Dealing with Credit Stealing Colleagues: Conflict Resolution Strategies in the Workplace

In this episode, Simon Goode analyzes a workplace conflict case study involving a senior strategist and a junior team member navigating issues of credit-stealing and strained collaboration. Simon Goode explores different frameworks for understanding and resolving value, data, and interest conflicts within teams, emphasizing the importance of clarifying expectations and rebuilding trust through specific, actionable plans. The episode also discusses strategies for assertiveness, empathetic listening, and when to consider escalating issues or bringing in external mediation.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Navigating workplace hierarchy and roles

04:03 Clarifying roles and expectations

06:47 Discussing presentation and collaboration issues

09:51 Conflict resolution strategies

13:18 Rethinking work-life balance

16:40 Collaborative conflict resolution strategies

22:46 Discussing conflict resolution strategies

24:36 Discussing management communication strategies

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

Well, hello. Welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator, Simon Goode. In this video, I'm going to be analyzing a workplace conflict case study. I'll explain some of the different frameworks and approaches that I tend to use when I'm brought in as an external workplace mediator. And my intention is that this might allow you to develop some different options that you can use to manage the conflict situation that you're in. Now, in this situation today, I'm talking about a case study involving a credit stealing colleague. I'll just make sure that my pen's working there and that the annotations are coming through. So I'm going to read this out first, talk about some of the different bits that jump out at me, and then I'll maybe choose one or two different areas to explore more. Now you might be dealing with a conf a credit stealing colleague yourself. So in that case, there might be a number of very obvious options that you should consider. But even if you're dealing with a different kind of overly pushy or you know those very entitled people that you tend to come across, the arrogant, always big noting themselves kind of thing, maybe that's something that you're dealing with. So it's not what you might consider workplace conflict, it's not a dispute where you would bring in a mediator. At the same time, something's going on that's rubbing you up the wrong way. And so maybe today would be a way just to explore what's going on for you in your context as well. I guess what I'm trying to say is even if you're not dealing with an actual credit stealing person, you could still probably use some of the approaches I talk about for empathetic listening and exploration, or maybe for assertiveness and establish establishing boundaries. So let's go through the scenario first, and then maybe I can talk about some of the different bits that jump out at me. In a mid-sized tech firm's marketing team, Sarah, a senior content strategist with five years of experience collaborated closely with a junior member, Alex, on a major campaign launch. So Alex is the junior person, Sarah is the senior. Now it's interesting framing, isn't it, already? Do you think about somebody who's been in a sector, been in an industry for five years to be an expert? Are they actually somebody who you would think of as senior? Or if you do think of terminology like senior something, senior accountant, senior engineer, senior project manager, does that necessarily imply that they hold some level of uh what would you call it, like expertise? And is that knowledge or is it practical application of that knowledge, or is it managing people? I'm often brought in to deal with workplace conflict situations. And the issue is that somebody, like an engineer, for example, has become very good at their technical area. They are actually excelling in the field of engineering, and so they get a promotion, but this next step often involves having a team that reports to them dealing with performance management issues. And I I don't think I'd be telling anybody anything new here, but if you're a good engineer, you might necessarily be a good people manager. You might be, but you won't necessarily be. And I wonder if that's the kind of thing that we often seep into this way of people thinking about conflict. I'm senior. Well, to me, all of those different terminologies and the way that we consider them are what I would call values. These are the subjective perceptions that we've developed throughout all of the experiences that we've had up until this point. So whether or not I think Sarah is senior, that probably depends on the other places that I've worked and how they use terminology like senior something, for example. I guess the thing that jumps out at me as looking through all of this is that we're not necessarily starting from common ground. They might have very different expectations in terms of what they want from one another or what they're prepared to do for one another, what kind of rights exist between them based on their levels, what kind of responsibilities or duties exist between them depending on their levels. So I've just jotted down on the right-hand margin there that that's a value. That would be something where I want to normalize both perspectives. Look, it sounds like you've got different ideas about what working together might look like, given you've got these different roles, different titles, and different sets of responsibilities associated with them. Like I'm trying to say it's normal that you might have different ideas about what would work, what's fair, what's professional communication, what's respectful communication. So let's start from a point where we acknowledge that there's going to be some subjective difference. And the way that we can often navigate that is by really clarifying the expectations moving forward. It's one of the things that I often suggest as a way of rebuilding trust after there's been a lot of conflict is to consider things like let's make very short-term specific plans. And then once I see that you're doing what you've told me that you would do, that's where trust often can be rebuilt. Sorry, I'm just adjusting the levels to make sure that it's not picking up too much of my breath and mouth noise. It's funny all of the different things that you become all of a sudden incredibly conscious about when you're sitting in front of a camera. I can talk to a human very easily, but all of a sudden when I'm recording something, my words get mixed up, my tongue gets tired, that kind of stuff. So what do you make of all of that? Someone's got five years experience, they've collaborated closely, and it's been a major campaign launch. So they've collaborated closely, they've probably got different ideas about what that actually looks like, and it was a major campaign launch. I wonder who considers that to be major, and do they have the same idea about what a major launch is in terms of expectations from team members, that kind of stuff. Let's check out that next paragraph then. Sarah handled the core strategy, creative direction, and many late nights while Alex supported with research and graphics. When the campaign proved highly successful, Alex presented the results in the team meeting, highlighting his own contributions prominently. While only briefly mentioning Sarah's leadership and heavy workload. For me, there's an area there that's about the data that needs to be clarified. In what way did Alex highlight his own contributions and what would he have done differently in order for Sarah not to be upset about it? Like I find that's often a very helpful topic to explore, especially in the the pre-mediation meetings where I meet people one-on-one before we go into a joint mediation session. I often say to them, Well, okay, it sounds like what they've done in your mind anyway was reasonably unacceptable. They shouldn't have done it. What would you have liked them to do differently back then? You've talked about them not collaborating. If they were taking more of a collaborative approach, what would you have liked to see from them? What would you want them to do specifically? And that then often informs the agreements or the plan that the parties come up with. Let's think through specifically what you expect from one another. And I often say to them, because when you see that there's a specific plan and that it's actually being followed, that often is where the trust is rebuilt. We can't really decide to magically flick a switch and trust somebody after conflict, can we? It's a lot more complicated than that. So I think there's a bit to explore here about the data. The other thing that really stands out to me is there's a layer of interest conflict going on here as well, isn't there? Like maybe Alex is gunning for a promotion at the moment, and so by highlighting his work, it might have meant that he was in a better position to rise up the ranks. Maybe there's something else going on though, like Alex feels unappreciated by potentially Sarah. And so he might be looking for some opportunity to shine. And it's not just about this report, it might be about him feeling hard done by in a previous kind of situation. All of the time, in these kind of teams, there's dynamics that develop, they can change and flow and ebb and flow, I guess, is a way of thinking about it over the years. But it would be possible that something was different that's triggered Alex to, you know, arrive in this behavior. So he thinks that he's just being justified because of what happened before. Whereas Sarah is just looking about what's happening now and thinking this isn't fair, what's wrong with you? Like maybe there's an element of even how dare you. So there's an interest layer that's about practically what do they want? Is Alex looking for a promotion? Is Sarah looking for a promotion? Maybe there's a way that they could collaborate on that, think through options and come up with something that's actually a win-win. Or it might be the kind of situation where they just need to compromise. Let's just split the difference. You've got four of these major reports coming up in the next six months. Maybe Alex could take two turns contributing to these two, whereas Sarah would focus her work more prominently in these other ones. And it's more like splitting the difference. Nobody gets 100% of what they want. So they're not entirely happy when I'm negotiating those kind of points in a workplace mediation. I don't say to people, by the way, are you happy with that? As soon as we say to someone, are you happy with that? Well, they're usually thinking at least, well, no, I'm bloody not happy with that. Would you be happy with that? If you were in my kind of situation, the language that I often use is more like, is that something that you can agree to or is that something that you can live with? So if I was coaching Alex or um Sarah here, that would also be the language that I would be suggesting. So when we're dealing with interest conflict, we kind of need to decide how firm an approach to take. This might be a situation where Sarah has absolutely had enough. There's been a number of formal warnings sent until now. So this is the point where she holds the line and takes a very direct kind of approach. But it's possible that there's ego or something else that's going on. And if we pause and just consider it from that helicopter kind of perspective, one or both of them might realise that it's not such a big deal at the end of the day. And so I don't need to hold the line, I don't need to stick to my guns. Maybe this is an area where I can give a bit of concession, or I could use a negotiation tactic like if you can do this for me, then this is what I can do for you. I'm happy to leave this as is, if you will do this other thing related to this other report that's going on at the moment. Or uh what would the other version be? If you do this for me, then this is what I'll do for you. Excuse me, munching on a bit of ice there, I'm sure the microphone picked that one up, unfortunately. So here we've got Sarah feeling deeply undervalued and resentful. So she feels undervalued and resentful. Is that a fact? Is that what you would think of as data? I mean, all of our emotions and feelings are only clear to us to some extent. We don't see the full element of what we're feeling. So I suppose that would be one way of describing what happened within Sarah, but inherently choosing language means that we're like under under expressing the complexity that's actually involved. I think when we arrive on those kind of feelings, we could often describe a number of different what emotions, what you might call emotions, that have a very similar set of physical symptoms. Like Sarah might be feeling tired. If she felt tired and like she didn't have much hope, that's a little bit different than telling herself, I'm undervalued, I'm so sick of this, all of the resentful rumination that often plays out. So I wanted to just put a bit of a a highlight under the word feeling as well. This is often something that I have to deal with in the pre-mediation appointments. Initially, I often find it helpful just to acknowledge and validate it. I can see where you're coming from, that makes sense, given all of these different experiences that you've had over the last six months or something. Yeah, if I was in your position, I might very well feel the same way. As someone looking from the outside, though, I can see that there's more going on here. There's more complexity that's contributing, both within work and those dynamics that exist in your working relationship. But each of you have lives outside of work as well. And there's going to be different things that's going on that you're not actually aware of in the other person's life at least. To be honest, I don't think we're often aware of it in our own life, the way that these personal challenges that we go through spill out and affect the other aspects of our life. Like challenges in this one work relationship might mean that you're not as available to your kids or to your partner, or you end up eating way more chocolate or drinking more than you might normally do, or something else. Like there's this constant spilling out in both directions. So although we think about work-life balance as sort of simplifying this division, it's not true. We have the same brain and the same body that we carry into work as well as life, quote unquote. So I don't think there's necessarily much logic to confirm this idea of work-life balance. I tend to think about it much more as integration personally, but this is another of those value areas where we're all going to have a slightly different perspective on, isn't it? So let's finish up on this scenario. She began withdrawing from joint projects. Communication became strained, and overall team morale suffered as other members noticed the growing tension. So let's find out what the facts are and then we can talk about the subjective elements. She began withdrawing. I wonder if that's also the way that Alex would describe that. If Sarah met me first and I wrote that down, I might consider asking Alex something like, What have you noticed about Sarah's behavior over the past week or two? Has she described what's going on for her? What would other people have observed in terms of the communication within the team at the moment? So I'm kind of getting both of them to explore these areas. I don't necessarily think about them as facts. So she began with drawing. Okay, well, that's either my subjective idea about it or hers or Alex's. Communication became more strained. This is an area again where they're going to have very different ideas about an overall team morale suffered as other members noticed the growing tension. What were the indicators for that overall morale suffering? I often hear people talking about their concerns about stressing out the other members of the team. And I can very much appreciate where they're coming from. At the same time, it there's almost an implication that discomfort is something that should never be tolerated. Like I'm stressed. You can't ask me to do something when I'm stressed. I've told you I have this issue. I've been diagnosed with ABC or whatever. You can't make me feel uncomfortable. So, I mean, I'm not saying that you should make people feel uncomfortable or that you shouldn't, but for to me as an external mediator, I often see these things as very much open to debate. Ultimately, it's in the eye of the perceiver what's fair and what's not. Can I make my staff call a client and give them bad news, even if it will make them think about it for the rest of the evening? I mean, these aren't easy questions to answer. What level of trauma, so to speak, should staff be exposed to, and what is trauma and what's just stress? I don't think that there's such clear delineations as a lot of well, even people in the mental health sector think, to be perfectly frank. In any case, what I would say with them here is that all of these ways of describing your behavior and the other person's behavior inherently constrain the meaning that you make about it. If I use words like communication became strained, that's different than saying you refuse to even talk to me or I I dreaded meeting with you for weeks before each meeting or something similar. I often suggest that let's find a way that's mutual and neutral to describe the issues. And I might actually m talk with both of them about this here. Like tell me a little bit about that behavior. What was it specifically that they did? How did you react? What did you do then as a result? And I'm not really looking for who was right and who was wrong and who's contributed more and whose fault is this or whatever. It's more understanding the patterns. Because if we can get clear on what's going on in terms of the back and forth, that's often where we can begin to think about some options for dealing with it. And then what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? I think a lot of managers like to be collaborative, so they use language like, how can we figure this out? What do we need to consider as a solution here? I think inherently as a mediator, I don't want to necessarily be the rescuer coming in because I'm not going to be here. They're going to have to figure out a way of talking to each other after I'm gone. So I often use much more attributing ownership kind of language, like, how are the two of you going to figure this out? What do the two of you think would help? How would the two of you like it to be? What would you like to be different, etc.? So after these meetings with these kind of people, I might be thinking about some of these elements that I've written down the margins here. There's value conflict, I think, at the heart of this. Our different ideas about what should we expect from one another, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, what's professional, what's not professional. We need to clarify a lot of those different perspectives. There's also going to be some elements of data conflict here. What are the roles and responsibilities? Like these are all of the practical kind of areas that I think sometimes people benefit from just having an external person or a senior manager within an organization sit down and just go through the back and forth between them. What do you expect from one another? All of a sudden can't spell as soon as I'm writing on the whiteboard, and what do you know? I notice that using the virtual whiteboard that I've got here, exactly the same phenomena is happening. So the value would be about how they should treat one another. So that's about the what how do you expect things to be? What do you expect maybe is a better way of framing it from one another, from the rest of the team, from these meetings, from the email communication, etc. So they're inherently tied in my mind. Like if Sarah has a view that we're all basically on the same level within this team, so I don't see why I should have to spend extra time staying back late when Alex always leaves at five and he just sort of walks out the door brushing his hands of everything. So that would then inform the data, wouldn't it? Like if Sarah has that view that we should all stand on our own true two feet, then it means that the responsibilities that she would expect then is probably a large level of independence or autonomy. Whereas it's possible that Alex thinks about it very differently. He might think that because seniors Sarah is a senior person within the team, she's on that pay level, she gets paid the big bucks, that with that should come a certain level of responsibility. And it's not his problem if other members of the team work much slower than him. So whose problem is this? That's the value element. And then what do they expect from one another? That's the data kind of element. And then the other area that I referred to was interest conflict over here on the right hand side. This is thinking about what's important for both of them. What do they want in the short term, in the medium term, in the long term, in terms of their team, in terms of their own career? It might be something to do with work-life balance, like they don't want to stay back late a certain amount of time per week or whatever. Uh, there might be a recommendation that they could offer one another. There might be more clear ways of delegating the tasks, because maybe one of their interests is that they are time poor and they don't like sitting through a long meeting that effectively could have been an email. This is where I would explore with both of them what do they want. What do they need? And what about other people's interests, what about other people's needs, maybe the two of you. It sounds like you really do care about the other people that you care about. And although there's some tension going on between the two of you, you hadn't actually considered that to be such a big deal. It sounds like from your perspective, some level of disagreement is helpful at the same time as you've noticed that other members of the team are a little more withdrawn, and they talk about standing on eggshells during a particular point in a team meeting or something similar. So I inherently begin with that assumption that you guys probably also want to support the other members of your team, right? And I mean whether they do or not, they want to be seen as being supportive of the Of the team. So that often can be also a little bit of leverage about, well, what then do you expect from one another? It sounds like you wish that you could just do this, or it's fair enough actually that you just say this. On the other hand, this might be an area that you're willing to compromise on, given the fact that you've got the other people's needs and wants in mind as well. You're not just thinking about yourself here. So that's an admirable thing, isn't it? And often it's it's this very balanced, nuanced approach, isn't it, as a mediator? Like how pushy should I be, how influential should I be? I could describe the proposal from the other party very differently and get the same other party to agree to it or not agree to it. And so I always sort of tread very carefully around all of these different areas. But reducing the conflict, I think that's often something that's just objectively better for everybody involved. It's better for the organization, it's better for the individuals, it's better even in terms of not saving you'd save money rather than getting an external mediator to come in and solve it or something else. So that would be probably the areas that I would be wanting to explore with these people. I don't know whether I would meet them individually first or just start with the joint meeting. I suppose in reality, if you were dealing with this kind of situation in practice, you would know them and so you'd have a little bit of information about what they can tolerate or what's fair enough given the history and given all of the other things that would be factored in there. But what do you think? Would you be also considering exploring those different ideas about mutual support in value terms, or dealing with the data, the job descriptions, the meeting structures, the agenda items, who's going to be CC'd into which email, those kind of elements in terms of the data? Or maybe there's also some element of interest, and you could either be exploring with them what they want and how developing a more productive relationship might actually be good for both of them. And ultimately, I think if things don't change, you also need to consider escalating your level of assertiveness. There might be a point where you say, enough is enough. This is what I expect from one or both of you. If it doesn't change, this is what's going to happen. And I think, in a sense, that's probably taking that interest level to the next layer. Instead of just letting them either collaborate or compromise, you're stepping in as an external authority to say, this is what's going to happen moving forward. It doesn't mean that you necessarily have to be harsh or abusive or mean or disrespectful or anything, but it's very firm. That low tone of voice, slow speed, lower volume, not a lot of wiggle room, not a lot of flexibility. This is what needs to happen next. Let me know if you need any clarifications. Please let me know if anything changes on your end and we can reconsider. But at this point, this is the plan, and this is why I'm expecting you to follow it this way, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, what do you think? How would you apply these different areas? Would you be more inclined to do it in a formal kind of way or informally? Would you be more inclined to get a senior manager or somebody with a level of authority in or not? Do you think that it would be better for the team leader or the local team to deal with it? And what would you think about bringing in an external mediator? I don't know necessarily that this one is at the point where you would need a mediator, but I suppose that all depends on the context as well, how much time you've got in terms of you as a manager or even you as a business owner if it's a company that you've got. I'd love to hear though if you'd be willing to leave a comment down below, especially if it's been useful. If you want to write a question, I'll do my best to answer them, although sometimes I'm not the quickest at responding, but I will respond. And otherwise, thank you very much for sticking with me this far. If you'd like more videos and resources dealing with conflict, please consider hitting subscribe. Otherwise, all the best. Bye for now.