Overcoming the Art of Avoidance With Sarah Noll Wilson

My guest today is Sarah Noll Wilson. She is an executive coach and leadership development consultant who’s been fighting the good fight of making work better for many years. Sarah is also the author of the book “Don’t Feed the Elephants!: Overcoming the Art of Avoidance to Build Powerful Partnerships.”??

In this episode, Sarah and I are talking about conflict, workplace relationships, late-stage capitalism and burning it all down. Sarah is passionate about fixing work and helping people lean into their best selves. However, she didn’t start out with this focus.?

Sarah’s undergraduate degree was in theater performance and theater education. Soon after, she found her way into the corporate world, where she found her passion — working with leaders to improve work. And one thing that has a significant impact on workplace culture is conflict. Sarah wrote her book as a way to reach out to “fellow avoiders of conflict” on how to effectively deal with it.

Why inspired Sarah to write this book? “When I started to get introduced to what do truly adaptive cultures look like, what are best practices, what do the best teams look like, being able to have and navigate disagreements and conflict — and I realized I'd never experienced that, either in my relationships or on the teams that I worked on.”

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Having Tough Conversations

It’s no fun to be in a workplace that is full of conflict or one that is so conflict-averse that even tough conversations are avoided. Both situations ultimately result in even more conflict, making the situation worse. In her book, Sarah shares that in each situation, people must acknowledge the conflict as a first step to having important conversations.

“I think even just the act of recognizing when we’re avoiding it is a really powerful practice” because it creates the awareness needed to make a different choice, Sarah says. “And it sounds simplistic to say that awareness is the key, but if we can get better at noticing and naming for ourselves or for the team or for other people, ‘I think we’re avoiding something right now,’ then we have the moment to make a choice.”

The second step is reimagining how you approach tough conversations. Many people build up these conversations in their heads and imagine what reactions they’ll receive. They want to remove this discomfort, but that’s not possible, Sarah says. “If I'm taking a risk, if I'm speaking up, if I'm speaking out, if you matter to me and I'm telling you, ‘Hey, that hurt,’ there's a risk there.”

“I think that acknowledging it, being able to name it, see it, and then understand that the discomfort is part of the human experience of taking risks and speaking up and speaking out,” Sarah adds.

Getting to the Root of Conflict

I’ve found that many conflicts between people seem to be about politics, organizational charts, job titles, etc., but the root cause of those disagreements is the organization itself. Sarah offers advice for how to step back and look at the bigger picture.

“I think that’s part of, for us, taking that time to just get really curious about, ‘Well, where is this coming from? And what’s actually going on?’ And that’s hard. I mean, I say that like it’s a simple practice, but it’s hard, especially when there’s a pattern of hurt or there’s a pattern of not being able to reconcile or heal or to have the kind of healthy conversations that we need to,” Sarah explains.?

All of this is difficult. It’s not easy to stop yourself in the moment and wonder about the cause of conflict, Sarah says. “When I talk about curiosity, it’s not comfortable. It’s really looking and going, ‘What role am I really playing in this?’ And that’s not an easy question for us to ask, and sometimes it’s a harder question for us to answer.”

The Organization’s Responsibility in the Workplace

We often think of organizations as nameless, faceless entities, but that’s not what they are. Corporations are groups of relationships and people working together to provide services to their audience.?

And when it comes to conflict, Sarah wants corporations to recognize and invest in their people. “I would love to see organizations see beyond the bottom line and the profit and the productivity and to realize that people are giving you the greatest asset, time, energy, emotions. That’s a huge thing that we’re asking of people,” she says.

She adds, “The organizations that I think are going to thrive in this new whatever, this disruptive time, are the ones who truly care deeply for their people, care deeply for them as a whole human and not just them as a worker, and then how they show up is with that.”

People in This Episode

• Sarah Noll Wilson: Website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, ”Don’t Feed the Elephants!: Overcoming the Art of Avoidance to Build Powerful Partnerships” book

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