Intro: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon, future proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.
Toby Mildon: Hey there. Thanks ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon, and today I'm joined by Merry Brown, who is a workplace conflict restoration consultant. And I'm really interested in learning from Merry because conflict is something that we talk about when we want to create inclusive workplaces. One of my favorite books is called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. And he mentions these five dysfunctions. And at the bottom of the pyramid he talks about the need to establish trust to establish that psychological safety for high performing teams. And then the level above that is to have healthy conflict. He says that dysfunctional teams tend to avoid conflict and that means that we are not creating inclusive work cultures where people feel able to speak up without fear of backlash. So I'm really interested to learn more from Merry and her experience as a workplace conflict restoration consultant. So Merry, welcome along. It's, lovely to see you.
Merry Brown: Thank you so much for having me on your show.
Toby Mildon: I'd just like to dive straight in if that's all right with you. Could you just tell me a bit more about the work that you do as a workplace conflict restoration consultant?
Merry Brown: Absolutely. So what I do is, one thing that I do is I am a workplace mediator. So when you have two or more parties that are locked in some sort of conflict that they're unable to solve, it's always nice to bring somebody in from the outside who is there to help facilitate conversation so that the parties themselves can really get out what's going on and then make a plan to move forward. And I love that work because it is really magical what happens when people listen to one another and are listened to because of course in a conflict, many times we end up making stories up about the other person. They've done this and they've done that, and eventually we think they're unreasonable. And it's very hard to work with somebody that is unreasonable. And so the mediation process is an opportunity to de-escalate what's going on so that we can really find a path forward.
Merry Brown: And that's why I call my work not just resolution, but restoration. Sometimes in a conflict we just need to resolve it, but if we are in any kind of prolonged relationship with somebody, we need more than that. So if I am in a conflict with somebody at work and that gets solved in a win-lose, somebody wins, somebody loses. If we show up to work on Monday, we have both lost because now we're supposed to work together and we haven't worked on the relationship dynamic so that we can collaborate as a team. And of course what we want is belonging and psychological safety. So that is one thing that I do. And I got into this work primarily to do mediation, but then I saw what typically happens when somebody comes to mediation, something has gone terribly wrong and there's a really big problem.
Merry Brown: And so I have pivoted into transformational culture work, which is what I call preventative healthcare in the sense of let's make the conditions so that we empower every individual in the organization to address conflicts early, often, swiftly and justly. Let's empower management at every level to be able to see what is going on and act early, often swiftly and justly so that conflicts don't escalate. When I see somebody in mediation, usually something has been going on for months or a year or longer. And if people had the training and the empowerment and the organizational structure in place so that everybody is expected to deal with their conflicts when they first happen, then many of these things, many of the escalated situations wouldn't have occurred because right away after I was talked over at a meeting or I saw somebody roll their eyes at me or somebody took something out of the fridge that was mine, if I went to the person and said, Hey, I noticed this.
Merry Brown: Tell me what's going on, then we have a dialogue instead of no dialogue, which means I supply the dialogue in my own mind. So I go into organizations and I help them create what is best for them, the size of their organization, the values in their organization so that they can have a healthy work environment. Healthy work environments come about through intentional sustained effort. It is not a training and you're out, though it is the case. I do a lot of training I go in and just say how to have a difficult conversation. So that's really what I do.
Toby Mildon: I really like what you were saying about empowering individuals to manage that conflict. I'm reading at the moment Radical Candor book and I'm learning that radical candor is about the ability to with care, challenge one another. And I like, I like that empowerment. 'cause going back to the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Model by Patrick Lencioni. What he's saying is that once you have got openness and candor by building trust and resolving conflict within an organization, it's then up to a team to basically have commitment to hold each other accountable and to focus on results. That's the kind of the pinnacle of a high performing team. And you just can't achieve that focus on results if you just don't address that. The elephant in the room, which is often, not managing conflict very well in my experience.
Merry Brown: Absolutely agree. And what a nice, putting those two books together, right, the five Dysfunction in a Team and Radical Candor, when I was reading the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I read it recently and in some ways it made me a little bit uncomfortable because of the push in it. Right? And I think, okay, we're in a work environment, what are we really gonna be requiring of people? But this is the rub. If we want a high performing team, we need to be able to be honest. A Radical Candor as she points out, is not rudeness, brashness, it's not bullying. It's really the opposite. The radicalness is the courage to actually talk about the elephant in the room, the courage to not participate in magical thinking. And I think also the courage to embody the vision of the organization. If you have a great vision, it's gonna take something of you. It's gonna require something of you. And that means being a part of a team and at least the culture that I'm a part of in the United States, many people are not team players. In fact, the culture is very individualistic. How do I get ahead? And that's the paradox. I actually get ahead individually at work and in my society when other people get ahead, when we actually work together, it really does benefit everybody.
Toby Mildon: Yeah. Absolutely. So how did you get into this space? 'cause you've got a really interesting resume, and I know you've been teaching philosophy for 20 years, for instance.
Merry Brown: Yeah. So my career began a couple decades ago teaching philosophy. And I absolutely love philosophy and I still love it. In fact, I taught this past semester for a faculty member who was out on leave. And in my work as a philosopher, while there's always content for students to learn, I always thought, what are they gonna remember about the content? Are they gonna, they might remember Plato's Cave or they might remember some very little interesting tidbits about being a brain in a vat or something like that. But what I want for the most is that development of critical thinking skills. So what is this argument? Why is it good? Why is it bad? Why does it resonate with me? How do I articulate my point of view? And then how do I listen to somebody else's point of view and engage in a dialogue? This is the Socratic method back and forth. It's not arguing, it's a conversation, a dialogue which requires both the parties to be able to listen, respond, take whatever the other person said and respond back. So this really dialectical approach. So that's my background. That's how I understood my work as a philosopher is really this critical thinking skill piece. And I've always been very interested in civility, civility in culture. Because without civility we don't have conversation.
Toby Mildon: Yeah.
Merry Brown: In 2018, I became a Rule 31 mediator in the state of Tennessee. In the state, every state has a different mediation if you're gonna be working through like with the court system or something like that. And I thought, well, I'll teach during the school year and in the summer I'll do some of this mediation stuff 'cause I've always been interested in, in helping people come together. Turns out it doesn't really work that way because I have three kids and if you teach, you still do stuff in the summer. And so mid pandemic, I had been thinking for a while, probably a good five years, then I wanted to transition. While I really loved philosophy and I loved teaching, I was always a lecturer. So I don't have a PhD in philosophy. I'm married to somebody who has a PhD in philosophy and he's a tenure track philosopher at our local university.
Merry Brown: There's a very strict hierarchy in universities. And while everybody was very nice to me at this place that I worked for 18 years, I was never a voting member because of my status. And that no longer became acceptable to me. I wanted to be able to participate in a real way in the organization in which I was in. So I thought, well that's not gonna happen here. So what am I gonna do next? I live in a small town, I'm not moving. So mid pandemic, I saw the world really is flat just like you and I are on different continents, being able to talk and meet. And so I thought, okay, I'm not gonna be able to move. So there are options for out of work philosophers and what is it I wanna do mediation specifically workplace mediation. And then in that work I saw I want something even more, which is preventative. I wanna prevent people from coming to mediation or litigation. And I wanna be a part of the solution of bringing about healthy work environments.
Toby Mildon: I really like that preventative approach because whenever I talk to heads of HR about inclusivity and they are dealing with, an employment tribunal for example, that's a situation that you just simply don't want to be in because it's so soul destroying for everybody involved. And it can be really damaging to your brand. It can cost you a lot of money. And I think it's really important that when it comes to creating inclusive work cultures, that you focus on the preventative measures that you can take and be proactive because you don't want to end up in a tribunal or a mediation situation. And so when it does come to the training that you do within organizations, what is your main focus?
Merry Brown: My main focus first anywhere that I go is my mantra, which is, conflict is normal and expected, let's deal with it. So I wanna have a reset that you are going to experience conflict. You have experienced conflict, you may be in it right now and I will guarantee you, you will have it in the future. Conflict is just normal. It happens internally within ourselves. We are conflicted. Should I do this or should I do that? I want a clean house but I don't wanna get off the couch. Right? [laughter], I mean we have all of these internal conflicts and of course we're gonna have conflicts at work. And I think with this push for inclusivity with DEI, if we really are serious about diversity, we should expect that we're gonna have more conflict. The thing is, conflict is not bad. Conflict is not the problem. In fact, conflict is good. We want healthy conflict. You are not doing your job if you're not speaking up. If you hear something that you don't think has the right perspective or all the information or you know why this may not work, your job is to speak up, is to bring that information forward at the right time, in the right way, in a civil way.
Merry Brown: This is good conflict. So the first thing I wanna do is to let everybody know we're gonna have conflict. Conflict is good. In fact we should want conflict. 'cause that means we are bringing a diversity of opinions and of voices. It means we have psychological safety because that means people feel like they can speak up without fear of retribution. So this is good. What we want to then do is manage the conflict. The problem is unmanaged conflict. And that is what I try to get across. Anytime I get an opportunity to speak any kind of training that I do, I say it over and over again because I want people to hear it. It's normal. That does not make it easy. It's never easy If it's a conflict for you, if it's a difficult conversation for you, it is difficult. Okay, that's fine. We can do hard things. We do hard things all the time. This is just another part of your job. And it is hard. It's hard in a particular way 'cause it's psychologically difficult, but you can do it. And I'm here. That means that your organization is expecting you to do it. So let's learn those tips and let's give you that training and let's give you that continued support.
Toby Mildon: I mean obviously 'cause I work within the field of equity, diversity and inclusion, I come across conflict quite a lot. I liked how you've distinguished between internal conflict as well as maybe external conflict. 'cause I do talk to a lot of senior leaders who have this internal conflict of, I shouldn't say something or I don't know how to say something because I'm worried about causing offense or embarrassing somebody or myself or making myself look like, I don't know what I'm talking about. But because of my position and seniority in the organization, I should be seen to know what I'm doing or what I'm talking about. We do know that with diverse teams, we have increased conflict just because we've got people coming from different walks of life, different lived experiences, different perspectives, different personalities. That diversity of difference just naturally brings conflict with it. But we also know that diverse teams outperform homogenous teams when they're managed well. So it's almost like as a, it's a really difficult job as a manager 'cause you've got to kind of get the balance right between managing this conflict well, in order to have a high performing team, it's not easy in that sense actually. Could you share some examples of how conflict resolution has actually improved some situations within the workplaces or clients that you've worked with?
Merry Brown: One thing that I've noticed is the setting of expectations. So whatever kind of team you have, you automatically have a kind of diversity. Not everybody has the same background experiences, but as you say, the more that we really are going for having the full expression of, the human condition in our work environments, which is good. It's good for everybody as you know. So the setting of expectation, what does it mean to disagree here? How do we disagree well? What does that look like? What are some concrete examples of what we expect our meetings to look like? What is too far? What is not far enough? What will happen if somebody crosses boundaries? How will we address that? How will people know? And this takes the willingness to have conversation, to have dialogue, to set expectations. I wrote a book not too long ago, it's not just this book that I wrote, but any, you could do this with anything. It's called How to Be Unprofessional At Work, tips to Ensure Failure.
Merry Brown: And it's 80 tips of what Not to do at work. And I've been contacted by a variety of organizations who have been using it as like a tip a week. And it's, opens up dialogue about low stakes issues. And so, but that means they're talking about work culture. What does it mean here? So like one tip is lie, well clearly we know that's unprofessional. So what should we do instead? But actually this is pretty important because if I admit a mistake, what's gonna happen here? . Why do people lie? They lie because they don't want the consequences. They lie for a variety of reasons. It's fear. Okay. So if we don't want people lying, what should we be doing instead? And why? And how are we going to handle mistakes here? And how do we view honesty and integrity and trust and how do we get that?
Merry Brown: And so it's really this day-to-day mechanics of having conversations and setting expectations and resetting expectations. And so I have found in the organizations that I've worked with, that the success comes through working through the process. As soon as somebody is sitting in my office or I'm talking with them, their organization is already changing because they're changing. They are no longer okay with the status quo. And conflict resolution is never about me. The person who is setting the system up. It's about the practitioners, the everyday person that the manager who's now going to say, we're not doing that anymore. We're doing something new. And it's a mind switch. Is this 180 in a way of moving from a disempowered state, Even as the leader of the organization, they don't know what to do with these big personalities. They don't know what to do with this drama.
Merry Brown: But as soon as they say, we're gonna do something different. The working through the process, how do you become a pianist by playing. How do you do anything? It's not something deliverable that all of a sudden now I've got it. Like you've purchased a product, it's all through the embodying and doing it and seeing it. And now you are setting an example and you're not taking the gossip. And in fact you are redirecting and in fact you are noticing the good, you're calling out the good. That's what I've really noticed. It is very simple and it's in the every day in which I see these changes.
Toby Mildon: I really like the practicality of this and I really like how an organization has taken your book and they talk about how not to do it a week and kind of have that as a discussion on the table. I really like that idea. So the people that typically listen to this podcast are heads of HR or they're diversity and inclusion leaders. What specific advice would you give them about managing conflict Well within their organization?
Merry Brown: I love this question and I love HR professionals and I feel like they get such a bad rap because they deal with all the explosions that have occurred. And people come to HR when they need disciplinary action or, and so what is the HR professional supposed to do? The first thing I would say is, well, as they already know, you're gonna be dealing with conflict. So have a conflict management system. Be proactive. I would say hire an ombuds, an ombuds person. Somebody who specifically is in your organization, that does something different than HR. An ombuds person is somebody there who will listen, who it's completely confidential. It's not like official reporting, but they are there to help direct you to the resources in your organization, to workshop ideas with you to help empower you so that you can make those changes to make those decisions. And that ombuds person also then reports to the CEO or the president, what are the kinds of trends in this organization so that the organization can make structural changes.
Merry Brown: But what I would say to anybody in this space is what is your plan? Not what is your disciplinary plan when something has gone wrong, right? That makes this us versus them. If we really want an inclusive organization, if we really wanna be us, then what do we do in a really life-giving way when somebody has a gap in behavior or performance? And that will be all of us. All of us at times don't do our best work. Sometimes we have bad days. So what is that plan to treat people really well from pre-hire to retire or fire? How do we treat people really well when there's a conflict, there will be a conflict.
Merry Brown: What is the individual person supposed to do. Instead of this system that lot of organizations have, which is treating adults like children, they have to go to their mother or Father.
Merry Brown: Whoever their manager is, and then they have to go to theirs. Let's empower people as much as they are able in the everyday issues. And so that's what I would tell HR people is what is that system? And then what is the continual training and support that you were giving your workers? Because it's one thing for me to tell people how to have a difficult conversation and they get the basics down and then they hear somebody gossiping about them and then six months down the road, this thing has happened to them. They feel gas-lit or they feel bullied. Okay. They need a place to go, a person. 'cause we're persons a person to talk with off the record who can help them think about what are their alternatives, what is it they wanna do at this time in their life. So that's what I would say it's coming. Have a plan. So that.
Toby Mildon: That's brilliant advice. Thank you. Now the question I ask everybody when they come on this podcast is, what does inclusive growth mean to you and how might that link to the work that you do around conflict restoration?
Merry Brown: I love the question inclusive growth because I think a lot of times we just wanna say, well this is a justice issue. Full stop. It needs to be done here 100%. But to me, growth denotes a realism that we need to be moving forward. Yes, this is the goal and this is what we want, but how do we realistically get it. And so looking for those wins and continually getting better tomorrow than we were today. So I love that imagery, but it makes me think about John Rawls. And John Rawls is his philosopher and he talks about something called the Veil of Ignorance. And so he's a political philosopher and he says, when we're setting up a society in order to set it up, we need to put ourselves in this, He calls it the original position behind the veil of ignorance, which means you don't know who you're gonna be in society. You don't know if you're gonna be rich poor, you don't know if you're going to, how your body's going to work or how your mind's going to work.
Merry Brown: You don't know what your desires are going to be. You know none of this. So you could be anybody in the society. Now let's build. And while maybe Rawls has some problems with the system, I still love that thought experiment of thinking about universal design and thinking about society is for everybody, every single member. It's not just for the haves and the have nots. And if we really believe that, then how are we going to move forward? And so to me, inclusive growth is really thinking about the other thinking about whether or not that's in my future, whether or not I'm gonna need a wheelchair ramp, I may, but I ought not do it just because I might need it.
Merry Brown: I do know other people need it. So if we're retrofitting a building for a restaurant, okay, well it's a 200-year-old building, do I really need to put in a bathroom that will accommodate everybody there? Yes. Why? And so thinking about the other, and I think that plays into conflict management because in conflict, conflict shuts us down and we think it's just all about us and our pain and how we're managing. But actual conversation and dialogue is interested in the other. So in society, if we think about best practices and organizations and just society at large, it's me and you together, reciprocal altruism. It isn't just about me and it isn't just about you, but it's partnering together. I don't know, that's what I think about with inclusive growth.
Toby Mildon: That's brilliant. I haven't actually had an answer like that before, so I think it's fantastic. Now, if the person listening to us right now wants to learn more about the work that you do, they may even want to reach out to you and get your help with conflict restoration, what should they do?
Merry Brown: You could reach out to me at my website. So my organization is called Third Party Workplace Conflict Restoration Services. You can find us online at 3pconflictrestoration.com. I also have a podcast that Toby's been on, so you can listen to him and listen to, uh, how fabulous he is. And that's called Conflict Managed. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, and I'd love to talk with you and get in touch with you and see if there's any resources I could share.
Toby Mildon: Brilliant. Well, Merry, it's lovely to see you again. It's always nice how I can appear on your podcast and then you come on my podcast and we kind of reciprocate, which is really great. So thank you for coming along and sharing all of your wisdom and knowledge with us.
Merry Brown: Oh, thank you. It's been an absolute joy.
Toby Mildon: Thank you. And thank you for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast with myself and Merry today. Hopefully you've learned loads of wisdom and useful tools and insights from Merry that you can apply to conflict within your own organization to help build inclusive work cultures. If there's anything that I can do to help you on your journey to building a more inclusive workplace, feel free to reach out to me through my website, which is mildon.co.uk. You can also find me on LinkedIn where I post regular content and we can always chat online over there until the next time I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, which will be coming up very soon. Cheers. Take good care of yourself.
Intro: Thank you for listening to The Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website @mildon.co.uk.
