Considering my career as a whole, I’ve developed expertise and been promoted at an accelerated pace. Some of the reasons why have nothing to do with me at all1 and others are specific to me as an individual2, so I’m sharing the tactics and principles that could be useful to others. This is the first installment in a series.
Be fun to fight with
I almost said be fun to work with, but it’s too close to be likeable. I want to improve my tolerance for being disliked, so I’m not in the business of telling others to waste energy managing other people’s overall perceptions of them. Being fun to work with is too generic to be useful.
Sure, being fun to fight with is also about others’ perceptions of you, but it’s focused enough to be able to evaluate and improve upon without considering whether you should develop an entirely new personality.
Being fun to fight with means in tense conversations and high-stakes disagreements you are consistently able to contribute some combination of:
- clarity
- bias toward action
- accountability
- humor
Those attributes–other than humor, which is a memorable bonus when deployed with care–are what make professional conflicts productive and useful. They also top the Most Likely to Be Overruled list when our lizard brains take over because we’re angry, scared, or frustrated.
Think back to a disagreement within a team at work that you remember as especially sharp, heated, and wasteful. I bet there was:
- easy and emphatic blaming of other teams or leaders
- little to no sincere admission of actions or decisions that contributed to the problem
- at least one doom spiral about how it’s always like this here or why can’t they just do better
- conflation of multiple problems or factors to keep tensions high
I’m not saying those elements are never reasonable or don’t have any place in professional disagreements. I am saying: those elements are functionally limited. When that list represents the whole of a conflict, you’ll remember it as icky.
So how can we be fun to fight with, and why does that matter?
What do you remember about less painful conflicts? Which ones left you with a spark of energy or optimism? When did a conflict make you feel more connected to your team or your manager or your peers? I expect you’ll remember:
- at least one person owning their mistakes or contributions to the mess at hand (without dramatizing or self-flagellating)
- one or more people steering the conversation back to the problem once sufficient catharsis has been achieved, however many times it takes
- discussion about the nuances of the problem (not
justpeople) - brainstorming a plan
- laughing
Being fun to fight with is important because it means you will be included in the process of and, eventually, responsible for making decisions that matter.
All strategic and revenue-impacting decisions are made through negotiation, which I consider a specific flavor of fighting. I’ve worked on teams and with leaders who are more comfortable with negotiating than fighting and vice versa. The behavioral principles I’ve outlined here apply to both.
Once you’ve internalized these principles and apply them consistently, I predict you will notice an increase in the number of negotiations or professional fights you’re invited to. People who can defuse without diminishing and inject humor without trivializing are rare. Those who improve how a problem is understood without being reductive and inspire movement toward solutions are rarer still.
Skills like these are highly visible because they manage big feelings in tense moments and rally people toward progress instead of throwing out platitudes about silver linings or indulgently mud-slinging. People who develop a reputation (spoken aloud or not) of having these skills are easy to promote, easy to grant more responsibility, and easy to assign the bigger and more abstract opportunities.
- I joined tech at a lucky moment when the disciplines of UX design and UX research were new enough that I was able to elbow my way in by pitching my experience in academia and my cute portfolio produced from self-directed, online learning. There are still organizations and hiring managers who are curious enough that this entry path exists, but it’s harder to find now than it was nearly a decade ago ↩︎
- I give good interview. I credit my years teaching in university classrooms to (mostly) indifferent audiences with my comfort performing confidence and selling myself and my ideas to strangers. I’m white, I have a name most people assume they can pronounce, I have multiple university degrees. Systemically, these are privileges that have smoothed my professional path. ↩︎