Are you choosing your style or running on default…
When we have differences of opinion, or conflicts of ideas, what’s the best way to come to a solution?
It’s a genuine question.
Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen the competitive approach in full effect. Different politicians of different parties have laid out their policies, along with their fulsome critiques of the ideas, ideologies, and often the characters of their adversaries, in front of us, the population, their judge and jury at the ballot box.
I use judge and jury deliberately, because our legal system is based the same competitive model, each party engaging an advocate, trained in the adversarial process of the courtroom.
It’s also the dominant model in commissioning: define the specification, pass some minimum standards to be on a framework, then get all the players competing on price.
And it’s the default style inside many organisations too – each directorate lays out their pitch, for resources and a share of the budget, for their targets and plans over the coming year, or the rationale for why this team or this decision should now fall under their aegis.
And in each case, the boss, the commissioner, the judge, or the public at large, having listened to the arguments, makes the call, and everyone falls in line and goes back to being civil to each other. Or they don’t.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen what happens when they don’t. Politicians tearing chunks off each other in adversarial contests, unable to reconcile and collaborate once that contest is over; a public increasingly split into factions; a fragmented and often fractious VCSE sector; employees downing tools; stakeholders venting on social media.
And yet, despite all those implications, we still default to that adversarial model. Why?
It isn’t because there’s aren’t good alternatives – there are.
Mostly it’s because we’ve been conditioned that way: educated in an environment of competing for grades and merits, and then, having competed some more through CV-writing and interview processes, most of us moved into a workplace in which we might superficially work as a team, but I have my goals and you have yours, and each of us is looking to catch the boss’s eye for that next step on the ladder.
You’re not choosing your style any more than I’m consciously choosing mine.
We’re all just following our programming. In the immortal words of Ted Lasso’s mum: “Winner, winner, B F Skinner”. So it’s hardly surprising that adversarial competition is our default route for negotiating conflict when our system is overwhelmingly set up that way.
Often, we’re so habituated to one particular style we don’t even realise there are alternatives, let alone that we each have a choice, in every situation, about which style might be best to adopt.
When was the last time that you, or anyone you know, got trained in collaboration? When did you last appraise a team purely on their shared goals?
More to the point, when did you last find yourself consciously choosing your style for a particular discussion?
These choices have a huge bearing, not just on political discourse, but on organisational culture and leadership effectiveness as well. Competition requires an arbiter – a judge or a boss, someone to pass a verdict.
Which means that in any organisation where adversarial competition is the default way to resolve tensions, the power must sit at the top, people must learn to look upwards for the answer, and the culture inevitably becomes one of heroic leaders, backroom alliances, resistance and learned helplessness.
But just as there is an entire spectrum of leadership styles to suit different situations, so there is an entire spectrum of styles for navigating conflict.
And we know this. We’ve all experienced it to some degree, whether in creative discussions, in loose coalitions, in groups of friends planning a night out, we’ve all found ourselves in that collaborative peer-group space, finding creative solutions that meet everyone’s needs.
It’s not easy, nor is it always appropriate, but the challenges facing society over the coming years, even those facing the sector today, are not ones that any organisation can tackle alone.
They need us to collaborate. We need us to collaborate. And there is no “upwards” to which we can look for solutions or arbitration. If we’re going to lead positive change together, we need to choose and model a different leadership style.
A style that treats others as collaborators rather than competitors; that transfers power to those who have the expertise and insights to use it wisely; that creates an environment for consensus and commitment rather than contention and competition.
We are all products of our environment. We all have strengths and defaults, shaped by our past and by the practices we’ve been taught. But equally we all have a choice.
Even if that choice is to default to our conditioning, it’s still a choice.
How are you exercising yours? How are you choosing your style?