Speaking Your Truth: Conflict Avoidant Leaders Create More Conflict

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“I am having the most difficult time with our Head of Engineering,” said the Product Manager.

“What’s going on,” I asked?

“Every time we’re in a meeting together, he shoots down whatever I am asking for, or argues that I don’t understand the technology constraints involved, or that I am pushing the team too hard. He just criticizes everything I say. I am really frustrated.”

“What have you tried so far”?

“Well, I try to be really prepared for those meetings now. I do a lot of research and prepare all my data to be ready to argue my case. But then, when the time comes, I can’t think of what to say. I just tend to freeze up. He doesn’t let me get a word in anyway. He just dominates the discussion.”

“Have you ever tried just talking to him privately about how you feel about these meetings,” I offered?

“Oh, I could never do that! I don’t want to make a big deal out of it. What if he gets angry? What if it gets back to my boss? What if he embarrasses me more in the next meeting? No, I’ll just try to be more organized next time.”

The fear of confrontation is understandable. No one wants to put themselves into an uncomfortable situation on purpose. But avoiding it will ultimately make things much worse.

There are scenarios when a private conversation with someone about a difficult issue provokes that person to be even more difficult. But those scenarios occur only a tiny fraction of the time. Most of the time, hard conversations that may seem insurmountable at first go more smoothly than we ever expected. Our fear is far greater than any negative impact of the conversation.

And yet, we assume the opposite. The mere chance that things won’t go well can prevent us from addressing situations at work that make us miserable. We would rather bite our tongues and continue to be miserable, to soldier on or muddle through, than to roll up our sleeves and go deal with it directly.

Why do we tend to fixate on the tiny percentage of times that things will go wrong? Why don’t we think more statistically about it and assume things will probably be fine? And, if they aren’t fine, they probably won’t be that bad.

A good number of us grew up in environments where having an opinion was frowned upon. Perhaps even criticized, shamed, or ridiculed. Or we were taught that we should never make another person uncomfortable, to always be polite even if it means biting your tongue. If you come from that sort of background, as many do, you might have developed difficulty expressing yourself when emotions are running high.

The anticipation of discomfort can be enough to prevent us from taking a necessary action. We might anticipate our own discomfort, imagining that the person we are speaking to responds negatively, with anger for instance. That fantasy scenario of being attacked or shouted at can be debilitating, as we run through the hypothetical conversation over and over in our head, thinking about all the ways it could go horribly wrong. So we avoid confrontation in order to avoid our own discomfort.

But we may also avoid a confrontation because we anticipate and try to avoid someone else’s discomfort. In that case, delivering bad news, or critical feedback, or simply asking someone to behave differently because they are making us feel bad in some way, we bend over backwards to avoid confronting the other person no matter how awful the situation makes us feel internally. Being direct and addressing the issue head on is simply too uncomfortable.

We have all seen examples of this at work, no doubt. Some of us have been the cause. But take heart: most of this is programmed behavior running on autopilot. It can be changed, if we can understand what is going on, and use a few simple techniques to work through it.

One powerful analytic framework that helps us see these patterns more concretely is Karpman’s Drama Triangle.

The Drama Triangle

The Drama Triangle is a type of “mind game” that was first modeled and documented by Stephen Karpman in the 1960s. It illustrates how dysfunctional communication patterns can emerge in our organizations.

The primary motivation for playing mind games at work is to preserve one’s status or retain (or abdicate) power over others. But it can also be used to avoid conflict, and paradoxically results in even more conflict. The Drama Triangle may be what is preventing us from speaking up when we are faced with difficulty at work. Unfortunately it makes matters worse in the long run.

Let’s look at how the triangle works.

There are three possible roles: a victim, a persecutor, and a rescuer. The most common version occurs between two people who start in one role and end up switching at the end of the game. Other versions of the game may develop with more than two people, but let’s keep it simple.

A victim role entails some form of helplessness. Usually, this role would be characterized by the phrase, “poor me!” A persecutor role is played by someone who is attacking, criticizing, or shaming the person in the victim position. It isn’t necessary for there to be a persecutor role in order for a victim role to start the game. The persecutor can just as well be imagined.

Finally, a rescue role is one who has taken on the responsibility for “saving” the victim. That may sound laudable at first, but we must realize that the victim is not in any real danger. They’ve simply abdicated responsibility for their own well-being. Similarly, the rescuer was not asked to rescue, but rather assumed the role in response to the victim’s complaints. It could be seen as a compulsion to jump in and help even when they are not really helping.

So, for example, if person A starts out as a victim by communicating victim-like behavior to person B (“Oh, poor me”), person B may be likely to respond by jumping in to help without being asked for help (“I’ll save you!”). Person A’s motivation at a subconscious level is to feel helpless, and they don’t actually want to be saved. They merely want to complain. And they may actually feel resentment of person B for interfering.

Similarly, person B’s motivation is that they are uncomfortable simply letting person A be miserable. They take over responsibility for person A’s feelings, and try to “fix” the situation. The more they try to fix, the more person A tries to remain helpless. The tension builds until finally one of them blows their top and switches into the persecutor role. As persecutors, they express their anger at the other, and all of the tension from the game is released in a big outburst. Then with the board clear the game can begin again. In fact, the outburst from a persecutor can easily trigger another victim response starting the cycle all over again.

How does this relate to our scenario between the PM and the Head of Engineering above? Let’s place them on the Drama Triangle in their respective roles.

You may think at first that the Head of Engineering is playing the role of the persecutor from the perspective of the PM, and the PM is acting as a victim. But that’s not the case. What is actually happening is the PM is avoiding confronting the Head of Engineering about their behavior because they don’t want to upset them. In that way, the PM is actually rescuing the Head of Engineering from what the PM perceives as the feelings the Head of Engineering will have in response to some critical feedback. Rather than simply giving feedback and letting the Head of Engineering deal with their own feelings about the feedback as an adult, the PM has inadvertently stepped into the rescue position and placed the Head of Engineering in a victim role.

As a result of the avoidance of confrontation, resentment may continue to build between the two of them until the situation inevitably explodes in an outburst of some kind. The Head of Engineering may be totally unaware of how their behavior is perceived. The PM has no way to know how they will respond to criticism. The PM has just jumped to the conclusion in advance that a direct conversation will “probably go wrong” and is thus avoiding dealing with the issue.

Rescuing Creates Victims

Any time you avoid speaking to someone because you don’t want to make them uncomfortable, you are in the rescue position of the Drama Triangle. “Rescue” here means doing something for others that you were not asked to do, or silently doing more than your share of the available work, or avoiding telling someone the truth because you’re uncomfortable with how you imagine they may react. Rescuing in terms of the Drama Triangle is not good. It’s assuming you know everyone’s feelings and then attempting to shield them from those feelings.

In all of these cases, you are engaged in a form of projection. Projection is a term from psychology that means that, instead of feeling your own feelings about a situation or topic, you attribute those feelings to another person as if they were feeling those feelings instead.If you avoid telling someone an important truth because you are afraid they can’t handle it, you are actually projecting your own discomfort with the situation onto them.

What’s more, you are taking their power away. You are creating them as a victim through your rescuing by not allowing them to make their own decisions about how they feel. And guess what? People generally resent having their power taken away.

Often, these situations arise in the first place because someone was not clear about what they wanted from another person. There was some misunderstanding, maybe using vague language or talking around the problem rather than dealing with it directly, and both parties walked away assuming something very different from one another.

An example in the workplace is bosses who do not give very clear feedback to their employees. That’s fertile ground for the Drama Triangle! Let’s play it out.

An employee is not performing up to expectations for some reason. The boss likes the employee and feels bad that they aren’t performing. Rather than being direct about the performance, the boss avoids telling the employee clearly about the feedback hoping the employee will just “take the hint.” (By the way, any situation that involves dropping hints rather than being direct is likely part of a mind game. More on that in the next article.)

The employee has no idea that they are not performing up to expectations, and the tension continues to build. Eventually, the boss may become angry or resentful and lash out at the employee, perhaps firing them or punishing them in some way.

But if the boss was unable to provide clear feedback this is not the fault of the employee. The Drama Triangle perspective shows that the boss was rescuing the employee from the feedback because they themselves were uncomfortable about giving it. It robs the employee of the satisfaction and dignity of hearing feedback and responding as they normally would. As a result, the tension built until the boss suddenly switched roles into the persecutor position and blew up.

How do we break the triangle altogether? How do we avoid getting trapped as a victim, or persecutor, or rescuer in the first place?

Brené Brown tells us in “Dare to Lead” that “clear is kind, and unclear is unkind.” Brown has given us the key to avoiding the triangle altogether. When we avoid speaking our truth to our colleagues, whether it is a direct report, or a peer, or even our boss, we create the conditions for the Drama Triangle to emerge. We must have the courage to speak up and speak honestly to each other.

That does not imply that we have to be nasty or aggressive in order to be honest. It is important to speak truth with compassion and empathy. But avoiding speaking your truth only makes things worse.

As we strive to build better workplaces and better products and services for our customers, we must be careful to avoid triggering mind games like the Drama Triangle in our organization.

References

Berne, Eric. What Do You Say After You Say Hello?: The Psychology of Human Destiny. New York: Grove Press, Inc, 1972

Brown, Brene. Dare to Lead. Vermilion, 2018

Karpman MD, Stephen. "Fairy tales and script drama analysis". Transactional Analysis Bulletin. 1968