Is Your Coworker a Jerk or Is Your Team Lacking Clarity?
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I rolled my eyes as I received another email from Dave* (name changed).
A few weeks earlier, Dave and I were friendly colleagues who would have brief catch up conversations when we’d run into each other in the office. But now, we were butting heads every day and it simultaneously befuddled me and infuriated me. I had always thought of myself as someone who got along well with different people and could handle even the most contentious employees. That is what struck me as odd with this situation. Dave didn’t have a reputation for being unreasonable and neither did I. So why were we not able to get along while working together on this project? Yes the project was stressful, but it hadn’t caused me to have conflicts with anyone else on the team who was supporting this project. The easiest answer was that Dave was a jerk. But was he really?
I would have remained stuck in that thinking if it was not for a new framework I had learned called GRPI. Developed in the 1970s, the model GRPI illustrates that a lack of clarity around goals, roles/responsibilities, and processes/procedures can undermine the effectiveness of your team. One of the symptoms of a GRPI breakdown is the presence of interpersonal conflict.
This was exactly the situation between Dave and I. Our interpersonal conflict was actually a symptom of the lack and clarity around this project. We were both taking on new responsibilities and represented different parts of the team. As such, our incentives and how we measured success were defined in different ways. This lack of clarity around this project's goals and our roles, created tension that we (or at least I) attributed to the individual. By taking a step back, we can recognize that creating clarity around the goals, roles, and processes can reduce interpersonal tension and create more effectiveness for the entire team. In my consulting work, I usually find that if one person is unclear about something, there are others who are also unclear.
Dilbert Comic Strip
Normally when companies sense tensions between departments, they immediately jump to fixing some process. The thinking is that the process is broken and that is why these two teams or departments aren’t working effectively together. But this is the wrong approach because the GRPI model is hierarchical. You need to first start with addressing the goals, then the roles, and then the process. This is a classic mistake made by companies.
When I was working on the strategy team at Starwood Hotels, I was tasked with helping redesign the process by which the company decided to “deflag” properties that were not meeting the brand standards set by the company. The global Brand teams were at odds with the Operations and Franchise teams over how this process was run and the results, or lack of results. So I was tasked with fixing a “broken process” that was causing tensions between two departments. When I started to do my due diligence, I realized that the goals of each of the departments were misaligned. The Operations teams were incentivized to keep properties in the system in order to maintain good relationships with the owners so they would do future business with the company. The Global Brand Teams were incentivized to maintain hotels in the portfolio that were good examples of the brand therefore raising the prestige of the brand, so they wanted to kick out underperforming hotels. If I didn’t start by addressing the goal of the process and acknowledging how that goal affected each department’s individual goals, we never would have had a chance at being successful with the project. After the goals were addressed we next needed to clarify the role and power each team had in the process. I was following the GRPI model without even realizing it.
This idea that companies and teams need clarity to be successful is reinforced by more recent work. In his book “Essentialism”, author Greg McKeown writes, “When there is a serious lack of clarity about what the team stands for and what their goals and roles are, people experience confusion, stress, and frustration.” McKeown makes the argument that companies need to do a better job at being clear on what they stand for. These companies need to create mission statements that are more specific around what the company is trying to achieve and how they will measure success. Without that, teams waste effort by moving in opposite directions, or they resort to playing politics. In these scenarios, the goal becomes to get the attention of the leadership team and jockey for power since they aren’t focused on what they should actually be trying to accomplish in their roles. As McKeown illuminates, “...when people don’t know what the end game is, they are unclear about how to win...they vie for the manager’s favour.” Like the TV show "Heroes" whose mantra was “Save the cheerleader, save the world”, I would argue that according to GRPI, “Clarify the goal, save the company”.
Now, back to Dave and I. Recognizing that a conflict that feels personal is really just a miscommunication and caused by a lack of clarity from leadership, was empowering. No one likes to fight with their colleagues, particularly colleagues they kind of like. More importantly, once you recognize where the tensions are stemming from, you can focus your energy on resolving the conflict. In this case it started with trying to clarify the goals each of us were working towards and identifying the misalignment. In this case, we were measuring “success” differently. While we normally aimed for 95% customer satisfaction and thus was my goal, Dave was aiming for 100% satisfaction. That difference was significant enough that it caused us to react to customer issues differently, with different levels of alarm and priority. It didn’t matter whose definition was correct, it was more the fact that we had different definitions that was significant.
The other big issue I realized is that we seemed to be on different pages about what my role was on this project. I remember saying to another colleague that, “It’s as if Dave thinks I’m his personal analyst”. You see Dave kept asking me to do work that I didn’t have time to do, wasn’t prioritizing as urgently as him, and wasn’t specific to my skillset. But that statement “it’s as if…” was significant because it clued me in that we had different ideas about what my role was in this project and it occured to me that maybe my boss had told him to use me as his analyst in order to meet his goals. The point was, I didn’t know what had been communicated to him and it didn’t actually matter what the answer was. I just needed clarity on what the expectations were for me around my role so I could align my own work and prioritization to match our team’s goals. If my boss said I should be his analyst, then I could make an argument to drop my other work that didn’t align with those priorities. At the end of the day, I felt I was being overworked and still seemed to be letting people down and that wasn’t a good feeling.
So how did I resolve this tension and these issues I identified? I went to my boss and explained that I thought we perhaps were operating off of two different measurements of success and lacked clarity on what each of our roles were in respect to this project and the priority of this work over our other responsibilities. I asked if he could help clarify for both of us so we can be on the same page and work more effectively. It took more than one meeting with my boss to get my questions answered and to ensure that this was also communicated to Dave. However, I want to point out that something interesting happened between the time I realized the cause of our tension and when I was able to get some clarity from my boss. I stopped hating Dave so much. All of a sudden, I didn’t view our conflict as personal becasue I realized we were just reacting to different information. That allowed me to operate more effectively until I got more clarity because I wasn’t carrying around as much resentment throughout the day and had way less eye rolling, which isn’t great for your vision.
There is power in understanding the dynamics in your work environment. So the next time you have a work conflict with a colleague, ask yourself whether this may actually be a GRPI related issue. And if you want even more helpful tips and insights, sign up for Inside the Mind of Jess Wass, a bi-weekly newsletter filled with my latest articles, theories, and offerings to make work suck a bit less.
