes — not just the organisational structure
Distinguish structural issues from workforce management issues, both of which can impact team performance
Invest in significant upskilling of your people leaders and shift towards high EQ, develop empathetic coaches who do not manage the day-to-day delivery of the workstream
Here at Propelius, we have worked with numerous clients in the UK and NZ facing these challenges. Historically we have proposed and implemented an innovative, collaborative (Pre-Agile) Service Delivery Model designing and incorporating complex four-way service level agreements addressing conflict type 1.
We are currently advising a large tech client, where in 2022 we have been able to steer them towards an outcome-based technology and digital strategy execution.