Three Growth Mindset Filters for Approaching Antagonistic Relationships
One of my former bosses continuously shut my ideas down and regularly spoke to me in more aggressive tone compared to my colleagues. At the time, I felt that this boss was 'antagonistic', and more specifically, always wanted to kick me down. I lost motivation to drive healthy conflict with this individual, since my proposals for process improvement were always denied. Then, I started to think, "Why?" Why does this manager treat me this way. I did not rule out the possibility that all of my ideas were terrible. The criticisms I received were typically quite generic and not constructive, "This idea won't work", therefore I was not learning. As a curious individual, I started to ask, "What factors need improvement" to make sure that I would continuously get better. Over time, I continued to refine my ideas from these learnings, thereby improving my credibility and working relationship with the former 'antagonist'.
Approaching antagonistic relationships with a growth mindset is essential to continually improving both your craft and your working relationships.
When you are leading Healthy Conflict, there are times that a boss or colleague will shut your idea(s) down, potentially multiple times. Let's define the aforementioned phenomena as an "Antagonistic Relationship". Some colleagues may be more antagonistic than others, but in each case, we need to understand the root cause. We need to know what is driving the antagonism, and problem solve accordingly. Let's find out what the building blocks are to turn the criticisms, both constructive and non-constructive, into learning points.
Without negative feedback, our growth will begin to slow. Due to this, we need to view the people shutting down our ideas as our critics, not as our antagonists. Growth will come from learning how to react to and work with these critics. To do so, we need to understand the underlying type of disagreement. The areas of disagreement can be broken out to objectives, ideas, and personal.
We should start by checking if the overall objectives are aligned. If they are not, the first adjustment needs to happens here. If the objectives are aligned, we can then check if there are disagreements on particular ideas and discuss each one by one. If objectives are aligned and all parties agree on the ideas, the final check would be personal disputes. At each step, pay attention to the criticism or disagreement point and look to learn from each one.
Objectives
The overarching goals, objectives, key results, key performance indicators need to be aligned before beginning to discuss projects or ideas. These objectives will likely have deviations across companies, across teams, or potentially even in the same team. If objectives have not been aligned, disagreements and criticism will naturally occur. If you are leading a project and receiving attacks or a lack of cooperation, look to understand the objectives of the involved stakeholders. A logic bridge needs to be built to explain why the project helps the stakeholder's objective. Building these bridges is a key source of learning for any individual.
In my previous role, my job was to increase sales at an early-stage ecommerce company. I worked very closely without marketing team, who had the responsibility of optimizing for user traffic and conversion rates (# orders divided by # visitors). So at highest levels, our objectives are well aligned since more traffic and conversion points to higher sales. However, when I was trying to set up a system for us to track the performance for each campaign, I received hesitation from the marketing team. Upon digging deeper, I uncovered their team was short on headcount and current objective was to stay afloat with their daily activities. To work around this issue, I adjusted the plan, such that the existing marketing team workflow would not need to changed. For those of you who are curious about the details: this involved aggregating data tracked in different working streams, with appropriate software, from multiple teams to all flow into a single report.
Ideas
If objectives are aligned and an antagonist has shut down your idea(s), similarly, we need to determine the underlying reason. If we do not know the rationale, we need to ask our critic for their explanation. Ideally, we want this feedback as detailed as possible. If there was a lapse in communication or the idea was not explained clearly enough, find out why. If there were multiple steps, find out which step(s) were found to be faulty and why. If there are variables that you were not considering but should, find out what are those variables. If no rationale is provided upfront, we need to be persistent to find the reason our idea was not accepted. Persistence can mean rephrasing the line of questioning to the critic or asking other involved and knowledgeable parties for their opinion on the criticism. Understanding our criticism is critical to our personal development, so make sure we chase after the underlying rationale.
After receiving the feedback, ask yourself if you agree with the rationale. If the reasoning is valid, great, we can then look for learning points or think about what we would do differently next time. If you do not agree with the logic, break the problem into smaller steps or relevant parts and discuss each one individually. We need to continue dissecting until we understand how to improve or how to better articulate our logic to the critic. Through this back and forth, both parties should grow and learn how to work each other better moving forward.
While at the same budding ecommerce company, I attempted to develop a solution to improve a particular segment of our operations issues. To give a general overview, when a buyer places an order: the seller needs to prepare/package the items, a third party logistics provider picks up the order and brings it to a distribution center, then the package is sent off to a buyer. The issue occurred between the sellers and the third party logistics (3PL) providers responsible for picking up parcels. If the 3PL did not pick up the parcel, the seller would report this to us. However, when we would contact the 3PL, they would say that the seller was not ready with the items upon the 3PL pickup staff arrival. So my solution to the finger pointing was to have the 3PL pickup staff scan a bar code on the seller's application to verify their arrival. I thought this solution would work wonders, however, the idea was rejected. This was not the first time that an idea to improve operations was shut down. Eventually, I found out that although my solution was valid, the scale of the problem was too small, as a percentage of overall orders, to solve at this time. So moving forward, I would first check for a problem's scale before looking to solve it.
Personal
Disagreements on the personal level should be our last consideration. Ideally, we were able to determine the source of antagonism from objective or idea alignment. It is possible that a boss or team member simply does not like you, to the point that they will disagree with you, or ignore you, even if they agree on objectives and ideas.
As an imperfect manager, I regularly dealt with my team members rejecting my ideas, usually not directly unfortunately, but simply through not executing the agreed upon plans. I approach each situation by trying to understand why. Each time I dig into the underlying issue, I will learn something new. Perhaps their workload is already full. Perhaps I did not explain the idea clearly enough. Perhaps there are issues outside of work slowing them down. Over time, I built out a list of reasons for why we may have personal disagreements. For the following projects, I will consider these past issue drivers before cascading the new work each time. Specifically, I will check team member workloads and run through ideas with a few team members to ensure they are clear beforehand.
For more extreme cases of personal disagreements, such as illogical disagreements based on personal hatred, we should still try to understand the underlying cause - ideally by directly speaking to the individual(s). If the underlying cause is controllable (e.g., repeated mistakes, the way we work), think if making adjustments makes sense to improve working relationships here. If the underlying cause of antagonism is not controllable (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, ideological beliefs) and not improving, I would consider speaking with your human resources department to brainstorm options for a healthier working environment.
Closing Remarks
Some team members can be more antagonistic towards us. We need to learn to work with them properly by
thinking about the improvement points we can make from these criticisms. If the criticisms are not concrete, we need to ask the right questions to find out the underlying cause, so that we can make future adjustments. If there are misunderstandings, look to understand both sides and align on objectives. If there are disagreements, break down the concept into smaller pieces and discuss areas of contention. If there are personal issues, seek to understand why and problem solve controllable pieces. Do not be discouraged from these conflicts, but rather, strive towards continuous learning and growth.
Do you have any antagonistic relationships you would like to share? What was the disagreement area (objectives, ideas, personal)? What did you learn?
