After more than three decades of leading housing management teams and teaching managers in the classroom, I’ve concluded that confrontation is a skill that is sorely needed but rarely taught.
It’s needed because managers are often called upon to confront others, be it a resident or an employee, over one issue or another. With residents, it is usually about paying rent or complying with some other term of the lease. With employees, it’s usually a matter of job performance or personal behavior.
Yet we seldom discuss the “dos” and “don’ts” of confrontation and rarely, if ever, teach it as a unique skill. In my view there are two reasons for this. First, “confrontation” has come to have a negative connotation. It’s seen as something that is argumentative and negative. So as a society in general we tend to soften it up by using terms like “problem-solving.” Yet confrontation is a particular kind of problem-solving and therefore requires a unique set of approaches.
Second, we don’t teach confrontation because we ourselves aren’t sure how to do it effectively.
If you are a manager (of anything, not just housing), ask yourself this question: what is your least favorite thing to do on the job? Second to filling out paperwork, I’m guessing it is confronting others about some sort of issue or another. Yet the best managers are the ones who have developed a knack for confronting others in the most effective ways.
Why are we afraid to confront others? It’s simple. We have a “negative” message to deliver and we are expecting a “negative” reaction. Consequently, we often avoid the problem and hope it just goes away. But, alas, it usually doesn’t. And if we let it fester long enough we often build up so much frustration that we end up lashing out in ways that aren’t particularly productive. In our Certified Manager of Housing programs we call this the “flight-fight” phenomenon. On thing that is guaranteed: if we end up letting our frustration boil over we most assuredly will get the negative reaction we fear.
So what’s involved in effective confrontation? Well, there is a lot to it but here are three key elements:
- Credibility: The more credibility you have in the first place, the more likely it is that your message will be heard. And credibility is built long before the need to rely upon it. Terry Goodwin, a manager from Louisiana, put it better than I ever could during a recent webinar. She said, “I establish a lasting relationship based on respect upon the move-in. I always have a presence and good relationship with all of the residents. They also know that I am in control of the situation. I use 98% respect … 2% fear.” In other words, she begins establishing her credibility.
- Dispassion: Effective confrontation requires that you put your feelings aside. That doesn’t mean acting like a robot, but it does mean that you need to stick to the facts and circumstances. Remember, usually you are dealing with a matter upon which the other party has already agreed to — with residents, they are a party to the lease. With employees, they signed on in one form or another to the responsibilities of the job and the rules of behavior when they took the job. If you stick to the facts, and try your best to get the other party to see that it isn’t personal, you have a better shot at success.
- Caring: I know it sounds contradictory to my previous point, but you need to show some caring. What I mean by this is that you need the other party to understand that you care about the good of the property, staff or other residents, whichever the case may be. You want the person who is the target of the message to be a positive part of that equation but ultimately you have a greater good to serve.
As I said, there is a lot more to effective confrontation than these elements, but they are a good starting point.