Hello Dickinson,
Thought I’d share a tale of integration. I had a an important, tense meeting this past Sunday with a key partner. Two of my colleagues who work with him most frequently had negotiated 95% of the terms for a partnership on several separate but related projects.
They were down to the last couple of relatively minor items, when the negotiation blew up and our partner demanded a giant breakup fee to walk away. In addition to being impossible, this would have been a terrible outcome. I am proud to say that several Stagen
practices kicked in and saved the day.
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Recalibration: I took the two colleagues into my office, sat them down, and had them take a breath. The tend to work each other up sometimes.
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Then I walked my two colleagues through a version of the ladder of inference: “What is [partner] thinking right now? What story is he telling himself about what is happening right now? His response here suggests he is angry with us and feels we are not treating
him with the proper respect. Why would that be?”
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Communication modes: I suspected the answer was related to the fact that the last couple of rounds of discussion had been via email. The disconnect was that my colleagues viewed these last couple of items as simple and straightforward; our partner did not,
making email a sub-optimal communication medium. So I told them we need to sit down with our partner in person and listen to him.
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And that’s what we did – some active listening. On a Sunday morning. I listened to his concerns and stopped my colleagues from interrupting or responding with their position until he was completely finished.
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Trust / productive conflict. Once he was done, I thanked him for going through the whole picture for me, and told him that before we have a discussion about the specifics, I wanted to remind everyone at the table that our two firms have been partners for a
long time, and will be partners for years to come. That means conflict is inevitable; we are not always going to agree on everything. When we have conflict, we need to be able to address it directly. I was specifically trying to make sure I showed a high level
of trust in him in terms of credibility and reliability, and demonstrate low self-orientation in this situation. I can’t say I specifically thought about intimacy, but I think we demonstrated it. Then we went through our position, which it turned out our partner
did not fully understand. We were able to reach a compromise from there without much trouble.