Learn why deconflicting in leadership is the one skill every modern leader needs to guide teams through chaos.

Transformational leadership.

Transactional leadership.

Servant leadership.

Distributed leadership.

Honestly, forget about all of them. To be an effective leader in today’s chaotic and resource-constrained world, you must master one thing before everything else: deconflicting.

Most of the time, leaders face the worst conflicts an organization can offer. And they are paid to resolve those conflicts.

Let’s look at some examples.

1. Resources

Nobody ever has enough resources. Not even big tech. Resources are always scarce, and resolving resource conflicts always creates disappointment with some stakeholders, because everybody considers their request the most important one — customers, partners, employees, everyone.

Let’s look at product management as an example. Even as the CEO of Yonder, I take direct control of the product roadmap. Sometimes we have to concentrate our scarce resources on an important feature that is required to keep up with the competition. Sometimes we have to focus our resources on improving existing features to keep existing customers happy. And sometimes it’s all about fixing important bugs before doing anything else — even if the bug doesn’t turn out to be a bug in the end.

Resource priorities can shift very quickly, and not everybody will understand why priorities shift constantly. That’s where deconflicting leadership is required.

2. Misunderstandings

Conflicts often arise from misunderstandings, especially when working across cultural boundaries.

Let’s look at customer relationships as an example. Now and then, I am dragged into an escalation call with one of our customers. Typically, escalation calls happen during onboarding, when our product is still new to the customer. Believe it or not, the root cause for escalation calls is often misunderstandings. Either because the customer expects something our solution cannot deliver in the same way as their previous solution, or because some information about a certain aspect of our system got lost in the discussion between all the involved people at the working level.

Recently, I was asked to join an escalation call about a problem with setting up a new customer’s single sign-on solution in our system. Before the escalation call, the issue went back and forth multiple times, causing frustration for the customer and us. Believe it or not, the issue was resolved within 5 minutes: I asked the customer to screen share the config page of their single sign-on solution, and it became apparent that they had entered the wrong application URL to reach our system.

3. Priorities

The top priority for a business is very simple: Only do stuff you can make money with. Easy said, not so easily done.

When you start a company from scratch, you likely will pull in whatever customers you can get, and this is the right thing to do as a young company. Later, when you have found product-market fit and gained some experience with how different customers use your product, you might start to consider focusing on certain customer groups only.

At slightly over 30 customers, we still cannot turn customers down. But whenever we engage in discussions with a prospect, we start thinking if there is a fair chance to make money with that customer. If the efforts outweigh the benefits, we are thinking carefully if it makes sense to pull this customer in at whatever cost. Recent examples include a lonely prospect in China, looking to diversify away from American technology; a prospect requesting data residency in Saudi Arabia; or a small customer requesting ample customizations of the product.

Such situations aren’t black-or-white. It’s the grey zone that people struggle with, and that’s when they need their leaders to deconflict.

4. Interpersonal Conflicts

Last but not least, when humans meet, there will always be interpersonal conflicts. Some people naturally like each other, and some naturally dislike each other. Now add a healthy dose of intercultural differences and narcissism, and you will always have interpersonal conflicts with other individuals at work.

But never forget that you will never make money on nurturing interpersonal conflicts. So I suggest wasting zero energy and resources on interpersonal conflicts, focusing on what is relevant, and moving on.