While leading teams you will surely face confrontations. Your decisions will be questioned, criticised and sometimes will not be accepted. It is not possible to avoid it, so be ready for it.
The confrontation is unavoidable, because the interest of both parties might not always overlap. The best way to solve such confrontations is mutual agreement, but it might be hard to accomplish such an agreement when the reasons behind the decision fall to different areas of responsibility. As a leader, your task is to bring the best for the product, customer, company and the team. But a developer might just focus on the product and him/herself, omitting the interest of other parties.
The best possible solution for such a problem is, “the empathy”, but is it really possible to empathize with each other when there is a confrontation on the table? The key is to stand in each other shoes, but this does not happen momentarily. This is a practice you should often perform prior to a confrontation to build an understanding of each others actions or reactions in any circumstance.
There is a story about Sinan the Architect. When he was building Selimiye Mosque, his master work, he hears a child saying “that minaret is inclined”. He calls the child aside and asks which minaret is the inclined one. The child points one of the minarets. Sinan says, “OK. Now we are going to tie ropes to that minaret and you are going to help us fix it.”. The ropes are tied, workers pull minaret to the direction the child orders. After every pull, Sinan asks the child if it is fixed. This goes on and on until the child confirms that the minaret is fixed and straight now.
After this event everybody asks Sinan why he did this. “There was no inclination at the minaret and you knew it. You also knew that it is not possible to fix it by pulling the ropes. So, why all this work to fix it?” He answers “I know that, but I can not let people think this way. If I haven’t let the child fix it, this word will spread as the minaret is inclined and everybody will believe it.”.
Although the moral of this story is different from the point I want to state, there is a lesson for us too. To prevent such confrontations, collaborate with your team on making decisions. When they think that the minaret is inclined, let them fix it. Let them share their thoughts and efforts on making the product better. Keeping them out of the decision making will spread the word and make the confrontation deeper. Otherwise, by keeping them in the decision making process you will create a strong bond which will eventually lead to emphaty between the team and you.