Why Your Managers Keep Calling Each Other “Difficult”
Labels like “difficult” usually mean a team has no common way to talk about how people work. Fixing that starts with your senior team.
If you want your organization aligned behind its plans, give people a common language for how they work, and make sure everyone understands it the same way. Then a manager can tell a colleague, “I need more time with the numbers before I decide,” and the colleague hears a description of how that manager works. Without that language, people reach for labels like “difficult.”
Two managers now copy their VP on every email
Imagine an operations manager and a finance manager who share a project. The operations manager makes decisions quickly and moves on, and the finance manager wants every number checked before anyone commits. A few weeks in, they copy their VP on every email they send each other, and each of them has come to your office, separately, to explain what's wrong with the other one.
At a nonprofit, the same standoff might be between a development director and a finance director with a grant application due Friday. The development director wants it submitted on time, and the finance director won't sign off on the grant budget until every line ties to the organization's own budget. Both of them are protecting the organization, and if they can't talk about how each of them works, the grant can slip away while they argue.
What changes when the language is shared
I've seen standoffs like this ease once the two people could name how each of them likes to work. Once both managers have those terms, the finance manager's “He's reckless” becomes “We work at different speeds, so let's set a date for the decision.” Nobody has to change their personality, and the disagreement goes back to being about the project. A common language won't resolve every conflict, though. If one of the two managers really is missing deadlines, handle it as a performance conversation.
Why alignment depends on a common language
An organization will never carry out a plan as well as it could until everyone is aligned behind it. People can't be aligned without a shared understanding of the plan and of each person's role in it, and that understanding depends on speaking the same language. The two managers in the scenario agree on the plan, but every disagreement about how to carry it out turns into one about each other. That's true whatever languages people speak. In English, Spanish, French, or a mix, the words you use about working together need to mean the same thing to everyone.
Listen for the labels people already use
This week, listen for the words your managers use about each other in meetings and in your office. “Difficult,” “slow,” “pushy,” and “too sensitive” are signs that a team has no common way to describe how people work. Some people hear words like these as offensive, and others don't, but either way they don't help anyone work together. What helps is understanding how people differ. Labels like these can also stick to a person for years and follow that person into performance reviews and promotion discussions.
Decide on the language with your senior team
Before any manager hears the new terms, your senior team needs to decide what the language is. The senior team usually has that conversation when someone proposes a tool, and asks, “What is it, what do these words mean, and why would we want this?” Once the team agrees, write down what the main terms mean, with examples, so a manager in sales and a manager in engineering understand them the same way. Agree, too, that the terms describe how people prefer to work and will never be used to decide who gets hired or promoted, or to rate anyone's performance.
Use the same terms everywhere, starting with onboarding
If sales uses one set of terms and the engineers who support them use another, the two groups still have nothing in common to say when they disagree. Use the same terms in new-manager training and in team kickoffs across every department, and build them into onboarding. If new hires don't learn them in their first month, a few years of normal turnover leaves a good part of the team without them, and the old labels come back.
Why the language needs a home inside the organization
Your HR team is already in the conversations where a common language helps most, from onboarding to the meeting where two managers can't work together. In-house isn't always cheaper, and your facilitators will need time with a program before they can lead it. On November 17 and 18, in a free, live masterclass, we'll talk about what building that kind of program involves. Save your seat here.
Join us on November 17 and 18
Your In-House Advantage is a free, live masterclass for internal HR, L&D, and OD leaders at organizations of 250 to 5,000 or more employees. It's two 90-minute working sessions, on Tuesday, November 17, and Wednesday, November 18, at 1:00 pm ET (10:00 am PT). In the first, we look at the patterns organizations fall into with new managers and what those patterns cost. In the second, you work on a solution for your own organization and leave with a one-page business case for your CFO.
It's live only, with no replay, and seats are limited. Nothing is sold in session one. In the last few minutes of session two, I'll explain how Symphony 100 works with organizations that want help.
Save my seat for November 17 and 18
You'll probably hear someone called “difficult” before the week is out. When you do, ask for an example of what that colleague does, and listen for how that colleague prefers to work.
Frank November is the Founder & CEO of Symphony 100 and has been an Everything DiSC® Certified Practitioner since 2014. Symphony 100 Ltd. and Symphony 100 North America LLC are each independent, authorized partners of Everything DiSC® and The Five Behaviors®, which are registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., or its affiliated companies.
