To many of us, confrontation is something to be avoided. The word conjures up something unpleasant or uncomfortable. We imagine two people standing toe-to-toe, their faces red, the veins in their necks bulging, and screaming at one another at the tops of their lungs. Well, if that’s the way you think of confrontation, it’s easy to understand why you’d want to avoid it. But confrontation doesn’t have to be that way . . . in fact, it shouldn’t be that way. Besides, when you avoid confronting an issue of some sort, it’s unlikely to just go away. It’s more likely that it will fester and get more and more difficult to solve as time goes on. So if it’s in your nature to avoid confrontation, please read below for some thoughts on how you might approach confrontation in a more positive, constructive way . . . a way that doesn’t involve yelling and screaming.
Let’s get confrontational!
Confrontation gets a bad rap because it does bring up images of anger and unpleasantness. But it shouldn’t. According to the dictionary, to “confront” is “to come face-to-face with.” That’s all. It doesn’t say anything about anger or fists pounding desks or anything like that . . . it only says “to come face-to-face with.” That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? To be sure, some issues we may need to face are loaded with more emotional baggage than others, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore or avoid them.
The problem here is that if people see that the CEO avoids confronting the tough issues, they will too. Or worse, if they see the CEO confronting issues in a way that confirms their worst fears about confrontation (red face, yelling, screaming, etc.), they will continue to avoid it. So the answer must be for the CEO to set a positive example for how we handle confrontation around here. Here’s what that positive example would look like:
- The CEO does not sweep the tough issues under the rug nor does he or she allow others to do so. If there’s an elephant in the room, let’s give it a name and talk about it.
- The blame game is something the CEO keeps out of the room. It doesn’t matter how we got here, and finger pointing does nothing to help us. This is where we are and we need to focus on what we’re going to do about it. Nothing else matters right now.
- In a confrontational situation, the CEO needs to establish the “rules of engagement” . . . namely that we can disagree without being disagreeable. That means we treat each other with respect and we don’t impugn our colleagues with dishonorable or unworthy motives. We absolutely want robust, spirited debate about our tough issues, but when the debate ends, we need to be able to walk away as friends and colleagues.
- Getting the issue or problem out in the open and talking about it is a good first step, but it’s a waste of time unless we do something about it. Sometimes, because the issue is too scary, too complex, or too unclear, the discussion ends in an uncomfortable silence with no resolution. Therefore, once the talking is done, the CEO must insure a path forward has been identified and responsibilities for action steps have been assigned.
When the CEO models these behaviors, they trickle down to the rest of the management team, and then to the rest of the company. Ultimately, they become part of the company’s DNA, part of its culture. And that sends a powerful message, not only to everyone inside the company, but also to its customers, vendors, and suppliers. The message is, “We don’t ignore problems around here. When we find ‘em, we face ‘em, and we fix ‘em. We’re confrontational!”
