Strategies to reduce drama at work
Part 1: From Blaming to Problem Solving
Drama at the office seems to be a constant presence. People keep looking for solutions to conflict, toxicity, clash of personalities, cliques, antagonizing factions, and other problematic behavior. Many times we simply work around these issues and hope they will solve themselves, but it’s good to have a few tools to actively reduce the drama.
This series of posts (it was just too long as a single piece) are not surefire solutions for a total drama-free workplace. I believe drama at work is not something you solve; it’s something you manage. I just reflected on a few things that have helped me understand where drama was coming from, and that can help us snap out of it.
A short story
A few years ago, I worked at a company where a group of coaches and product owners collaborated closely together. Both teams effectively constituted the bulk of the leadership layer for a group consisting of dozens of people. While meant to be a partnership, coaches were effectively reporting to the product owners from a hierarchical point of view. Things were civil for a while, but the coaches started to notice they were being kept in the dark on significant decisions and became annoyed, feeling their expertise was not being put to good use and frustrated about having to clean up the mess after staffing decisions they hadn’t made backfired.
Pretty soon, venting became a habit, sometimes behind doors, sometimes quite publicly. The team at large began to wonder what was going on, feeling uncomfortable with the struggle and, in many cases, pushed to take sides. Product owners questioned whether the coaches were actually helpful, capable, or even willing to do their jobs.
After some effort to mediate the conflict but failing to understand and solve the underlying root causes, product owners exercised their authority, asked coaches to behave, and moved on. Coaches started to feel hopeless about their situation and bad about themselves. Maybe they were not assertive enough, not relevant enough to make the decisions that truly mattered in this organization. The product owner group reiterated how much they appreciated contributions from the coaches, but appreciation didn’t solve the root causes. Within a few months, many of the coaches left the organization, and those who stayed made parallel moves or joined other departments.
I am sorry I can’t give you a happy ending this time, but this story exemplifies what I mean by drama in the workplace and allows me to connect a few common threads:
- Disagreement and frustration turning into blaming
- Creation of factions and drama impacting the culture at large
- Venting as a habit
- Hostility making groups unable to problem-solve together
- Power dynamics at play preventing a win-win resolution from happening
- Blaming others turning into self-blaming, leading to hopelessness
- Finding that the only way out of a painful situation is to quit the problem altogether
- The high cost to business from all of these
Frustration turning into blaming
Blame happens to be a natural reaction to frustration, and we all experiment it as an initial mental state. While difficult at first, we need to start seeing the positives in facing disagreements. They become a problem when we lack the skill to navigate them. If we get stuck in frustration and blame, we are contributing to a culture of hostility, aggression, and general drama.
We can blame other people, we can blame environmental factors, or we can blame ourselves. When we blame people, we are doing “Personality Attribution” — as author Anna Maravelas writes[1], we make assumptions about others or about ourselves. It may seem like a personal choice, but it has implications for the work environment and culture at large.
- Blaming others often comes with assumptions about people’s incompetence, ill will, or stupidity. It leads to rage, resentment, and feelings of aggression. In best cases, we end up avoiding others, and when escalated, we end up antagonizing and attacking each other. You can see how a personal assumption you make can devolve into a toxic work environment.
- Blaming ourselves is no better (although, more socially acceptable). It triggers feelings of hopelessness and can lead to depression. From an office culture point of view, it’s easy to understand how depressed people can make for a disengaged and withdrawn workforce.
So, what to do when facing situations in which individuals or teams keep blaming others for their circumstances. Or when groups take a defeating angle on things, a “this is what it is” mindset, accepting to endure conditions nobody is happy about?
Well, there is no silver bullet, but most sources agree that our best chance is to adopt a position of calm curiosity and problem-solving. And I admit that this is what has given me the best results.
As disagreement and bias expert, Buster Benson, explains [2] when the clash between two perspectives, what we call disagreement, becomes unacceptable, we decide that rather than understanding other people’s minds, we need to change them. And that leads to trouble because we can only change our own minds and our own behavior.
This kind of approach may seem challenging, especially if emotions are running high. But you need to realize that the change in behavior starts with oneself. Benson advocates for us to start appreciating disagreements as opportunities for growth, connection, and enjoyment instead of as problems that need to be squashed or avoided.
In our short story if the groups in disagreement had understood the need to understand each other and make progress towards sharing goals within their constraints instead of acting from positions of power (product owners) and avoidance (coaches), the outcome could have been different.
Stretch Collaboration
In “Collaborating With The Enemy” (a book with the best subtitle ever: “How to work with people you don’t agree with or like or trust”), Adam Kahane talks [3] about the concept of Stretch Collaboration. It is a way to move forward when we are not in control; when we can’t effect change unilaterally, and we can’t control the focus, goal, and plan to reach an outcome.
He gives three dimensions for this kind of collaboration
- How we relate to the people with whom we are collaborating — we need to find, appreciate, and work with connections that exist in the group, even in the face of mistrust and absence of harmony.
- How we advance the work of the team — if we can’t agree to a “best solution”, we need to stretch and experiment with multiple perspectives and discover what works and what can move us forward.
- How we participate in the situation we are trying to address — because we cannot get anyone to do anything, we need to be open to changing what we ourselves are doing.
So again, we go back to the idea that the key to less drama lies within ourselves. And it’s good when everyone gets the memo.
The Responsibility Process
I explain The Responsibility Process [4] a lot. I even wrote about it quite recently, but it happens to be the best “tool” I have for this. And yes, this is not a model you can force on other people, as you will see. It’s something to personally exercise and model, but we can teach about it and hope the awareness contributes to a healthier environment.
The basic principle behind it is to stop thinking of “responsibility” as a personal trait and start considering it a mental state that anyone can reach. In this state, we are “able to respond,” we have the freedom and ability to exercise that calm curiosity and problem solving we want.
The model pioneered by Christopher Avery takes only a few minutes to explain. I usually do it in one-to-one contexts with the intent that individuals can learn and become excited about personal Responsibility. Still, I’ve found it’s worth introducing it to groups as well. Avery claims it’s the only team norm you would ever need, and I tend to agree.
We all go through several mental stages when exposed to some conflict or frustration; this is when the reality we want and the one we got are not the same. Sometimes we go through the stages very quickly and sometimes slower, and we can get stuck somewhere in the process, which is what can lead to the problem behavior. The stages appear in the infographic below.
Let’s go back to our short story, and try to identify the different stages in it:
- Blame: it’s someone else’s fault — “we are cleaning up the mess, it’s their fault they keep making decisions without us. They don’t know what they are doing!.”
- Justify: another form of blaming, where we blame some environmental factor — “this is what happens when you have an organization hierarchy like this.”
- Shame: yet more blaming, this time we blame ourselves — “How did I become a glorified secretary? How is that I am not trusted enough to make smart decisions? Am I useless?”
- Obligation: we do something because we have to, not because we want to — “Well, the salary is good, and it’s an easy job. I don’t feel any kind of fulfillment, but I can, for sure, keep doing this for a while.”
- Responsibility: I can respond to this situation in a way that I fully own — “Ok, this situation doesn’t work, and it’s making me mad! But I have the freedom of choice. I can get angry, keep my head down, be miserable, and hate coming to the office. Or I can try to make it work. If we can understand where the trust issues are coming from, we can generate some options.”
I want to reiterate that we cannot impose Responsibility on others. People take Responsibility. When we talk about holding agreements and expectations, we are discussing Accountability. People are held accountable. In Swedish (and other languages), there are not two separate words for these concepts, which makes it more confusing than it needs to be.
In Avery’s model, the first key to Responsibility is the Intention [to operate from Responsibility]. I often assume everyone would want to aspire to reach the Responsibility state, and then find myself surprised and slightly disappointed when I realize it’s not always the case. Again, not something I can force people towards. But one thing I would say, if you find individuals that don’t, this is where your red flags should kick-in. These are the people who are most likely to perpetuate whatever toxic behavior they are engaged in, and might pose a risk to the culture you are trying to build.
Safety
My friend Eva Tamashi came up with a reflection while discussing this topic that might sound obvious, but worth mentioning — it has been easier for her to adopt the problem-solving stance with her teenage daughter than it has been to do the same at work. One of the biggest blockers to feel like we can get past blame is the absence of a safe environment, which is critical to building an environment with less hostility and drama. She also believes schools should be teaching about this, which I have to agree would be a good idea for everyone!
You may have heard about safety in the last two years more times than “All I want for Christmas is you” in the past two months, and if you haven’t, just google it, I am not going to explain about it in here. The critical point to make is that if you are practicing leadership, you have a responsibility to find ways to help people express their concerns and frustrations freely and early before they become stuck in blame. It starts with showing vulnerability, curiosity, and empathy. You might not like what people around you are saying, but if we can go into problem-solving, remain calm, identify, and address the root causes, you can manage the frustration down.
If all this Stretch Collaboration and Responsibility stuff turn out to be too much for some people, the only thing I ask them is to remind themselves, when facing frustration, that there is always a reason for any given situation. Ultimately all of us need to make choices about how we want to live. We can choose to believe everyone is useless, and that the world is hopeless and conspiring against us. Or we can choose to think everyone is OK and we just need to be curious and learn about each other. This choice will affect our communication, and the environment around us will respond in return [5].
Managing energy levels
The one “good thing” about a culture where blaming others and creating factions is commonplace is that somehow we get energy from all this anger. It’s common to find people addressing depressed teams with a toxic rallying cry — “No wonder you are in this state, your previous manager was crap!” or “This company sucks, but we are a T.E.A.M., and we are going to be fine!”. It’s the oldest trick in the book; it builds trust and re-energizes teams fast. But the benefits are short-lived. You have now normalized hostility and aggression, and it can be hard to come back from that. I’ve seen this plenty of times. I have done it myself. Common sense tells us that we should all work together and compete with our competitors, but in the end, it’s easier to fight an enemy you can see, and those are usually in-house.
This “negative” energy doesn’t usually translate into high productivity. A lot of effort goes into complaining and venting rather than creating value and trying to make things better.
One aspect to keep an eye on if you are trying to reduce drama and aggression is the fact that as you reduce hostility, the energy levels will go down. The group may move from blaming others to self-blaming and may become disengaged in the process.
Make sure you have something ready for people to engage in before you start addressing the toxic behavior. A mistake I’ve made myself is to coach someone, reducing hostility but failing to provide a focus to keep the momentum going. If you are getting comments like “thanks, I am going to do things differently now — and now what? How can I help?”, that’s a sign you may have failed to re-channel their energy. A continuous improvement backlog or a good honest retrospective may provide useful items for people to invest their newly freed energy.
Coming Up
This post was about the impact of leaving blame unchecked as the primary reaction to frustrations. Raising awareness, moving ourselves to a problem-solving stance, and understanding how we can take Responsibility may help. It’s not easy! But you have to start somewhere.
In Part 2, we will explore the problem with venting and the fascinating field of Transactional Analysis.
Thanks to Eva Tamashi for her input while putting this series together.
References
[1] Anna Maravelas: “Creating a Drama-Free Workplace” (2020)
[2] Buster Benson: “Why Are We Yelling: The Art of Productive Disagreement” (2019)
[3] Adam Kahane: “Collaborating with the Enemy” (2017)
[4] Christopher Avery: “The Responsibility Process” (2016)
[5] Anita Mountain & Chris Davidson: “Working Together” (2016)
