Stop Being Your Team's Referee: Escalate Together

A staff member knocks on your door and asks you to settle a disagreement with a coworker. Saying yes feels good, and it is one of the few things in your week that ends cleanly. It also teaches your team to bring you every dispute, and it pushes the fundraising, board, and strategy work that only you can do into your nights and weekends.

In this episode I walk through escalate together, a practice I draw from Kim Scott's Radical Candor and use in every interim executive director engagement. Staff make a good faith effort to work it out themselves, and if they are still stuck, they come to me together. I cover how to set up the room, the two questions I ask once everyone sits down, the issues that belong in formal channels instead, and what to do about the frequent flyer who has escalated with eight different colleagues in a year.

You will also hear what happened when I rolled this out on my first day at an organization with a long history of instability, and a team member knocked on my door about 90 minutes later.

This episode answers the following questions:

How do I stop my staff from bringing me every disagreement? What do I say when an employee complains to me about a coworker? Is it the executive director's job to mediate conflict between staff? How do I get my team to resolve conflict without me in the room? When does a staff complaint go to HR or an attorney instead of to me? How should a nonprofit CEO handle an employee who has conflict with everyone? Does any of this work with a fully remote team? How do I roll out a new management practice to my board chair and my staff? Links mentioned in this episode:

Radical Candor by Kim Scott: https://www.radicalcandor.com/the-book (also on Bookshop.org) CEO Excellence by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra: Bookshop.org The Netflix culture memo, where the team and not a family framing comes from: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Curious about executive coaching, including the coaching library I send new clients? Contact me. Subscribe to the newsletter and join a live podcast recording: https://successfulnonprofits.com/newsletter-signup/ Looking for more? Check out these other amazing episodes:

Conflict Can Be Good for Your Organization with Nate Regier The First Four Words: Starting Conversations with Confidence with Tucker Miller Timeless Tips for Working with Difficult People with Jody Foster Join the live virtual audience for podcast recordings (and bring your question for the Q&A). Top