You think the board’s plan is wrong, your team is pushing back on a decision you’ve already made, or a colleague’s project cuts straight across yours and you know you’ll need their goodwill in six months’ time. Kate and Maddie look at the pull between standing your ground and preserving the relationship: what each end gives you, what it costs when you lean too far, and why so many of us misjudge how much speaking up will actually cost.
In this episode
- The five conflict modes in the Thomas-Kilmann model, and why collaborating is the one that asks you to be assertive and cooperative at the same time
- What happens when a disagreement becomes about who’s right, and the quiet warning sign that people have stopped disagreeing with you
- Kate’s early lesson with a new client: it’s fine to accommodate, but say that’s what you’re doing, or it becomes how things work forever
- The Challenger launch, and the moments when holding your ground matters more than the relationship
- Using the ladder of inference to find the point where two people reading the same report went in completely different directions
Try this
Find the smallest disagreement you can this week and practise on it. If you tend to avoid conflict, that might mean saying no to one small request, or asking to move a meeting. If you tend to dig in, try asking someone who disagrees with you to talk you through their thinking, starting with what they noticed and which part they decided mattered most, and see where your reasoning splits from theirs. Either way, notice whether the cost was what you expected. This is a muscle, and small reps now make the bigger conversations easier when they come.
Over to you
Kate’s tip for getting honest feedback in an annual review was to add one question: “What advice do you have for me?” If you try it, with your own review or with your team, we’d love to hear what it turns up. Write to us at hello@latenightleadership.com.
Research and resources
- Daniel R. Ames and Francis J. Flynn (2007), “What breaks a leader: The curvilinear relation between assertiveness and leadership”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research on getting one’s way while also getting along, and why both too little and too much assertiveness count against leaders. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.2.307
- Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (1974). The two dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness, and the five modes: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. https://kilmanndiagnostics.com [
- Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981). Focusing on interests over positions, why the ongoing relationship often matters more than any single negotiation, and being hard on the problem and soft on the people.
- Brené Brown, Dare to Lead (2018). “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”
- Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). The emotional bank account, which Kate first learned from her dad, a teacher.
- Richard Strozzi-Heckler on declines as a commitment to the relationship.
- Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964). The parent, adult and child ego states from transactional analysis.
- The Rogers Commission report on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident (1986).
- Chris Argyris’s ladder of inference, popularised in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (1990). As Kate warns, it’s a big book, and The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994) covers the ladder in a few pages.
- Past episode: Confidence vs Vulnerability, for the people who haven’t read the report but still know what to do.
Next episode
Being or Doing: reflection and presence vs action
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About your hosts
Kate Nicholroy (Good Ideas Agency, https://www.goodideasagency.com) and Maddie Fox (MadFox Group, https://www.madfoxgroup.com) are coaches who work with senior leaders and their teams, and Late Night Leadership grew out of the conversations we kept having with them.
Produced by Tim Fox. Music by Richard Flindell.
Late Night Leadership was formerly A Curious Space.