Workplace Conflict Resolution: Ginelle Krummey Of ‘Growth Point Collaborative’ On How Team Leaders Can Create The Right Environment To Resolve Conflicts
An Interview With Eric Pines
Invite people to practice on low-stakes conflicts. While the culture is shifting, make sure to keep it light! Encourage conflict resolution exercises where nobody thinks they’re necessary, such as issues in the staff refrigerator. It should be just as important to discuss little things like someone using peanut butter without permission, as big things like condescending voice tone or differences in vision for the company.
An important component of leadership is conflict resolution. Why is conflict resolution so important? How can leaders effectively incorporate conflict resolution into their work culture? In this interview series called “Workplace Conflict Resolution: How Team Leaders Can Create The Right Environment To Resolve Conflicts,” we are talking to business leaders who can share insights and anecdotes from their experience about how to implement Conflict Resolution at work. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ginelle Krummey, LCMHC.
Ginelle Krummey, LCMHC (she/her) operates Growth Point Collaborative Counseling and Group Facilitation, PLLC- a private therapy practice and clinical consulting business based outside of Asheville, NC.
Ginelle uses integrative feminist analytic therapy to help overextended entrepreneurs, burnt-out helpers, and mother strugglers find their own pathway through life. Ginelle’s hundred-year-old office cottage is located amongst the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains with 360 degree views and access to an undisturbed, private forest. There she hosts individual therapy sessions, intensive extended therapy retreats, and colleague gatherings.
Ginelle provides clinical consultation to organizations of helping professionals on the subjects of workplace burnout syndromes and the basics of trauma. Ginelle is an adjunct faculty member teaching Trauma at her alma mater, Lenoir-Rhyne University Asheville Center for Graduate Studies.
Ginelle’s passion project is advocacy writing about the struggles and needs of an under-supported, overburdened population she calls Breastfeeding Breadwinners.
www.growthpointcollaborative.com
www.breastfeedingbreadwinners.com
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Sure, thanks for asking! I’ve always been curious about what makes people be the way they are. I’ve been known to sit back and observe rather than participate, and I have a keen interest in the impacts of cultural conditioning on people’s behavior. So I studied Psychology, Women and Gender Studies, and Anthropology in college before my first several years of professional work in human services. Once I got to work with a number of vastly different populations of people (such as teens, the elderly, and people exiting homelessness), I was absolutely certain that I wanted to become a therapist and make the examination of humans my life’s work.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
What’s been striking me as interesting lately, as I’m almost 15 years into this career, is how my dreams keep coming true. I look at notes and journal entries from years ago about my intentions, and then I look around at my life and it’s all happening! I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d go into private practice so soon, and since I did, I find myself a business owner in my 30’s much to my own surprise! I say this not to celebrate my privileges and good fortune, but to acknowledge that when you take the steps that lead to what you want, despite hardship and among setbacks, it can happen.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
For me, it’s “there is no such thing as failure, just experiments that bring more information.” I really don’t waste my time on regret, shame, and wallowing in lackluster results from something I try. I either workshop the thing, try something new, or move on and allow myself to try again if I ever want to. I put out a lot of offers in my business. Not all of them are winners, or sell out, or have takers.
I think it’s successful and brave to offer service to the community. If nobody signs up for your group, it’s not a group that’s needed, or your marketing wasn’t thorough enough. If I were to take personally every offering I’ve made or every new-client-consultation I’ve done that didn’t result in business, I’d have quit already and considered myself a failure. But by continuing on, fine-tuning my offerings and marketing, I have a perfectly thriving business that is so fulfilling and supports my household. There is plenty of success to be found among the failures and efforts that don’t result in business. You really can’t have one without the other.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
A couple things. My location is one-of-a-kind. When my family moved to this property, one of my first thoughts was “I have to share this with the people I serve.” So I work out of a hundred-year-old cottage that’s been renovated into my beautiful therapy space that’s on my homesite, but not inside my home. My commute is 100 steps from door to door, and I’m so fortunate for that.
Another thing that makes Growth Point Collaborative stand out is my unconventional offers. Beyond standard individual and couple’s therapy, I offer clinical consultation to local organizations about burnout response and prevention, and I offer full-day intensive sessions. I call them therapy retreats. For people who need to get out of the city and into nature, into the mountains, or out of their usual therapy groove, the intensive therapy day is a one-time experience that can be tailored to a person’s unique needs and desires to create some serious change. These days are super powerful to facilitate.
In addition to that, I have recently been following my interest in a specific population of people (of whom I was one until recently) that I call Breastfeeding Breadwinners. I was so struck by my experience of transitioning into parenthood that I had to find out more about the experiences of others. I felt flabbergasted and caught off-guard by the sheer amount of things I didn’t know about breastfeeding, and the drastic underrepresentation of breadwinning mothers in the media. It’s this weird intersection of gender non-conformity and conformity, where there really aren’t very many people doing the heavy work of breastfeeding an infant and earning their household’s income. But I did it for 13 months, and I still interview and communicate with fellow breastfeeding breadwinners because there is a great need for community and we are still really far behind other countries in accommodating working parents.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Service-oriented. Above all, and from the beginning, my interest is in helping others. The roles I’ve worked in have been in support of people who need help in some way. To keep that intention primary serves as a guide to know I can continue forward with any business endeavor without hesitation. Does it help someone? Go ahead.
Tenacity/Commitment. Sometimes getting where I’m going has taken a while. Three years of graduate school while I’m already exhausted from 8 years of serving super vulnerable people for low wages? I gave up expecting much recreation on weekends. I’ve spent time and life energy on getting to the other side of many of my goals, and resisted plenty of temptations to do less. I’ve also stuck with projects longer than is comfortable, leading to greater results than giving up would have.
Curious learner. Whether it’s attending a psychoanalytic case consultation for over three years, or interviewing people about their lives to find out more about the population as a whole, or learning about what marketing strategies are available for supporting my business, being an endlessly curious learner has served me well. Fortunately, I’m in a profession that will provide me opportunities to ask questions and pursue answers indefinitely.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?
I was once in the position to choose between employment and self-employment, and I could really feel the magnitude of the diverging life paths that decision held. I was offered a job 6–8 weeks after initially interviewing, and in that meantime, I’d taken all the steps to start my private practice. I didn’t know my journey of self-employment was meant to begin at that moment, but that’s what I chose, after a fair amount of agony. At that point in my career I had to choose to finally not do the harder thing, as I’d spent 9 years working with populations going through intense hardship and my lifetime empathic trauma load had really started piling up.
Ultimately, I chose to prioritize my health and sustainability, with the understanding that I’d already proven my grit and dedication to serving humans, and that I would not stop doing so. Now I take that grit and apply it to creating a business that effects meaningful change in the lives it touches, and that supports my family in ways that regular employment never would. In this instance, it seems I chose to harness leadership instead of doing more following and proving myself to others in order to feel legitimized.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s start with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. What does Conflict Resolution mean?
Conflict Resolution is a practice in navigating differences. Resolving means to have come to a conclusion that everyone understands and agrees to, whether or not it was their preference. Conflict can include disagreement of a moral nature, of a procedural nature, or of a mode of communication. Conflict can take place among individuals or groups, and can even take place within a single individual. Conflict Resolution as a practice should provide a workplace or any group with a strategy and protocol for facing conflicts and transforming them into connection and solutions as an experimental, fluid process that maintains the dignity of all involved, produces growth, and serves the group’s larger mission.
What are some common misunderstandings about Conflict Resolution that are important to clear up?
Conflict resolution is not “being touchy feely” or “woo woo.” It’s a practice that demonstrates mutual respect for ideas and viewpoints.
Conflict resolution is not a waste of time, as long as it’s done in good faith. It’s an investment that should save functional time that would be wasted when conflict sticks around and festers into disgruntled employees with low productivity and resentful, unenthusiastic workmanship.
Conflict resolution is not therapy. While the cumulative effects of a workplace that provides effective conflict resolution may be therapeutic, the practice is not the equivalent of providing therapy in the workplace.
Conflict resolution is not a performance of agreeing-to-disagree. Again, done in good faith, all people should have needs met and viewpoints heard, and a plan can be decided that is inclusive of all people’s offerings.
Conflict resolution is not restorative or transformative justice. Those practices are just as needed in workplaces, and may serve very well in specific situations. Conflict resolution is a tool for when coworkers struggle to collaborate due to ideological differences, where no harm or wrongdoing has occurred.
This might be intuitive to you, but it will be helpful to clearly express this. Can you please explain why it is so important for leaders to learn and deploy conflict resolution techniques?
First and foremost, for the dignity and sense of safety and peace of the employees coming into your workplace.
Secondly, it is for the overall efficiency of their labor and efforts.
When a leader can confidently and effectively deploy conflict resolution techniques, everyone on the team gets a clear sense that the person in charge has their back and is holding the structure for the environment. The ability to trust a leader comes largely when the leader handles conflict confidently and unabashedly. When workers can trust their leader, they can relax into peaceful productivity. Cohesion, unity. Trust. When someone knows that any conflict that should arise will be dealt with in a professional, considerate, respectful way, they can truly rest into their role. When conflict arises, if a system of conflict resolution is already in place, a person can go into those interactions expecting to grow, to be held lovingly accountable, and to remember their respect for the other.
On the flip side, what happens to a work culture when there is not an effective way of resolving conflict? How does it impact employees?
Without it, there is agony, unrest, competition for power and faux leadership, and a general sense of unsafety that is not good for anyone’s nervous system. Without an established conflict resolution ritual, people will take matters into their own hands, and that will be messy. People are naturally likely to avoid conflict and let their resentments fester so long that they eventually blow up over something relatively minor. They are also likely to try to solve their issues indirectly, such as talking about people and not to people, complaining about the work instead of seeking solutions, and gathering up burnout symptoms due to feelings of not having any control of their circumstances. Burnt out employees aren’t just undesirable on their own merit, but also because their symptomology influences that of others in a phenomenon called “contagion”.
Can you provide examples of how effective conflict resolution has led to increased team performance, collaboration, or innovation within your organization?
I once worked in a super emotionally and physically challenging environment: a residential behavioral treatment facility for foster youth. Our work had the possibility of threatening our emotional wellbeing and our bodies every time we came in for a shift. We worked half-weeks, and split Wednesdays with the alternating team. On Wednesdays, we would come together as a team and discuss hardships, triumphs, and gameplan. We would also participate in a group process that was called “development.” Through these meetings, we were able to sustain some of the hardest work I’ve ever faced for years at a time. We knew our teammates understood our agreements. We knew that there was a space and opportunity to bring feedback and praise that was all agreed to encourage everyone’s growth. Without those Wednesday meetings, we would have been disjointed, struggling to orient ourselves to our roles, and we’d have had a really hard time trusting each other. I’m so grateful for that experience because it’s what I bring to teams when I do consulting work in organizations to this day.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Ways Every Team Leader Can Create The Right Environment To Resolve Conflicts”? If you can, please share specific examples of a workplace conflict you’ve encountered, and how you applied conflict resolution techniques to address it.
1 . Resolve conflicts with an audience. It will take some time to create culture shift. Team mates will need to learn by watching prior to taking the risk to participate in proactive conflict resolution. Begin by processing through a conflict in privacy with a colleage, then ask for permission to tell the story about the resolution to the group. Reenact the conflict resolution conversation in front of the group, and encourage a discussion about what the team observed. Then create an actual place and time where these conversations are meant to be had.
2 . Create a tone of courage and maturity. Talk about how uncomfortable and challenging it can be to confront people about conflicts, and model the way you want your team to do it anyway. Also talk about the relief that comes afterwards, and identify the benefits of maintaining honest and open communication in relationships. Connect teammates to their worthy deservingness of a healthy work environment, and the way it takes everyone contributing to make that happen.
3 . Invite people to practice on low-stakes conflicts. While the culture is shifting, make sure to keep it light! Encourage conflict resolution exercises where nobody thinks they’re necessary, such as issues in the staff refrigerator. It should be just as important to discuss little things like someone using peanut butter without permission, as big things like condescending voice tone or differences in vision for the company.
4 . Enact boundaries against indirect communication. It’s important to identify behaviors that the team will not engage in while learning new ones. In the job I mentioned above, there was an agreement among staff that we “talk to the person, not about the person.” When anyone would begin talking about someone to another colleague, the colleague’s main job was to prompt the person talking to take that comment to the one they’re talking about. For example, “I see what you mean, have you brought that up with so-and-so?” or “I’m not sure I’d like to be the one we’re talking about right now, let’s bring this feedback to the group meeting instead.” Once it becomes uncool to gossip, your team is really going in the right direction.
5 . Incentivise training in emotional awareness. Don’t just provide it and make it mandatory. Provide bonuses, reimburse therapy, bring mental health support directly into your workplace. The recommendations above can only go so far if people trying to do them have no personal tools, resources, or capacity to engage with them. That requires every individual to be on their own healing journey, and to have all the barriers removed to being on it. You want a team of growing, expanding, and creative people, not stuck, defensive, and hopeless people.
In your experience, what are the most common sources of conflict within a team, and how do you proactively address these potential issues before they escalate?
Lack of transparency between “leadership” and “staff” (as well as the hierarchical structure of most workplaces to begin with) is often a power dynamic that results in feelings of being abused or exploited, then that loss of dignity being taken out on fellow coworkers, or worse yet, at family members at home. A source of conflict connected to that is people not feeling their input is being considered, which leads to a sense of disempowerment that later results in attempts to regain any sense of power, which is often a misdirected mistreatment of others.
A deeper source of conflict within a team has nothing to do with the team. It’s the phenomenon we know about from psychotherapy in which many people reenact their role and the dynamics they’re familiar with from their family of origin. A simple example of this is when people were mistreated as children by their parents, a common outcome is distrust of authority figures and cynicism. Someone’s boss can be neutrally going about their business, and have all this historic pain projected onto them by their staff, unbeknownst to them. Bosses can be exploitive of staff due to unhealthy upbringings, and so on. Conflict is sometimes not at all about the issues at hand. All the more reason to have psychological professionals consulting with every workplace.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I have so many ideas about creating an ideal world, but for the sake of relevance, I’ll elaborate on the idea I just mentioned. Mental health is crucial to stable, healthy, and growing workplaces. I think the workplace, where people spend more waking hours than they do at home (that’s one gigantic problem with our world right there), should be a space of healing and nurturance. I believe that all people should have a meaningful and intentional relationship with the contribution they make to society through their careers. To do that, one must have every reason and permission to pursue growth, health, and wellness while executing their job assignments. If workplaces can provide life-giving resources and permission to use them, as a general rule, we could really make some advances in society.
How can our readers further follow you online?
For therapy-related inquiries, I can be found at my clinical website, www.growthpointcollaborative.com, or at the blog I host for breastfeeding breadwinners at www.breastfeedingbreadwinners.com. I have Instagram for both of those projects @growthpointcollaborative and @breastfeedingbreadwinners . I do blog appearances related to mental health and in advocacy of the birthing people who find themselves in the very unique position of being the earner for their families at the same time as breastfeeding their young ones.
I’m open to consulting work with organizations and businesses that want to improve their workplace cohesion, increase their mental health awareness, and decrease burnout and turnover.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Eric L. Pines is a nationally recognized federal employment lawyer, mediator, and attorney business coach. He represents federal employees and acts as in-house counsel for over fifty thousand federal employees through his work as a federal employee labor union representative. A formal federal employee himself, Mr. Pines began his federal employment law career as in-house counsel for AFGE Local 1923 which is in Social Security Administration’s headquarters and is the largest federal union local in the world. He presently serves as AFGE 1923’s Chief Counsel as well as in-house counsel for all FEMA bargaining unit employees and numerous Department of Defense and Veteran Affairs unions.
While he and his firm specialize in representing federal employees from all federal agencies and in reference to virtually all federal employee matters, his firm has placed special attention on representing Veteran Affairs doctors and nurses hired under the authority of Title. He and his firm have a particular passion in representing disabled federal employees with their requests for medical and religious reasonable accommodations when those accommodations are warranted under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (ADA). He also represents them with their requests for Federal Employee Disability Retirement (OPM) when an accommodation would not be possible.
Mr. Pines has also served as a mediator for numerous federal agencies including serving a year as the Library of Congress’ in-house EEO Mediator. He has also served as an expert witness in federal court for federal employee matters. He has also worked as an EEO technical writer drafting hundreds of Final Agency Decisions for the federal sector.
Mr. Pines’ firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas and has offices in Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia. His first passion is his wife and five children. He plays classical and rock guitar and enjoys playing ice hockey, running, and biking. Please visit his websites at www.pinesfederal.com and www.toughinjurylawyers.com. He can also be reached at eric@pinesfederal.com.
Workplace Conflict Resolution: Ginelle Krummey Of ‘Growth Point Collaborative’ On How Team Leaders… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.