Say your team's part before the fourth meeting.

Dispatch · to the desk of one working leader

Say your team's part before the fourth meeting.

The observation

Sofia knows part of the reason the product launch brought in fewer deals than planned. Her sales team took four days, sometimes five, to call most of the new leads, and by then many had signed with someone else. She's talked it through with her own team.

Mark's team ran the launch campaign. The week before launch, they shortened the sign-up form and dropped the question that told sales which customers were ready to buy. Every lead reached Sofia's team looking the same, so her people worked through the whole queue in the order it arrived, and the ready buyers waited with everyone else.

On the weekly pipeline call, the conversation keeps circling lead quality and response times. "Can marketing get us better leads?" someone asks. Mark says the leads went over the same day they came in, and Sofia says her team is on it. Neither of them can explain their team's half without pointing at the other's, and with twelve people listening, neither wants to go first. The next campaign is in planning.

Plenty of problems between two teams last a quarter this way, with good people on both sides doing their jobs. Both sides already have the facts about their own part. They're just waiting.

The pattern

The first person to name their part can look like the one who owns the problem. In a shared mistake, they're usually the one who decided to stop waiting.

Researchers Shereen Chaudhry and Valeria Burdea have studied conflicts like this one, where each side had a part. In a series of experiments, people were much more likely to apologize first when they thought an apology would come back, and they expected a returned apology to feel better than being forgiven. "People's willingness to apologize first often depends on what they think the other person is going to do," Chaudhry says in Chicago Booth Review's write-up of the work. When both sides misjudge each other, the researchers suggest, the conflict can settle into a stalemate.

Before every call, Sofia runs the same thought: "If I say our calls were slow and Mark leaves the form out of it, the launch is on my team."

There's a second reason Sofia holds back: twelve people are on that call. The executive coach Maya Hu-Chan wrote Saving Face (2020), a book about face, a concept from Asian culture. In an interview about the book, she said face "speaks to a deeper human need for dignity and acceptance." In her words, face "represents both how you see yourself and how other people perceive you." She said that across the conflicts her clients bring, "the most consistent characteristic missing in nearly all of those interactions is how people deal with each other in terms of face."

Naming your part first in a group meeting puts your own standing on the table and leaves the other person to answer in front of everyone, so the one-on-one call comes first. "Knowing how to protect the face of others," Hu-Chan says, "is a prerequisite of successful collaboration."

Hold this line

The move

The moment. A problem between your team and another has come up in three meetings, and each side keeps describing what the other side did.

The check: what's your team's share? Write it down in one sentence. If that was easy to write and the other side hasn't heard it from you yet, you're waiting for them to go first.

1. Name your part first. Pick one thing your team did that added to the problem, with a detail the other person will recognize, like the four days it took to call the leads. Say it as a plain fact about your team.

2. Keep the other person's face in mind. Call them one-on-one before the next group meeting, so they can answer without an audience. Then, in the group meeting, report what your team is changing.

3. Ask what the other side would change. Say your part with no condition attached, then ask what they'd change about the handoff. Chaudhry and Burdea's work suggests people hold back when they don't expect an answer in kind.

Say this: "I looked at our side of the launch. Our follow-up took four days, and that's ours to fix. For the next handoff, is there anything on the form you'd want to change?"

What it costs. For a week or two, your team may be the only one that has said anything, and someone in the group meeting may talk as if your team's delay was the whole story. A peer may answer the same day or need a week. Either way, your team is already fixing its half of the next launch in the open.

If you're on the team: when you can see your team's part in a problem with another team, tell your leader before the next meeting, so they have it in hand.

Tell me what happened. What did the other side say back? I read every reply.

The other side is waiting too.
Say your part first, and leave the door open for theirs.

See you Tuesday.

Rui

P.S.  Worth your margin: "What Prevents Us from Saying 'Sorry'?" by Kasandra Brabaw, Chicago Booth Review, November 2022, on Shereen Chaudhry and Valeria Burdea's research. It follows two colleagues who miss a flight home through mistakes on both sides.

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