Dear Jarred
We are experiencing major conflict in our leadership team! There are big personality clashes and I feel like I spend a lot of my day mediating between people who should really be better than this. As a fellow CEO is this a situation you’ve faced yourself and is it the job of the CEO to fix interpersonal problems like this?
~ Floundering In Great Hell Today, Sandton
Dear FIGHT
One of the most damaging situations for a business is when its senior leadership can’t resolve their differences. At the root of these clashes is usually one of three things: A lack of clarity in role or responsibility. A personality clash. Or misaligned incentives. Two of these are clearly things the CEO or leader can fix, one you can’t.
Role and responsibility
Hiring someone for a job is the easy part. Once they have the title and are sitting in the chair the question becomes what exactly are the accountable for?
I know from a lot of personal experience that finding a great person and putting them in a role feels like a huge win. That win tarnishes quickly when the person starts doing unpredictable things because no-one has set out clearly for them what the boundaries of their role are and how they are being measured.
There is no need to invent this stuff yourself. Most jobs, unless you’re inventing something obscure, have standard job descriptions available out there.
Attached to this you want to put together a RACI: Responsible (does the work); Accountable (owns the result); Consulted (provides input) and Informed (updated on progress)). If you’ve never worked with RACI before, it’s a simple document that makes it crystal clear who the final word is on key decisions and where the person just has input on someone else’s decision.
Clarity prevents clashes
This is true at every level of the organisation not just the senior leadership team. The more clarity each person has on what they are responsible and accountable for the less people crash into each other as they go about their days.
This seems obvious but it is extremely common for these steps to be missed. You hire a Chief Technology Officer, for example, and you assume they come with a pre-baked understanding of what the job entails. But every company is different and therefore one CTO and another do not have the same things on their plate.
As a leader in business it’s your job to be specific with your people as to (a) what you want them to do (b) what they have the final decision on and (c) how you will measure their performance.
People with unclear responsibilities will clash with each other because they will be trying to work on the same things at the same time.
Personality clash
Teams are made up of humans and humans have personalities. Some personalities gel, some don’t. And some personalities are also better suited to working collaboratively than others.
As a leader you can’t be expected to change someone’s personality. That was their parents’ job, if anything, and requires personal work which each adult should be ready and willing to go off and do.
In my opinion any two people can work together, no matter how different their style or attitudes, provided both are committed to working at the relationship. If one or both make no effort and don’t see it as partially their responsibility to compromise and gel there is little you as a leader can do to fix the situation.
The one thing that is your responsibility is to provide feedback. Feedback is a fascinating thing because it can feel scary to give and scary to receive. If you see a meeting in your diary called ‘Manager Feedback’ most people immediately assume it’s going to be difficult and are putting up mental defenses long before the scheduled time arrives.
This is clearly the wrong outlook. Feedback is a genuine gift from one person to another. It’s someone taking enough interest in you to share how you come across, how you are received and where your strengths and weaknesses are. And as a leader the ability to give feedback and receive feedback from your people is a core skill.
And so when it comes to ‘personality’ issues the responsibility starts and stops at offering feedback to your team – the work of addressing that feedback rests with them. If your budget stretches to it, offering professional coaching with an outside coach can be a really effective way of supporting someone through this kind of personal development.
Misaligned incentives
The concept of an ‘incentive’ in business (or in life) is another misunderstood one. An incentive is, very simply, how a person derives an advantage from a given situation. Incentives can be financial but there are many, many other kinds ranging from just feeling good to earning more authority to even just being acknowledged for a job well done.
When people on a team are seeking different, incompatible rewards the result can be dysfunction. I see this constantly – one person wants fame the other wants profit; one person wants joy the other person wants power. There are so many and having a clear understanding of what is driving your people is going to help enormously to defuse conflict.
Incentives fall broadly into two buckets: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic rewards include obvious things like salary increases, promotions and bonuses. Intrinsic ones often come down to enjoyment of the work and personal achievement. Both can be allowed to just emerge or can be intentionally put in place by leaders in a business.
It is natural to assume that most people are doing their jobs because you’re paying them to do them. In my experience that is a shallow and often false assumption. Obviously financial reward is important but people don’t spend eight hours a day obsessing over their salary.
Lived experience
What they do obsess about is their lived experience – are they achieving something? Is anyone acknowledging those achievements? Is it hard or easy to get things done?
Alignment of incentives means trying to get people on the same team to want similar outcomes for themselves. This can be orchestrated and encouraged by leadership and if you can line people up behind the same goals they will be inclined to work together to achieve them.
Often by just stopping and thinking about each person’s motivations and engineering them to some extent you can meaningfully shift relationships.
I will say in closing that managing one person to reach a goal is hard. Managing a team to work in sync and productively is incredibly hard. As much as we are a social species we also have in our genes the code for conflict and this is a feature, not a bug, of human groups.
Leaders need to set conditions up as best as possible to help people to stay on a positive track but in the end, as fully grown adults, it’s down to each person to do the work to be a productive part of a social system.
And so you need to know the extent and the limits of your power to construct a great team and do your best within it.
~ Jarred
This story was first published in Jarred Cinman’s Burning Questions newsletter on LinkedIn. Jarred Cinman is the CEO of VML South Africa.
