[leff_f]

I'm studying psychology and team dynamics and this is such a great example of conflict destroying the relationship. Want to share couple of thoughts on how we can avoid sacrificing the relationship.

-I'm 'The responsible'. Yes, as leaders, we are responsible for the results, at the same time there are people above us who is responsible for the results more than us. The responsibility is never on the shoulders of a single person in the company. When higher-ups support anti-leaders (as in this case), they take on some of our responsibility, and the honest discussion about their expectations is required. There could be lots of reasons for them being not confident in me driving the team, and it would be very beneficial to get their feedback before proceeding. Our assumptions and using formal understanding of the roles is only helping to fuel the conflict.

-The 'I know' trap. We really believe in our understanding of the future, it is always linear and always clear. At the same time, future we understand consists of 2 things: all the bad stuff happened to me before and all the good stuff happened to me before and depending on our feelings right now, we are projecting the mix of those 2 into the future. The question here is where is that 3rd category of all the thing that never happened to me? Where are the things I've never experienced? What if I don't know how this will play out? To me, creativity is something not known and something haven't been done before. Allowing ourselves to not know exactly how it will play out, helps us to keep an open mind and learn from the new experiences.

In other words we are never 100% responsible for controlling everything around us and the world is a bit more complicated than we want to believe. Hoping this was useful! Happy Friday!

[ripsawridge]

It was useful, thanks! I've definitely seen this in tech, esp. the latter case, which I've seen make smart people who deserve better miserable.