You won’t find Steve Christian hiding in his office avoiding a problem that needs to be rectified. That philosophy wouldn’t be good for anybody and certainly not the organization.
“Don’t avoid confrontation,” says Christian, managing director of accounting and consulting firm Kreischer Miller. “A lot of people don’t like confrontation, but it’s really an opportunity to make an organization better.”
It’s similar to being handed lemons and making lemonade. You take a problem or a mistake, and you find opportunity by breaking it down until you understand what went wrong. You determine how you can fix the problem and how you can avoid it in the future.
Christian says two characteristics of being a good leader are confronting issues and maintaining a constant focus on the good of the organization. Well, those go hand in hand, and that’s how Christian chooses to lead the firm and his 200 employees.
Smart Business spoke to Christian about how to effectively deal with company problems.
Don’t avoid confrontation. Not many people, in my opinion, welcome confrontation. I happen to be somebody who doesn’t mind confrontation because I think it’s an opportunity to make things better.
If somebody has let the organization down, has let me down, they’ve done something wrong, they didn’t serve a client right, well, the easiest thing is just to ignore it. But that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You need to look at it as an opportunity to make that person better, make that situation better, make the organization better.
When you sit down to have these discussions or confrontations, which is sort of a harsh word, it’s really how do you handle it. Do you handle it constructively? Or do you handle it destructively?
If somebody performed less than stellar client service in our business — since we’re a consulting firm, an accounting firm — does it do a lot of good for me to sit there and scream at them, ‘Don’t ever do it again. What were you thinking?’ I’d much rather say, ‘John Doe, what happened here? This is their perspective. Why is it happening? What do you think? What are we going to do differently? We’ve all done that before. Just try to help the situation not recur. We can’t have it back.’
The easy thing for anybody in life is to just ignore it.
Prepare before the conversation. First of all, you have to tell yourself no matter how much I don’t want to have this conversation I have to have it for the good of the organization.
Then you just have to find the best way to communicate. What are you trying to communicate? What do you want to accomplish in this meeting with this person? You have to ask yourself that and then come up with a game plan or an action plan to communicate that.
Take the emotion out of the meeting. Perhaps it’s something that has very much upset me. I may not meet with that person right then. There’s maybe a cooling off period of some sort … so there’s not a lot of emotion at the end of the day.
But you have to remind people what they need to be doing differently.
