Wars at Work? Forget Mediation. Try Meditation
You’re on a team with a colleague you consider an incompetent boor. She leaves her half-empty coffee cups around until mold starts to form and lets her paperwork slop over onto your desk. Because of her disorganization, a report you both worked on was late, tarnishing your image as well as hers.
You feel your chest tightening and your rage swelling.
There are two options, right? You can confront her directly and run the risk of an ugly scene. Or you can simmer in a stew of resentment, grumbling to co-workers or being obsessed about what you should have said to her face and run the risk of poisoning your job and compromising your work.
Is there another way?
Instead of adopting battle mode or succumbing to despondency, you might opt for a more serene approach: You could just breathe deeply and do nothing, or at least appear to be doing nothing. Or you could meditate, seeking inspiration to keep the peace with co-workers--and your sanity. Look inward to turn what seems like an impossible impasse into an opportunity.
Sound too New Age-y? Don’t be so sure. Their styles or choices of buzzwords vary, but a growing number of business consultants and coaches say it’s time to find creative ways to resolve that inevitable friction on the job. Some label their approach “spiritual,” while others prefer to describe theirs as “finding common values” and “keeping vision” or “acting with integrity.”
Bay Area writer and consultant Pat Sullivan recalls a near-disastrous confrontation with a hostile client. The originator of the project they were hired to handle left the agency, and the new manager was strongly opposed to it. At their second meeting, “The woman tore me up one side and down the other,” finding fault with every idea offered, Sullivan says.
Sullivan’s first reaction was to tense up and prepare for conflict.
Instead, she focused on her breathing, even as she stayed alert in the meeting with her business partner. “My inner knowledge told me, relax, listen to the other person as closely as possible,” says Sullivan, who now advises businesses on how to find their “vision” via her Oakland firm, Visionary Resources.
“We didn’t engage her in a fight. We simply listened.” After venting, the caustic client came around. “Because my partner and I became so relaxed, the manager also relaxed.”
Meditating on the job may also sound like a good way to get fired, but at least one consultant argues that the practice is good for employees and the bottom line. Because meditation is intended to bring complete awareness of what is happening in the moment, it allows people to stay focused in a world brimming with distractions, says Les Kaye, a Mountain View, Calif.-based ordained Zen priest who refers to himself more modestly as a Zen teacher. Kaye--who wrote a book “Zen at Work” and teaches a training program called “Meditation at Work”--even directs such clients as Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer and Netscape Communications to open employee meditation rooms after completing his 10-session how-to course.
Kaye started meditating in 1966. Near the start of his more than 30-year career with IBM as engineer, salesman and manager, his daily practice came in handy with a tyrannical boss who was a yeller. The boss often criticized Kaye’s work, constantly questioned and second-guessed him and blew tiny problems into big ones.
“This is one of those brilliant people technically who wasn’t so great personally,” Kaye recalls. “He was on a power trip and needed every so often to put people down.”
At first, Kaye felt awful, angry and depressed. Over time, he came up with a solution, but it wasn’t yelling back. He disengaged emotionally and stopped taking the boss’ behavior personally.
“The third time it happened, I simply watched myself. I stopped reacting.” Kaye is convinced that confronting the boss would only have made things worse; and after a while, his boss stopped yelling at him. “He stopped because he realized he couldn’t get my goat anymore.”
The Zen approach means abandoning the idea that problems at work are always somebody else’s fault, Kaye says. “When you have a meditation practice, you come to realize that when there’s a problem, we have created the problem. We no longer blame the other person for our having the problem.”
“When we do meditation every day, the mind becomes more flexible, more open, less attached to its own emotions, like feeling hurt or being afraid,” he says. “Those things start to diminish. We become aware of them and let them go.”
Searching the inner self can be as painful as probing a decayed tooth, though, especially if it reveals that the problem isn’t your crummy boss--it’s you.
“If we would take the time to reflect, I believe we would find that much of what antagonizes us is our own projection,” says Stephen F. Boehlke, a Minneapolis-based leadership and values consultant with a theology degree. “It’s something in our own dark side that we don’t want to deal with.”
That was the case with one of Boehlke’s clients, an executive who left a trail of human debris behind him everywhere he went. “He would just run over people,” recalls Boehlke, who worked with the man for more than a year.
After finally seeing that the turmoil was in him as much as between him and his managers, the executive began being more “honest and vulnerable with those he worked with.” Finding this level of insight isn’t easy in an environment in which quick decisions and constant activity are highly valued and quiet reflection is not. “We race from empty space, fearing the consequences of nothing happening,” Boehlke says. He rejects the belief that we can do everything faster. “You have to slow down to go far.”
Is conflict always bad? Our inclination may be to avoid it, but conflict is often the source of creativity, Boehlke says. “The creative energy really comes from being able to rise above or reframe a conflict where things don’t fit.”
When company leaders run from conflict, the consequences can almost be worse than those of ugly confrontation.
One inspiring and sales-savvy financial services executive assigned to Fred Kiel, co-chief executive of KRW International, an executive leadership development firm, had an intense charisma but just couldn’t deliver bad news. “He would fire people on Friday, and they’d show up Monday because they didn’t get the message,” Kiel says. The executive didn’t change until “he was made to finally see how his conflict avoidance was harmful to people he worked with.”
The man’s Mr. Nice Guy skills had yielded major dividends throughout the years, but he finally understood he had to learn new ones.
Paradoxically, conflict can actually improve relationships. “What I believe is that if you go into confrontation with a desire for an improved relationship, then you can find the truth that underlies the two individuals,” says Judi Neal, an associate professor of management at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, who publishes a fledgling newsletter called Spirit at Work.
When an unconvinced student recently blasted Neal’s classroom emphasis on values and integrity, the professor decided to probe deeper instead of striking back. After a long phone conversation, it emerged that much of the student’s anger stemmed from feeling mismatched with her master’s of business administration program, not Neal’s class.
As Neal sees it, “It’s an opportunity to learn what’s really important to someone else and discover what’s really important to you.”
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Tips on Conflict Resolution
* Understand the conflict. Is it about ideas, approach? A personality conflict? Figure it out, then look for areas of agreement around goals, working in small groups or one on one.
* Resist the temptation to act immediately and talk constantly.
* Take a break. Then come back and try again.
--Stephen Boehlke, leadership and values consultant, Minneapolis
* Breathe, breathe, breathe. And focus on your breathing.
* Listen. Think about what you can learn from the situation, however difficult.
* Resist getting caught up in the rage. Ask yourself how you can turn this into something positive.
* Let go of feelings that come up, stop taking it personally, but pay attention to what’s going on now.
--Les Kaye, writer, Zen teacher, Mountain View, Calif.
* Appeal to your own sense of curiosity about other views. Think, here’s a colleague I respect with a viewpoint so different from mine. How could that be?
* Dispense with the war metaphors. Talk about the pros and cons of alternatives rather than win or lose, good or bad.
* Rise to a minimum level of mutual respect and support. Much unproductive conflict stems from its absence.
--Fred Kiel, co-chief executive, leadership consultant, Minneapolis