How do move forward when you get into clashes and power struggles?
We often get into situations when we feel unheard or want to assert our opinion, especially when managing sideways to peers or upwards to folks more senior. This can lead to a kind of power struggle head on clash of opinion against opinion. The counter intuitive approach to moving past this is not to tell, but to ask questions.
## Transcript
Intro
How do you move forward when you get into clashes and power struggles with colleagues and stakeholders? This week I want to talk again about the power of asking questions.
Dealing with opinion clash
We often get into situations when we feel unheard or want to assert our opinion, especially when managing sideways to peers or upwards to some folks more senior than us.
And this can lead to a kind of power struggle that ends up being just a head-on clash of opinion against opinion. The sometimes counterintuitive approach to moving past this is not to tell more, or to emphasize more or to try and get your opinion across more, but to ask questions.
On what basis are we building this?
Some favorite ones are very simple.
One is on what basis are we deciding to build this? So when you’ve got someone who’s saying, we are going to build this feature or they’ve just decided this is the next thing to be creating. If you ask them on what basis are we deciding to build this? They should have some kind of data, ideally from some research, and they should be able to tell you.
Now if they can’t tell you and they just go, well, it’s just my opinion. Well then you’re in an opinion against opinion thing. ‘cause you might say, well, in my opinion we shouldn’t. But then you can point that out. Then you can say, well it seems to me that we are in just having opinion against opinion. How can we find some more data to move us forward? There you might suggest doing some kind of experiments, doing some more research and so on.
Or maybe that person doesn’t know. That’s the beauty of asking questions. because you put the responsibility back on them to make the case rather than you having to make the case of why they’re wrong. So they will either know and they’ll tell you or they won’t know and they may have an aha moment where they’re like, oh, actually yeah, no, we should get some more data around that and understand that better.
Intent
Another useful question is what’s the intent behind this? Whether that’s a feature or a policy or a process, because people get dogmatic about, oh, that’s just the next one off the backlog, or, well, that’s just policy and so we have to do it.
But when you ask what’s the intention behind it, it’s the why behind the why classically, and it helps broaden out the problem space and you might have a different way of approaching it. It also gets you out of that problem where people are very focused on pushing a metric that has become a target, if you know Goodhart’s Law. For example, we need to go from being a two star app to a five star app in the app store. But why? Why? No, we just want to do that. But actually, if you read all the comments, it tells you exactly what you need to do.
Governance
Another good question, particularly if you are collaborating with peers, is how do we make decisions? It’s a funny question because it seems like, well, we just decide on stuff. But actually, if you don’t have a formal process or a formal kind of governance around this, then it just becomes whoever’s loudest or has the most influence in the room, and it’s not really actually an intentional and informed decision making. Lisa Welchman wrote a really good book called Managing Chaos about this.
So for example, you might say, well, when we are just opinion against opinion and we recognize that, what do we do? Go and get some more data and so on. It could be that someone says, well, when we don’t really know one way or the other, and it’s not tragic, which the decision is, it kind of doesn’t really matter who decides.
Or it may be that someone says, yeah, when we’re not sure and we’re sort of deadlocked, I’ll make the captain’s call because I’m the the boss. None of those is inherently wrong. But the point is that you want to be agreed and aligned on that upfront.
The questions become part of the process
You may find, as you use those questions often that you’re repeating yourself a bit too much, and so you can soften this a little bit by saying, look, I know I’m always the one asking this, but, what’s our intent behind this?
Sometimes what happens when you drip, drip away with that same question is people start to internalize it and so they, they do it in advance. For example, they might say, and because Andy always asks this, here’s the intent behind this thing, and that’s great now you’re in a very different kind of conversation and relationship with those people than you were before when it’s just one of you trying to persuade the other one that you are right and they’re wrong.
Outro
I hope that’s useful for you. If you’d like to check out my coaching practice, it is at polaine.com/coaching and I’ll put the link below. If you’ve got any of your own tips, please post the comment below. I love to hear them.
Thanks very much, and I’ll see you again
