Optimal Outcomes in Challenging Times

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today I'm really, really delighted to be speaking with Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, a leading expert on conflict and organizational psychology. She is the founder and CEO of Alignment Strategy Group and author of a wonderful book, very practical and also very insightful, called Optimal Outcomes: Free Yourself From Conflict at Work, at Home, and in Life.

For nearly two decades, she's advised senior leaders on how to achieve optimal organizational health and growth. Earlier in her career, she was director of negotiation programs and a facilitator at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. A former counter-terrorism research fellow with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she received her B.A. with honors from Tufts University and holds a PhD in social organizational psychology from Columbia University.

Jennifer, thank you so much. To take time for us, we really, really appreciate it.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Thank you so much for having me, Anita. It's really a pleasure to be here talking with you.

Anita Brick: There's so many places we could start, but it seems to me that we need a shared definition of what you mean by optimal outcome.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Well, an optimal outcome is defined by two things. Number one, it's made up of what is the most ideal future that you can imagine happening in whatever situation you're in. We're talking typically about recurrent conflict situations. So what is the most ideal thing you can imagine. And I say imagine because I'm talking about what can you use, literally use your imagination, what would it look like then? What would it feel like and what would it taste, smell, even sound like then? Using all five of our senses and our emotion is a great way to imagine what it will look like in that future, or what it will be like in that future state. But we can't stop there, because if we do, we might end up lost in fantasy land, imagining something that has no basis in reality. So an optimal outcome is the best we can imagine happening in our situation, plus taking reality into account.

And there are three types of reality that I suggest we take into account. Number one, the constraints of the situation itself, realistically speaking. Number two, the reality of who the other people are, who are involved in our situation and not just what they care about, which is what we've been trained to think about when we get trained in win-win negotiation methodology. Not just what they care about, but actually who they are as human beings with all their strengths and their limitations. And then finally, the reality of who we ourselves are, which can often be very difficult for us to face. It’s sometimes more difficult than facing the reality of who the other people are, is acknowledging all of our own strengths and our own limitations. An optimal outcome, again, is made up of two things the ideal future we can imagine. Plus, taking into account the reality that we're facing as well.

Anita Brick: It was interesting, one of the MBA students, she said: “I understand that the challenges are inevitable and I'm pretty good at resolving those that I have with other people. That said, I lose motivation, momentum, and resolve when the obstacle is something where I have little or no control and there's lots of uncertainty and ambiguity.” Sounds like our world right now. “Where would you advise someone like me to start?”

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Great question for the Optimal Outcomes methodology, because this methodology is all about doing things that are in our control. So many of us have been taught now from a very young age, that collaboration is key to getting what we want in life and getting along with other people both at work and at home. And that's very often true, but it's not always true. Sometimes our efforts at collaboration, using the best methodologies and the best books and best workshops, including ones that I've taught myself for many, many years coming out of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, which is like one of the most well respected places on planet Earth for negotiation methodology, just doesn't always work. Great place to begin is to start with what you can control, and that is what the eight Optimal Outcomes practices are all designed to help us do. So you don't need anyone else's cooperation to do them.

So the first practice, which is always a great place to begin, is to simply notice what habit have I been using? What conflict habit have I been defaulting to in this recurring conflict situation?

Anita Brick: As we talk about that, the whole methodology, the way you approach things, really assumes you may have little control. You may not have a lot of control. But what's the first place that someone can start to even identify the areas where they do have some control?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: A great place to start is by identifying what pattern have I gotten locked in with someone else? So I talk about four conflict habits that we typically use when we're stuck in recurring conflict. Each of our habits interacts with other people's conflict habits to form a pattern of interaction that keeps us stuck on what I call a conflict loop. A great place to begin is just to notice how have we gotten stuck? What pattern am I stuck in with someone else?

Anita Brick: And I think we need to make it simple enough, because it seems you have one layer of your own habits, you have one layer of the other person's habits, and sometimes that can get so complex. People just throw up their hands and they go back to that conflict loop. So maybe you can help us simplify it to be able to actually implement.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes, I think it can be very simple. So the four conflict habits and you can ask yourself–which one of these two I tend to use–are we blame other people. We avoid other people. We blame ourselves and shame ourselves. Or we relentlessly seek to collaborate with other people, even when they have shown themselves to be unwilling to collaborate back with us. Once you've identified your habit, I'm going to take my best educated guess. What would I say the habit is that the other person or people that I'm involved with in this situation, what habit might they be using?

So, for example, if I know which is true for me, my conflict habit, when I'm really honest with myself, I blame other people. One of the stories I talk about in the book is that my mother and I were in conflict for many years. She was blaming me and I was blaming her. So we're stuck in a blame-blame pattern. Another very common pattern that people get stuck in is blame-shame. One person blames the other, and that person shames and blames themselves. Another common one is one person's trying to relentlessly collaborate and the other one shuts down. So the first thing to do is just pause and notice. How are we stuck? What pattern might we be stuck in?

Sometimes just pausing to notice how you're stuck is pattern breaking in and of itself. And that is the key here. If there's one thing I would advise people to do in their action, that is to break the pattern. And the way you break the pattern is very simple. It's just by doing something different from what you've done before. If I recognize that my habit is to blame others, well, what could I do instead? I could stay quiet. I could take a deep breath. I could go take a walk around the block to cool off. I could consider what my own contribution to the situation might be. There's a lot of different things I could do rather than just continuing to blame the other person. But this, of course, takes a good amount of self-reflection, so it's not easy to do. But guess what? It's also not easy staying stuck in conflict either. So the question is what would you rather do.

Anita Brick: It’s a good point? You know two questions kind of emerge from that. The first one is from an alum and he talks about pause, he says: “I like your idea of the power of pause. Yet how do you advise someone to do that without annoying the other person, especially if they really like to stay at a fast pace with conversations and coming up with solutions?”

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: And that's a great question. There are a few things you can do to take a pause in the moment with other people. And of course, it depends on who the other people are and what your relationship is with them, what level of trust you have with them. I'll start with the easier situations to take a pause and then move on to the harder ones.

If you're in a situation with someone who is close to you, someone you live with, and you have a trusting relationship, you know, I would advise you to say, you know what? I'm going to have a better answer for you after I have a chance to think and cool down. I'm a little riled up right now. Do you mind if we take a short break from this conversation, and let's come back to it later this afternoon, or this evening or tomorrow morning after I've had a chance to cool off and think. So you can ask directly.

And then if you're with someone, an example I like to give is the CEO in conversation with the head of the board, and the CEO does not feel comfortable saying, let me get back to you on that. You can take a break, a pause inside of your own mind, even while you physically remain with the person and just help yourself, could count inside of your head. You can take your deep breaths while the other person is speaking. You want to be engaged and listening, but allow yourself inside of yourself to do whatever you know you need to do to calm yourself down. This requires self-knowledge and some self-reflection to ask yourself, what are the things that help me calm down? Take the opportunity to get to know yourself and ask yourself what would be helpful to me.

Anita Brick: Okay. Here's someone who's working on it. But his concern is that it's not sticking. As an MBA student, he said: “I don't leverage my emotions, well, at least not the unconscious ones. This leads me to bringing conflict from work to home and home to work. I do work on changing this, but I haven't been able to make my aspirational habits in this area stick. Thank you in advance for your advice.”

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Well, all of the practices in the book are called practices. It's not one and done, and the more we practice, the better we get at them. The more you do them, the more comfortable they become, the more likely you will be to achieve ongoing, optimal outcomes over time. What do we do with our emotions and how do we not having our emotions flow over from work to home and back and forth?

The first thing to do with our emotions is notice them. Identify them. What are we feeling? You and I could even do that together right now. Just take a moment and just ask ourselves, what am I feeling right now, right? There's so many different emotions we could be feeling, and we might be feeling multiple emotions all at one time. This is a practice, just the practice of identifying what our emotions are is a great practice to engage in. Just noticing how our emotions do change over time can be helpful. First you got to know what they are. So identify them and sometimes they will settle and they will move and they will pass.

But other times they don't. When that's the case, and oftentimes when we're stuck in recurrent conflict, they don't settle. They don't pass as quickly as we might wish that they would. So the next thing that I advise is to ask ourselves, what messages are my emotions trying to send me? And there are some very classic messages that our emotions are there to tell us. So for example, anger typically says something here is not fair, not right, not just. Fear, says danger ahead. Sadness tells us that a loss has occurred. Just noticing what's the message. And the final step is to ask ourselves, what is a constructive action that I can take based on that message? And again, you want to ask yourself not only what's a constructive action that I could take, but what would be pattern breaking?

Anita Brick: So in the midst of this, and I know you talk about this in the book, how do you not get derailed by shadow or lurking emotions?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes. So I talk about three different emotion traps in the book. And in fact, people, if they're interested, they can go online and find out which of these emotion traps they tend to get trapped by the most. You can go to optimaloutcomesbook.com assessment and you'll see two assessments. One is the conflict habits assessment and the other is the emotion traps assessment. You can take one or both. My advice is the same regardless of whether you're being trapped in it. I can explain what that trap is that you just mentioned. So the lurking emotions trap is when we experience emotions intensely inside of ourselves. But we have been taught from a young age, most likely, that it is not okay to show those emotions or to express those emotions outwardly. So we hold them inside and we hide them away. And we hope that no one can figure out what we're feeling. Problem is that they typically ooze out anyway, and people do sense them, but they come out in these ways that we can't control, and they can often wreak havoc on our relationships with other people.

My advice is exactly the same as what I just said regardless of which of the emotion traps we have gotten trapped by. Which is first, identify what is the emotion, right? If I'm someone who's used to hiding my emotions, even when I'm experiencing them very strongly or intensely inside of myself, it can be very helpful for me personally to ask myself, what am I feeling? Oh, I'm feeling angry. Or oh, I'm feeling frayed or scared. See if I can sit with it and let it pass or move through me. But again, if that's not possible, then ask, what message is this trying to send me? Well, if I feel angry, maybe it's because this situation doesn't seem fair to me. There's something here that's going on that's unjust or not right, that needs to be made right.

And so then I can ask myself, what's a constructive, pattern-breaking action that I can take? So if I've been holding it inside, well, what would be constructive and different from holding it inside might be asking myself, what do I need to have happen here for this situation to feel more fair or more right or more just? Then I can have a direct conversation with someone, else perhaps, about how I see the situation and why I think it's unjust and what my request would be going forward.

Anita Brick: There was a question here that made me think of this. Sometimes we go into the conflict and we've decided we do not want to resolve the conflict. We want to keep it going, either because it gives us allies or because it makes us feel better about ourselves. There was an alum who was talking about her manager, and her manager really isn't changing. The situation is deteriorating, and the alumna wanted to know, look, I think this guy is a jerk. I can't leave my job right now. It's not possible right now. How do I find one thing of value in that other person so I can shift my perspective?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes. Two of the practices in the book actually put ourselves inside of someone else's shoes and see things from their perspective in a very quick way. The first of those is the practice of mapping it out. So very often when we're stuck in a conflict like this question asker is describing, we see it as it's just between me and the other person, especially when we're stuck in a recurring long term conflict. It's usually a bit more complex than that. So map out who else is involved. But we want to take it a step beyond that too. We really want to open up the lens here and see not only who else is involved. Put down on that map people, places, events, any factors that have influenced or might be influenced by the situation.

So you could put the background as much background as you know where that other person comes from, where other people on your map come from, how did they grow up? What influences them in their lives? Have they told you about particularly influential coaches that they had, or teachers that they had, or bosses that they had. Put those people on the map as well.

This can be a very quick exercise. I've been doing webinars on my book tour, and I've literally given people two minutes, and this is hundreds of people on these webinars, and I give them two minutes to map out a situation. And then I ask them what insight have they gained? And it is amazing to me that people come back after literally two minutes of mapping out a situation and they say, oh my gosh, what I've discovered is that my manager has somebody putting pressure on her that I had not considered before, and so the pressure that I'm feeling from my manager is actually coming from her manager. It gives me empathy for her. So it doesn't take away the pain of my feeling micromanaged. But it does help explain the circumstances that my own manager is finding herself in. That raises my empathy for that person. So that's one practice you can do to raise your empathy for the person, understand what might be going on for them.

Anita Brick: Along with the lurking emotions. There are those shadow values that also come into play to create different dynamics in conflict. How do you identify them and how do you also work with them so that you're not working against them?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes. So I distinguish between ideal values and shadow values. Ideal values are those things that we care about in life. And we are proud to say we care about. So things like love, adventure, leadership. Shadow values, in contrast, are things that we really care about in life that we are not proud to say that we care about, not even to our own selves. So we push these values down inside of ourselves, out of our conscious awareness. Not only can we not admit them to ourselves, but obviously, of course, then it's impossible for us to talk about them with other people and impossible for other people to talk about them with us. So these are things like typically status, power, control, financial security.

My advice is, first of all, like you suggested, just noticing what my own shadow values might be and taking my best guess at what someone else's shadow values might be. I don't like how my manager is acting, and I suspect there's something else going on, but I just don't know what it is. So asking ourselves what might be leading my manager to act this way? So it could be that your manager is actually feeling like they're not performing as well as they would like, and you are performing well, and they're worried that you performing well is going to make them look bad. You know, I would call that a shadow value about status or about recognition. They want to be recognized and maybe they're jealous or something.

Just noticing that. Now, it doesn't mean that you should then go up, try to have a conversation with your manager directly saying, I think that you really need to be recognized. That's not likely to get you very far, likely to lead to a lot of defensiveness, because if it's a shadow value, it's not something that the other person is aware is going on for them, but just you noticing and honoring that shadow value for yourself. So when I say, what does it mean to honor a shadow value? It's in words, in thoughts, or in your actions. So in your thoughts just to say, you know what, I can notice for myself that my manager might have a need to be recognized either by me or by other people in the organization. And that's not happening for my manager. And that must be really frustrating for my manager. And I'm getting caught in the crosswinds of that. But it's probably not about me. But if I can acknowledge, well, if I think maybe my manager has this need that she can't even notice for herself, maybe I could try recognizing her for something and see if that helps calm her down. You don't have to do anything about it. I don't want to suggest that that's your responsibility to take care of your managers shadow values, right? You don't have to. Again, just like the mapping practice does, just noticing what might be going on for the other person.

The risk of being wrong is worth the reward of the possibility of being right, because it can again raise your empathy for the person, depersonalize the situation and it frees you from the conflict loop because conflict freedom is contagious. So the minute you free yourself from that conflict loop, the energy is gone from that conflict loop. What we want to do is help free you from the situation in whatever way we can. And often recognizing what other people's shadow values are and what our own shadow values are, go a long way towards that.

Anita Brick: So when you think about this, how do you avoid being cognizant of the other people's shadow values and other things and have empathy for them? And if you tend to be someone who takes care of others, you then create a new conflict, because now you're taking care of them and you've forgotten about yourself. How do you balance the two?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes, all of these practices are focused on ourselves, partially because of what you just described. There's so much technology and literature out there already on how to raise our emotional intelligence, to be empathetic towards other people. And what I have found is that it's suffocating us. So I really advise us to, particularly when it comes to our emotions and empathy, stop worrying so much about what other people are feeling and how they're reacting, because we have very little control over that anyway. As little control as we feel we have over our own emotions, we have even less control over other people's emotions. Right? Right. See what it would be like for you to stop worrying so much about them, just being able to identify what am I feeling right now, and own that for yourself. And I'd like to see us do more of taking care of our own emotional selves first.

Anita Brick: The way you approach this makes sense because I can do that. If my objective is not to win or create a win-win situation, but to find the cause and break the conflict.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes. How do you see that?

Anita Brick: Good question, I hadn't thought about that. What I was thinking is that if my goal is to win at all costs, that means I have to defeat you. Clearly, that's not a good idea. if I am so forcing, like you said earlier, you're all about collaboration, collaboration, collaboration, you can lose sight of things. And maybe my end game for collaboration is that you win and you feel good and that I win and I feel good, and that one can’t exist without the other. When you think about the goal of breaking that conflict loop, I just need to see what it is that I want, understand the reality of the situation, and engage in a way that honors who I am without forcing any particular outcome.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Yes. Yeah, I think you're right. What you just described is a doing something different in the face of having been using a relentlessly collaborative conflict habit. If you have been trying and trying and trying to collaborate with someone else and it is not working, a great thing to do instead is what you just described, which is stop. Notice how you're stuck and then ask yourself, what else could I do instead? Well, I could notice what do I need here? Taking into account the reality of the person or the people, the situation that I'm facing. And then I could make a direct request. So I'm just going to be direct and tell you, here's what I need. And then I'm going to see if that works. I'm going to do an experiment. And if that helps me, great. I'm going to learn from that. And I'm going to have gotten my needs met. If it doesn't work, I'm going to learn from that. And I'm going to say what worked well about it, if anything, and what didn't work well. And what can I learn from that? And I'm going to put that into the application of my next experiment, and I'm going to try doing it a third way and see if that third way might work.

Anita Brick: We need to take responsibility, but in some cases we need to leave. In some cases we do. That is not your preferred outcome.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: I would not say that at all. I’m kind of agnostic as to whether we leave or we stay. That's the point. And that also, by the way, is part of the technology or the methodology of win-win principle negotiation. It absolutely is. If people are familiar with the term BATNA, best alternative to negotiated agreement. That was meant to be part of that getting to yes methodology, which is you always do have an alternative. It may not be a very good alternative, but you always have one. And your job is to identify what that alternative is. Now, the place that the optimal outcomes method takes this a step further. Now, standing on the shoulders of giants who created this amazing BATNA technology. What I found working with real people in real organizations over the last 20 years is that very often we perceive our alternatives to be so costly that we don't take them seriously, and therefore we stay stuck in conflict because we don't see ourselves as having a real walk-away alternative. We just pooh pooh it and pretend it doesn't exist.

So what I encourage us to do is take it seriously and write out for ourselves what are the costs that I'm paying for staying stuck in conflict? What are the costs I would pay if I walked away? And we have to then identify what would walking away look like. Very often when we're talking about walking away in the context of work, either I quit or I fire someone and compare those costs to the costs that I would pay if I tried something different. A third option that I haven't thought of yet, and I call that our ideal future, imagined ideal future. So what are the costs? And then what might be the benefits of each of those paths? What might be the benefits if I walked away? What might be the benefits of staying stuck? Sometimes the benefits of staying stuck are as uncomfortable as it is, it's actually comfortable, right? I know how to do this. I know how to stay stuck. I've been stuck for years.

Anita Brick: Right, right, right.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: And then what would be the benefits of this third ideal future that I haven't tried yet? And so sometimes what happens for people in this cost benefit analysis is that they notice that the costs of walking away are actually lower than the costs of staying stuck in conflict, and also than the costs of this ideal future. And many times they have tried this ideal future, right? The collaborative. In the book, I talk about one of my clients who had been stuck in conflict for years, and she had been trying to collaborate with the rest of the senior team she was on, and they had brought in, you know, consultant after consultant. I was one of them, and it just didn't work. And she had written off the possibility of quitting because she had assumed that it meant she was going to have to remove herself and her whole family to another coast, another city that was just untenable for her.

But when she took a good, hard look at the cost she was paying today for staying stuck, she realized that the costs comparatively, of walking away were smaller. And then, of course, it turned out that she was wrong. She didn't have to move cities at all, so some of the assumptions she had made were incorrect as well. So sometimes walking away can free us in a very obvious way that we just had written off before.

And the opposite can also be true, that sometimes walking away does come with so many costs and we’re fantasizing about walking away. We know it's not possible because it does come along with all those costs. So then we have to really ask ourselves, do I rather stay stuck? Or can I imagine an ideal future? And how do I free myself whilst being in this relationship with this person?

Anita Brick: That is a common dilemma that people face. Thank you so much for all of this. You've given us a lot to think about. There are tons of things to think about in the book. To summarize a little bit for us, if you were advising a client who wanted to create an optimal outcome and break this conflict loop, especially in a challenging time, what are three things that you would have them start doing right now?

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: The first thing I would advise is to notice what is your conflict habit. And you can go online again and take the assessment to find out at optimaloutcomesbook.com assessment. It's free and just seven minutes. And then I would ask myself what conflict habit might the other person or people involved be using and see what is the pattern? Is it blame-blame, blame-shame? Shut down-shut down, relentlessly collaborate-shut down. What is the pattern? And then just stop and notice. So that's the first practice. Then the second practice I would advise is map it out. Ask yourself who else is involved in this situation. Put anything on your map that will help you tell the story of the situation in a different way than you have before. Get creative. Put colors on your map. Put names of emotions on your map, icons on your map, anything that will help you tell that story in a different way. And then notice what insight have I gained from doing this mapping practice? What have I learned about the backgrounds of the other people involved? What have I learned about myself? What aspect of the situation is really the most difficult or challenging? Where might there be help from people on this map that I didn't notice before? And then the third place to continue on that journey could be either to delve into the practice about noticing your emotions and identifying your emotions, or about identifying your shadow values and other people's shadow values.

You can choose which one of those is most central to you. One of the things that I do say about these practices is that in any situation that you find yourself in, one or the other of these practices is likely to be more or less central. So for some situations, it's values is central, and for other situations emotions are central. So you can move fluidly through these practices and find which one speaks the most to whatever particular situation you're in. And this is an intuitive process of getting to know the practices and using them over time, and to figure out which one is going to be most most useful for you.

Anita Brick: That's why experimentation in relatively low risk environments is a good way to try something out. If it doesn't work or it's not the right thing at the right time, then there's not a lot of loss. Practice is so crucial.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: It's about keeping the focus on what you can do differently.

Anita Brick: And ultimately breaking that cycle so that you can be happier and more successful. I love that. It's really great.

Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Please keep doing the work you're doing. It is so important not just today, but it is important always because conflict can lead to so many negative outcomes and breaking free from that, breaking that loop can create possibilities.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Thank you so much, Anita. I do hope it's helpful for people. I hope people will stay in touch. You can find me online on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter at J. Goldman Wetzler, or at Jen Goldman Wetzler, and also at optimaloutcomesbook.com. You can get in touch.

Anita Brick: That would be great. And we have all that information on the chicagobooth.edu/careercast site. Again, Jen, thank you so very much for making the time.

Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler: Thank you very much for having me.

Anita Brick: And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.