CHAPTER 8

What Horses Taught Me about Conflict

Because we urge you to use conflict, you may think we’re fight fans. We’re not! There is a clear distinction between fighting and using conflict. In fact, they’re at different ends of the same continuum.

Let’s back up and discuss fighting, and even flight-ing, and the opt-out styles.

You may remember that the superstar opt-out style includes behavior that could be interpreted as fighting. Superstars think their opinion is right, they want to move the meeting along, and they are dismissive of other peoples’ reservations. Separators, on the other hand, demonstrate behavior that could be interpreted as flight. They disengage in the topic, walk out of the room, and don’t participate in team activities. Accommodators have a different flavor of flight behavior. They omit their own opinion, they ask questions, and they short-circuit the disagreement by changing the topic.

All of these opt-out styles are on one end of the continuum. Opting in with conflict is on the other.

FIGHTING AND FLIGHT-ING VERSUS USING CONFLICT

Fighting and flight-ing are one-dimensional. Use of conflict is multidimensional and creates the space for both the leader and team to show up fully.

Susan coaches star performers in an organization who get results, and who run over others in the process. When she works with these clients, they initially say, “I don’t know what the problem is. I’m doing my job and getting the results.” Their point is valid. Organizations tend to reward star players for strong business results and either overlook or hope the associated aggressive behaviors will eventually shift.

The Superstar leaders she coaches have strong opinions and believe they are right. Day-to-day they tell people what to do; they focus on getting things done. If someone doesn’t perform, they go around them. If that person is a direct report, these leaders are quick to fire them, more so than are other styles of leader. This aggressive tendency isn’t all bad. It drives action. But left unchecked it undermines the leader, the team, and the organization overall. Action for action’s sake is not always, or even usually, the best strategy. Without slowing down to consider the input of those around them, this leader can accomplish a lot, but undermine the business overall because he gets results in a silo. He misses how his action impacts others. This leader thwarts the development of the collective team intelligence.

To shift from fight behaviors to using conflict, this leader needs to be aware of the impact his behavior has on others. It is good to start with people the leader respects, because they are more likely to listen and recognize that they may not be right. This helps the leader develop the muscle of curiosity.

CrisMarie often works with leaders who were previously high performers, but now, for some reason, struggle. It could be that their confidence has waned, they are not being assertive, or they hold on to poor performers too long. These leaders are generally well liked by their direct reports and are themselves very hard working. However, their own performance slips because they don’t stand up for their own point of view, they say yes to requests for work, they take on too much, and they keep giving their direct reports another chance.

This type of leader has more of a flight style, and when issues arise, she resorts to asking questions or minimizing tension through avoidance, using diplomacy, or being nice and polite. Again, these skills are useful in relationship building, but by themselves, they do not create success in the workplace. This leader is not serving herself, the team, or the organization.

To shift from flight behaviors to using conflict, this leader needs to develop the ability and courage to speak up with her own honest, frank opinion, and engage in dialogue, tolerating others being upset. Yes, this will be challenging and uncomfortable at first. However, when she can stand forth and voice her opinion, she regains confidence. Then she is more effective at giving feedback to poor performers, and if the behavior doesn’t improve, she will make the call to finally let a poor performer go.

At team meetings, the combination of the fight and flight behaviors is unproductive. Even though some team members speak up, it’s often by interrupting or talking over other people, with little pause or reflection of anyone else’s input. Those who choose flight are either silent or simply managing the tension by smoothing over the disagreements. When we work with teams like this, the person who has fight behaviors tells us, “Oh, we have great conflict and debate in our meetings!” We don’t hear anything from people with flight behaviors until we take a break. Then they tell us privately, “Our meetings have terrible conflict. No one listens to each other.”

These teams show evidence of conflict, but they are not using that energy for collective brilliance. Instead, the loudest idea wins, and it’s a one-dimensional solution. It is important to note here that a fight behavior is just another coping style for dealing with the building tension and ambiguity in the room. It does not indicate the ability to leverage differences to develop a greater team intelligence. You may be surprised to learn that fighting is still a conflict-avoidance strategy.

The team dysfunction is not due only to the fight behaviors. People with both fight and flight behaviors are equally responsible for the dysfunctional dynamic. It is the leader’s job to shift the dynamic to help the team engage and use conflict for collective results.

Let’s reiterate; even we don’t love conflict. What we do love is the perfect storm that occurs when vision, opinion, and passion come together. Handled correctly, that combination is fertile ground for creativity, innovation, and aha moments. The key? You guessed it: opting in to the pressure of conflict and allowing the tension to build. Let us use horses to demonstrate.

HORSES AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Susan is a certified Equus Coach, expert at using horses for leadership development. She also uses horses with entire teams and continues to be awed at the impact on individuals and groups when working with a horse.

On a physical level, horses are gorgeous, powerful, and neurologically quite sensitive. On a spiritual level, well, there’s a reason these animals appear in so many mythological stories and are considered symbols of mystery and majesty. But what really surprises us, and why Susan uses them in working with people, is their keen sense of emotional intelligence. This makes them excellent mentors for reading and working with conflict.

Horses are prey animals. They never look for a fight. Instead, they constantly scan and read their environment for signs of danger. They have a sophisticated zone of awareness, meaning they notice the instant someone comes into the pasture. They read that person behaviorally, energetically, and emotionally from a significant distance and make instantaneous decisions to move, flee, or be on alert.

As that person moves in closer, she enters the horse’s zone of pressure. The horse goes on high alert. You would think the horse, as a prey animal, would run away. However, under pressure, a horse will lean in.

This instinct comes from years of survival of the fittest. The equine species learned that when under attack, or when a predator gets its jaws into the horse’s underbelly, if the horse runs, it will tear their skin and expose their intestines.2 The horse will likely die. The horse leans in to prevent the predator from ripping its skin. For horses, opting in is lifesaving.

For years, we’ve encouraged leaders and teams to do the same—stop fighting and start using conflict. We have been met with skepticism because people typically believe that to survive conflict requires pushing away the attacker. No way do they want to lean into that enemy!

However, as we’ve discussed throughout this section, we’ve found over and over again that when you are curious about what the other person has to say, rather than pulling away, everything shifts. It’s no longer your idea versus their idea. A whole new set of ideas, solutions, and possibilities emerges.

Of course, people aren’t horses. Humans have a natural tendency to avoid, deny, or bully through issues. But if you want to reap the benefits of conflict, you would do well to learn from these amazing animals. There are three steps to opting in to conflict, which we’ve drawn straight from the behavior of horses.

1. Find Your Zone of Awareness

Notice when you begin to pick up signals of the energy and behavior of people around you. Indicators that people are escalating into opting out can be nonverbal:

Or the signs can be verbal:

Practice looking for these signals early on, before the situation gets into the zone of pressure or escalation.

When a horse wants a relationship with you, he lets you know when you’re not being clear or when he needs more space. He ignores ambivalent signs and signals and waits for clear ones, or he moves away if you try to come too close.

2. Don’t Assume—Test and Check

When reading signs and signals from others in your zone of awareness, don’t assume you know their intentions. Horses test and check. For you, explicitly testing and checking can be as simple as saying, “I notice you’ve repeated the same point several times. I’m wondering if you’re uncomfortable or don’t think I’m listening to you.”

3. Under Pressure, Opt In

A horse under pressure literally leans in, putting its weight against another animal’s body. It doesn’t flee or fight; it surrenders. Surrender is helpful in our human interactions, too. In that zone of pressure or escalation, when the situation is most tense, what if you surrender, suspend your own agenda, get vulnerable, and be curious about the other person’s point of view? We think you’ll be surprised by the impact you can make doing something horses have done successfully for more than 10,000 years.3

Prey vs Predator

Here’s the deal: unlike horses, humans aren’t prey animals. Our instinctive nature allows for fight or flight: prey or predator. However, we do have the capacity to develop choice and go against our instinct, to lean in and engage our hearts and minds.

Humans in disagreement can get caught in the fight-or-flight reflex. For you as a leader, that undermines you, the team, and the bottom-line business results. In your fight-or-flight mode, you don’t think clearly, don’t have access to your best resources, and won’t support the development of the team’s collective intelligence. Learn to develop your emotional intelligence, just like a horse. Build the zone of awareness of yourself and others, be curious, and check out what is happening with others in the room.

Next up, we’ll take this out of the pasture and into the office to explore the issue of getting and keeping employees engaged.