Stardate S01E31
By: Sean K. Gabriel
Tags: Conflict Management, Consulting, Product Management, Season 1, Speaking

Mood: 🤹‍♂️. Spinning lots of plates, using a bit of burst capacity. It’s hard to resist popping my head around lots of corners!

Paolozzi’s ventilation obelisk, outside Pimlico station

🌹 What am I grateful for this week?

I feel like I pulled off a mini-EGOT by getting to take part in each discipline’s away days this year. Really enjoying the community vibes and virtually hanging out with a bunch of Badgers I wouldn’t normally get to see.

I hope they didn’t mind my gate-crashing! I felt a bit sheepish during my pechakucha for the product team and ended up introducing myself as the delivery guy who snuck his way in 😆. But actually putting my slides together reminded me of my product background and what I was up to 10 years prior at Microsoft:

Where I wrote my last functional specs. My office had a nice tree view. Sadly, building 1 no longer exists!

This left me with a deeper gratitude, for all the adventures I’ve been able to have over the last decade of my career and where I’ve been since!

🌵 Where did I get stuck this week?

Joining those away days, and trying to drop into a virtual conference, and align folks around a new internal project, and support a new sales lead all on the same week did come at a cost. I found myself slightly overwhelmed by Wednesday and ended up putting in a few early hours* to keep pace.

I’ve been trying to be better about not doing this regularly — it had become a staple of my way of working at HSBC, and several folks counseled me on the bad example I was setting. But given the variety of time-sensitive things I wanted to participate in this week, it seemed reasonable to do a one-off. Part of the reason I’m calling myself out here is so I can check back and make sure this doesn’t become a pattern!

💡 What stuck with me this week?

Julia made a guest appearance at our product day to share her thoughts on productive ideological conflict, and she made a great case for why you want to sit just past the midpoint between artificial harmony and violent disagreement, i.e. to lean in to potential conflict rather than fear it. Practically speaking, this means inviting a productive clash of ideas with phrases like:

May I challenge that? I’ve got a different view on that. Would it be helpful to hear it?

Which allow for an affirmative response from your counterpart, setting the stage and avoiding an unexpected challenge. I also quite like Julia’s idea of “conflict contracts” to encourage discussions like these as a team norm. Reminds me a lot of the cognitive diversity argument and making sure we give sufficient space for it to shine through in our teams.

Lean in to potential conflict — great ideas can come from it. Try to establish norms before the storming, if you can.

📚 What did I discover this week?

I loved the honesty of this write-up, it feels like the sort of thing we should all share at some point. For my part, I’ve failed multiple interviews at Google and Amazon over the years. Plenty of others that haven’t invited me to interview. All part of the journey.

Answering questions with questions — yes, it can be an annoying tactic if overused, but the wisdom here is to not assume that that question is the right one to be asking. Responding with another keeps the conversation open**.

I often find it difficult to explain the consultant-client dynamic to friends who have only ever worked in-house; this article gives a nice overview of what new layers that new dynamic adds to your work (along with the actual delivery, of course!).

🌱 What am I looking forward to next week?

Product strategy is back on the docket for our internal team, and we’re covering a territory in support of Mission Beyond. It seems like it was around this time two years ago I was just getting indoctrinated into this experimental process with Mark’s help — and now I have a chance to pay it forward again. ✌️

🏠 AOB

Flying solo this week while Lisa is away in Canada. Looking forward to joining her soon and having a nice long quarantine once I arrive. Funny how none of us were giving coronavirus a second thought last Christmas (well, at least nobody outside of Wuhan). Fingers crossed that I don’t catch anything during my travels.