Attuning to Discomfort – a Leadership Practice

Leaders – we – often say that they/we want to have “meaningful” conversations, that lead to productive results – yet they often complain about the lack of effective deliberation.

We’ve been there. You know that feeling when you leave a meeting:

🪢 Realizing that you’re in knots because the meeting was tense
😕 Feeling uneasy about how quickly something got “resolved” but it feels unresolved to you
🙍‍♀️ Replaying what you didn’t say

So, one might wonder what gets in our way of having “meaningful” conversations that feel properly resolved.

Here’s what I’ve heard from leaders about what often gets in their way: lack of skills in handling conflict, fear of negative emotional responses – and/or the difficulty of ensuring everyone is aligned and engaged?

Side note: Which one resonates for you?

🪰 If we were a fly on the wall in our own meetings, we might observe how the leader, or the team, deal with these issues – and how we unintentionally get in the way of the conversations we most need to have.  We might notice that in our rush to reach a decision (and a rush to avoid uncertainty), we try to “fix” things, for example;

• We try to smooth over conflict and not allow people to work through conflicting opinions
• We try to avoid negative emotional responses, by redirecting the conversation or by urging people to “move the conversation forward”
• We don’t check to see if everyone is aligned, in terms of agreeing on the problem definition or identifying how a decision will be made

In short, we, or the leader, often undermine the group’s ability to have a meaningful, productive conversation – where people feel aligned on the objective and the process; where they are allowed to explore their differences –  and where emotions are seen as data and are welcomed as part of the discussion.

What’s a leader to do?

Our primary means is awareness – awareness of our discomfort and our urge to “fix” it- which can undermine the collective intelligence,  erode trust and/or collapse exploration too early.

We need to take the time to notice what’s going on – and to ask the team what they’re noticing.  I agree with my colleague who said this beautifully: “Perhaps what leaders need is not more conversational prompts or hacks, but a re-skilling to enabling slowed-down thinking.”

Instead of “moving to fix”, we can inquire with curiosity – individually and with the group:

• Where are we feeling uncomfortable in the conversation?
• What is it that we’re trying to avoid – and what learning might there be in that?
• What does the group seem to assume needs to be resolved immediately?

Noticing and Awareness

Noticing and becoming aware are the foundations of meaningful conversations.  If we don’t do this work, we may be revisiting our decisions somewhere down the line.

Leadership is a series of behaviors that create team culture over time.  We aren’t “just” making decisions – we are building relationship and building trust; we’re creating cohesion such that we trust in our ability to engage in disagreement and to challenge each other’s thinking – and we’re building confidence in our ability to solve problems and to make effective decisions.

Reflection for you:

What might shift if we learned to stay with these moments a little longer?

Great article Abby. I agree. Conflict is so challenging and holding space and really hearing each other is needed.

Thanks for this thoughtful article, Abby. I also think that this is an area in which building group skills is important. I was leading a meeting a few weeks ago, and while I missed one individual’s discomfort, one of the other group members did not. I was very grateful for a group that does this well!

I love the way you highlight leaning into curiosity abut the discomfort.

Much like Development in general, building more capacity to hold emotional tension is a Leadership skill that can’t be bought, delegated, or otherwise outsourced!