Most team conflict doesn't start in the meeting room. It starts way before that, in a moment nobody caught. And by the time it surfaces, you're already managing the fallout instead of the cause. That is coming up next.
Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business, this is what you do, not who you are.
Welcome to the show folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.
Today we are getting into something that I see on almost every single team that I work with. And the truth is is that most leaders never see it coming until it's already cost them something.
The thing is, is that when I sit down with the leadership team that is dealing with conflict, they've usually already done most of the stuff right on the surface, right.
They've had hard conversations or they've clarified roles or they've worked on communication or maybe they haven't done any of those.
But a lot of the times when somebody's coming to us, they've done something to try and solve it. But the conflict keeps happening anyways.
It's not because, you know, the people are necessarily wrong, but because the pattern underneath hasn't been identified yet. That pattern has a name and I call it the Fear-Control Loop.
And once you see it, you're going to see it everywhere. So let me kind of walk you through this.
The Fear-Control Loop (00:01:38)
Fear is almost always under team conflict. But it doesn't show up, you know, labeled as fear. It shows up as stress, it shows up as frustration.
It shows up as that kind of, you know, I can tell something is off, but I'm not absolutely sure what's going on.
Fear tends to be the thing that causes people to self protect. It's the thing that causes them to pull back from working with team members.
It causes them to not be a team member, to be very selfish and self focused. Right.
If there is a fear that I am going to fail, like there's something bad going to happen, I'm going to mess something up, you know, I'm going to look really stupid to the team, to the leader, to whoever.
That fear of failing can absolutely create conflict on a team. We've all experienced it, we all know what it's like.
It could be that somebody is afraid of being seen as stupid or incompetent or not understanding their role.
Or the person who's supposed to be able to do everything, but currently there's a struggle or something seems to be, you know, causing that person to again, recoil and not really focus on driving things forward. Or solving things.
Whatever it is, it creates that fear inside of that person.
If it's losing influence, maybe it's a leader or a, you know, team member that's been there a long time that they see that whatever's going on in the moment or moving forward with something may cause them to lose influence.
That could absolutely be yet another fear that causes them to self protect. And it also could just be the absolute hatred of conflict because the fear of conflict can absolutely throw somebody directly into conflict.
I know because I don't want to be in conflict. I might self protect, I might attack, I might defend, I might do all kinds of stuff thinking that I'm protecting myself from conflict.
But instead what I'm doing is I'm actually creating more conflict or a different lane of conflict, if you will.
So when fear shows up, the natural response, especially for driven, you know, if we're looking at, like, leaders, driven leaders, capable leaders, many times when fear shows up, the natural response is to control.
[It's] something we talk about all the time in Next-Level Life, that there tends to be some sort of trigger event. Whatever that thing is, it can cause a person to try to control people or to try and control situations.
And if you're getting your worth from people, that's what you're going to control. If you're getting your worth from performance, then you're going to try and control outcomes that fear creates, that desire to, to control.
With leaders this can happen all the time and way too fast. Right. Because it feels, it feels like you're doing the safe thing. Let me just grab control of this situation. Let me protect me in the process.
Let me, you know, drive to a specific outcome. That's got to be the right thing to do. It's got to be the safest thing. If I can manage the outcome, then everything's going to be great.
And yet how often is everything great when you try to control the outcomes?
If I can manage the perception of the team, if the team is, you know, if I think that they're going to be thinking something bad about me, or if I think that they're going to think that I don't know what I'm doing or whatever, if I can control that, then---
No, you're not going to be able to control that.
Well, in fact, you might just enforce a lot of perceptions on the team by trying to take control or trying to control something. Or what about, you know, I got to manage the entire room.
I've got to, you know, all these people are looking at me, I'm supposed to look like I know what I'm doing.
Well, then that very fear is going to show up in how you control people, which is most likely also going to show up in a little bit of anger, you know, a little bit of frustration.
Definitely stress. I can tell you one of the things that I have had to learn in life. I don't apparently show a lot of stress. My wife tells me you don't show a lot of, you don't appear to be stressed out.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm stressed. I'm just trying to solve it as much as I can. But when I do reveal stress, and then one of the things I've noticed is that some people around me take on that stress.
If I'm struggling with something or if I'm frustrated with something, then because it's not something that's seen on a consistent basis. What I have found or what I've discovered is that many times that can cause other people to be stressed out as well.
Well, it's the very thing that we teach leaders not to do. Don't. If you're becoming super stressed, if you're consistently being frustrated, if you're consistently being seen as somebody who has a problem or has an issue, then guess what?
That is communicating to your team how they should respond as well. The problem with all this is that fear based controlling behavior, it doesn't create safety.
It doesn't create the thing that you're wanting it to do.
If you are grabbing control, if you are trying to control people, outcomes, whatever it is, situations, whatever it is, then because you think that that's actually protecting you and it's creating some level of safety and it's actually not.
It creates distance, it creates other people choosing to protect themselves because you're struggling. It creates in your team this, whoa, better let him or her figure this thing out.
But might as well stay away from that for a while because something's going on. Don't know what it is, don't want to know what it is, just want to be far away from it. Or it could also create something that is also painful.
The rescuers may come out. If you are struggling like this, then what you may find is the people pleasers may want to come and rescue you.
Oh my gosh, what's going on? Can I help you? You seem so stressed out. You seem. And then all of a sudden you're going, this is not what I wanted.
What did you want? You wanted control. You wanted to feel okay. You wanted to feel like you're not incompetent, you're not stupid, you're not failing.
The problem is those are all feelings. All of those feelings aren't going to change what's currently happening. You're creating a level of conflict through defensiveness, through stress, through anger, through whatever it is.
You're creating a level of conflict between you, a team member, a team. And that's absolutely driving people to retreat, to maybe stick their head in the sand just to make sure that they don't get in trouble.
Think about it. You've worked for somebody before that struggled, got stressed out. You know, it looked like maybe you might get your head lopped off in the situation.
Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't, but you definitely didn't want to be in the middle of it. That's exactly the kind of conflict that you're trying to prevent.
But you are actually, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. You're creating it and you probably see it in your team.
Maybe you do, maybe you don't. You probably notice some distance. The bad thing that we tell ourselves is that's okay, I can deal with that as long as I feel like I'm in control.
No, that's not solving anything. In fact, think about what it looks like on your team.
What happens to communication? Well, communication, because the current mode of communication is stress, it's frustration, it's potentially anger, it's whatever it is, it's self protection, it's defensiveness.
What happens to everybody else when somebody goes into that style of communication with what it signals to everybody else is forget it, this is not gonna work out.
Protect yourself, take care of you. So communication gets terrible, right? It goes downhill pretty quickly. What about collaboration?
Well, if I feel like collaborating with somebody who is in this stressed out place is going to bring me stress, then the last thing I want to do is collaborate with that person again.
I'll try and go solve things on my own. I'll try and stuff that I've got to get done. Maybe I'm bypassing something that's super important because I don't want to get in conflict.
I don't want to experience that. I also might be somebody who tries to solve everything. Like I say the rescuers.
What if I see that you're struggling or somebody is struggling and then the next thing you know I'm in there trying to get them to talk about it and get them to solve something and get them to do something different and all I'm doing is adding fuel to the fire.
The crazy thing is more times than not, the rescuers create more problem and more conflict. And then we see victim mentality go, I was just trying to help out. And we see more conflict.
Folks, it's such a colossal waste of time. When the thing is, is that we've been trying to not have conflict and now we are standing in a massive puddle of conflict. And the actual source is a feeling that never got named, which is fear.
What breaks the loop? (00:11:57)
The question that breaks the whole entire fear loop:
What am I afraid of right now and what am I trying to control?
It's not a soft question, it's not an easy question.
It's the most practical leadership question you can ask in the middle of any hard session. So I have experienced this a ton of times working with a ton of leadership teams.
There's probably, as I, as I'm going into this, I'm sitting there thinking there's going to be about 50 to 100 different leaders out there listening to the show right now, going, oh, he's talking about me.
Sure, absolutely. Because this is a common thing, guys. This isn't something, if you're experiencing this, you are not the only person to go through this.
This happens all the time until we get it under control, until we recognize that fear is the problem, that self protection is the problem. If we don't get out of that fear loop, then this just continues to happen over and over and over again.
So I've worked with many leadership teams, tons of. And you know, I can, if I just made a, an amalgam of situations, you know, I've worked with leadership teams that have made real progress.
They're busting their butt, they've got better communication, they've got faster resolution, they're actually solving problems instead of just pointing out problems.
They get to a place where they're genuinely building trust between each other and then something starts to happen.
Old patterns start creeping back in. Conversations become shorter. You can, you can just see it happening. You can see people becoming defensive again.
You can see people protecting their turf again. This is, I guarantee you there's a lot of folks listening to this going, he's literally talking about us. Because I am.
Because it's so many different companies and so many different leadership teams.
The problem is, we start busting it, getting things done well, doing really well, and then we forget, you know, we get into this place of feeling really good and safe and then something pops up or somebody makes a comment or something goes wrong and those old patterns start creeping back in.
The moment of honesty is when I ask leaders in these types of situations, hey, one thing started going sideways.
What were you actually feeling? And I will get some of the best responses. You know, hey, you know, some leader might say, I was afraid of losing momentum, we were busting it, we were doing so good.
And then I saw this thing happen, or, you know, I had this question about where we're getting something done.
And so instead of just, you know, allowing the process to work, I started pushing harder. I got fearful that things weren't going to go the way they should, that things were going to start to slow down.
So I pushed harder. I've had other leaders that have said things like, you know, I, I felt like we were doing so much great stuff, but all of a sudden now I'm not.
You know, my work isn't being seen. And so I stopped sharing as much because apparently it doesn't matter and you know, it's not being recognized, which again, that should never be a motivating factor.
But sometimes it truly is. The crazy thing is, is no matter what the situation is, that causes us to allow the old patterns to creep back in. It doesn't mean that we're technically wrong.
It doesn't mean that we're trying to create conflict. What it does mean is we're seeing something start to happen. And we've been here before and this has hurt before, and this has been a struggle before.
And so instead of overcoming with new information, with new patterns, with new processes, sometimes we allow the old process to creep right in.
Sometimes we reach for control as quickly as possible through pressure, through withdrawal, and we don't even realize that we're doing it.
So what shifted? We were doing good. Now we're not doing so good. We were doing good. We start going back to our old, old ways. It wasn't a new process, it wasn't a new structure.
It was one situation that caused one or two or many people to become fearful. What we should do is we should become incredibly curious before we ever become controlling.
When tension shows up, maybe it's in a meeting, maybe it's in a one on one and someone gets defensive, or someone's going quiet, or someone's pressing too hard.
Instead of reacting to the behavior, which is so common in so many people, instead of reacting to the behavior, start asking about it. Not in a very accusatory kind of way, that's not going to help out.
But one of the things that I like to do from time to time is just say, hey, how are you feeling right now? Once again, I know a lot of leaders are like, yep, he's asked me that question.
How are you feeling right now? I don't want to call out that somebody's being defensive yet I don't want to call out that somebody is struggling.
What I want to do is ask them a question that is not me accusing, it's me asking for perspective. How are you feeling right now? What's going on? What are you experiencing? It's great to use that phrase right there. What are you experiencing?
Means that I'm not accusing. And it's giving the person the ability to not to have to be crazy defensive, but instead it's allowing them to think, to process, to be able to focus on what are they feeling, what are they experiencing.
And the great thing is, is with so many people and so many leaders, what I find is if I don't put them on the defensive by accusing them of something, but instead ask a question that they feel like they have to answer, the great thing is, is that they tend to answer.
And that helps me to get to some level of understanding of what's going on and what's happening. And almost every single time, almost every single time, the answer that comes out is not what the conflict looks like on the surface. Right?
Because most think about it. How many times do you look at somebody who is starting to have an attitude or be defensive or self protective and you're thinking, why are you being a jerk right now?
But if you dig in, almost every single time, what I have discovered is that it's something like fear of failure, fear of being blamed, fear of looking stupid, fear of being left out of a decision, fear of appearing like you don't know what you're doing, fear of that they've worked on something so hard and that progress is all going to slip away.
It's almost never just that somebody's having a bad day. That does pop up too. We've all been there.
But almost every time there is an underlying fear in this fear loop that we're talking about. Once it's named, if I can name it or help somebody to see it, every single time, the control behavior just dissolves like immediately.
Because not only do they recognize what they're struggling with because it came out of their own mouth, but they also see that somebody is not judging the daylights out of them.
They also see that somebody is not, you know, hitting back on them or you know, trying to make them feel bad or feel guilty. And if I stay in control of myself without losing it, then it helps them to not feel like they have to self protect so much.
I can tell you that conversations that I had in my early days as an early leader, that would take very long, an incredibly long time to try and solve now takes 10 minutes, takes 5 minutes.
If it's somebody who's close to me, it takes 30 seconds. Because we don't spend time fighting about the surface and what appears to be going on.
Instead we dig in and find out what's actually going on. That's what happens when a leader decides to lead from self awareness instead of self protection.
Reframing (00:21:00)
So let's kind of reframe this. The next time conflict shows up on your team or in yourself, do not go straight to the behavior.
Just don't do it. I know it's super tempting. I mean, unless it's really bad behavior.
There are times, there have been a couple of times, not many, not even a few, just a couple of times in my leadership career where I had to tell somebody, hey, take caution with that tone because it was so out of, you know, out of control.
That was unacceptable. It was becoming very insubordinate.
That is such a caveat right there. It's only a few times. So do yourself a favor, try really hard not to go after the behavior at first. Ask about what's going on underneath when you do that.
Hey, what are you experiencing right now? What are you concerned about? Anything. Is there anything that you're afraid of right now? Don't ask high Ds that, they will say they're not afraid of anything.
But if you just ask what's going on, then you might get that answer. If you can even get to a place of hey, it feels like you're trying to control.
After asking what's going on, what they're experiencing and they give you some information, it feels like you're trying to control that by this. Do you agree or do you feel something else?
If you can do that and get them to a place where they see how much they're self protecting, you might be blown away at how quickly they can come out of that and start solving problems.
So something you have to understand is you may not be able to understand exactly what they're feeling. You might not be able to verbalize.
They may not be able to verbalize exactly what they're feeling at the moment. That doesn't matter. You don't have to, you know, answer say out loud the fear that they're struggling with.
You don't have to have that answer. But naming that there is something internally going on will change how everybody shows up in the next five minutes.
I can promise that. Now be careful in not doing this in front of a large group. By going through and naming individual struggles that somebody is feeling, that can be very detrimental and very disparaging.
But, you know, if you're in a large group, maybe you pull somebody aside and ask the questions. Or if it's a very trusting group, you know, we have our leadership team. If I was to say, hey, what's going on right now?
There is no problem. Our leaders are going to be very clear and explain it. And we all love each other and support each other. So just understand the situation that you're in.
If you can help people to create a team culture of understanding that if somebody is struggling with a behavioral-pattern issue, a fear-based issue, that just by being empathetic in that situation and just caring enough to ask what's going on or ask how they're feeling, or ask what they're experiencing, you can create that in your culture where people don't just respond to bad behavior immediately.
Instead they try to help out, they try to understand. Everybody's been there, everybody's had an off day.
If we can start there culturally, then we'll be blown away at how much we not only help people to not struggle, but how much we build trust in our entire culture.
So this is where everything starts to shift. The more we focus on this, the less conflict we're going to experience.
The more we focus on this, the sooner we could get over conflict if we help people to recognize what's going on. The truth is, your stress isn't a time problem.
It isn't even a people problem. Most of the time. It's a fear problem.
So if this hits home, come find me on Instagram @chrislocurto. I talk about this stuff every single week. Real leadership, real teams, real situations. Well, folks, that is all the time that we have for today.
I hope this has helped you immensely. As always, take this information. Change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.
