It is a simple idea grounded in the laws of nature, moving forward requires friction. Unfortunately, many companies do not have a culture that encourages friction, fail to teach mangers to embrace and inspire friction, or teach managers how to manage friction to keep it from igniting into fire. Therefore, as one who has been tagged as a “disruptive employee” in the past, I want to offer a bit of advice based on lessons learned. How can you be a disruptive employee while managing not to cause any fires that might scar you
I offer the following as best practices for disruptive employees:
- Understand and practice deliberative conversation vs. arguing. Arguing involves emotion. Keeping emotion out of a conversation allows you to have difficult conversions and make decisions that ignite changes that impact company success without causing a fire from the sparks that emotion beings conversations that inherently involve friction.
- Understand and be able to address the objections (and the obstacles real and perceived) that others may have in situations where reaching your objectives involves obtaining buy-in of them.
- If you see friction on the horizon, engage all parties involved that may feel the sparks that are coming and collaborate on how to have productive discussions
- Avoid e-mail at the first signs friction makes anyone “feel pain”. You will see this in the tone of e-mails. It is critical that you pick up the phone or have an in-person conversation to keep friction at a productive level and keep personal feeling out of the equation
- Listen. You can be provocative and passionate, but do not let this make your colleagues feel intimidated and afraid to share a point of view and/or feel that you are not giving their position adequate consideration.