Workplace Conflict Resolution: Will Yang of Instrumentl On How Team Leaders Can Create The Right Environment To Resolve Conflicts
An Interview With Eric Pines
Give the benefit of the doubt. I find it easier to resolve conflict when I come from a place of wanting clarity rather than jumping to conclusions. This way, employees can communicate their side without feeling attacked.
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 Will Yang.
Will Yang is the Head of Growth & Customer Success at Instrumentl an all-in-one grants platform that helps nonprofits find, track, and manage their grants in a single place. Their solution saves users three hours a week and helps them apply to 1.5X more grants within a year.
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?
My passion has always been in fostering growth and development in various endeavors. I started my career by co-founding an edtech company, Albert, with the goal of providing educational opportunities to many students. I oversaw leading and sales, customer success, and marketing teams and was able to help the company achieve significant revenue growth. After some time with Albert, I sought to assist another growing company and joined Instrumentl, a platform that assists non-profits and grant seekers in obtaining funding efficiently.
These experiences have given me a deep understanding of how to support the success of early-stage companies and promote growth on a global scale, always approaching my work with a focus on understanding the underlying “why” of each challenge.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
My favorite life quote is “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” By John Powell. It realigned how I look at my previous mistakes and see them as learning opportunities for me to grow and become a better person.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
We always attempt to look at a problem in every perspective possible by making sure everyone has their own input to the solutions we work on. It also helps that we never stay too comfortable with our place in the industry. We’d often look towards to how other companies are reinventing themselves to inspire ourselves and raise the bar with our expectations in achieving company goals.
Moving forward, we continue to work as one community to identify what more can we possibly do to provide value to our clients, which gives us purpose and keeps our clients satisfied with our services.
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?
Accountability. For each mistake I make, I hold myself responsible for. It’s easy for people to play the blame game when something goes wrong, but being humble enough to admit where I went wrong keeps me grounded and learn more of what I can improve in my personal life as well as my career.
Resilience. Nothing else is constant but change — especially in the industry. Being resilient allows me to rise from the fall and to adapt to difficult situations that may be out of my control. This allows me to work on my problem-solving skills and further create better solutions for future hurdles.
Self-awareness. Practicing self-awareness keeps me in touch with my own emotions. By recognizing my emotions, I am able to manage and regulate myself at work in the height of stress or pressure, thus allowing me to make rational decisions with a clear head.
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?
A hard decision I’ve had to make is to change a process that already works for us. It’s a risk that most leaders make with changing things up in an attempt to make things better. While it’s easier to keep things the way that they are, creating a change-proof organization is essential for its growth, even if it means retraining employees.
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 the process of identifying present and underlying issues, disputes, and disagreements to find a solution that satisfies all the parties involved. Essentially, being swift in resolving conflict is a great skill to have to maintain relationships with your clients and your team members.
What are some common misunderstandings about Conflict Resolution that are important to clear up?
Much like in any disagreement, may it be in your personal or professional relationships, managing disputes or conflicts can sound like a ‘me against you’ type of conversation. But really, conflict resolution is an ‘us against the problem’ conversation.
When effectively managing conflicts, it’s important to understand how the issue is perceived by the person you’re talking to and what the both of you can do to promptly solve it without remaining resentment against one another. Otherwise, you risk the stability of the relationship altogether.
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?
Learning how to resolve conflict strengthens the relationships they have between a company’s stakeholders. I find that great leaders aren’t afraid to face conflict and have difficult conversations — they would even go out of their way to ensure that all things are good between the involved parties. By doing so, they’re letting other people know that they can trust and depend on them.
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?
When a leader fails to resolve conflict, they risk the stability of their relationships between clients and staff by losing the fundamental key to any relationship — trust. If a leader does things like sweeping issues under a rug, ignoring attempts to have a difficult conversation, or even flat out dismissing the situation, they will eventually lose the confidence and respect their staff has for them.
Can you provide examples of how effective conflict resolution has led to increased team performance, collaboration, or innovation within your organization?
When managing conflict I believe that it’s important for me to make sure that each person gets a chance to have a say over what happened and what will be the best course of action to go about the issue because I want my team to understand that I am listening to them and value their opinion on the subject.
As a result, our approach to resolving conflict doesn’t just come from upper management — rather, it’s a united effort to solving an issue. Thus, people feel better equipped facing new challenges because we have each other’s backs facing them together.
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.
- Create a safe space. Building a relationship based on trust is essential in creating a safe space for employees to express themselves without fear– so avoid using their actions or words against them.
- Give the benefit of the doubt. I find it easier to resolve conflict when I come from a place of wanting clarity rather than jumping to conclusions. This way, employees can communicate their side without feeling attacked.
- Design a process. Having a structured process such as protocols and teams handling conflicts can make conflict management more efficient once it’s understood by everyone.
- Ask questions. It’s easy to misunderstand intentions when faced with conflict and disagreements, so it’s better for you to ask questions to clarify what the other person meant to ensure that you understand where they’re coming from.
- Listen. Hearing people is different from listening to them. The former is when you can physically hear them — yet your attention may be elsewhere. Whereas listening requires your full attention and understanding the other person’s intentions. Without listening, your attempts to resolve conflict may just leave the other person feel more frustrated and unsupported by you.
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?
Things such as tone of voice, passive aggressive remarks, taking credit for someone’s work, mismatch of work ethic and personality, and others can create conflict. It’s relevant for leaders to be alert and prompt when calling out these behaviors to avoid misunderstanding and damaging the team’s dynamic in the future.
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. 🙂
In my community, we have Facebook groups dedicated to giving items away absolutely for free. People post items that they have in extra, have no use for, or simply grew out of. This doesn’t only reduce over consumption, but it also instills generosity and help others in need.
How can our readers further follow you online?
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or follow Instrumentl’s work at @BeInstrumentl.
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: Will Yang of Instrumentl On How Team Leaders Can Create The Right… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.