By Aila Boyd
aboyd@mainstreetnewspapers.com
The Botetourt County Chamber of Commerce held a “Lunch & Learn” event on July 9 at Virginia Mountain Vineyards. The title of the session was “Coaching for Conflict.” It was led by Abrina Schnurman, the executive director of Hollins University’s Batten Leadership Institute, and Amanda Stanley, the CEO of DePaul Community.
Stanley explained that when she first started at DePaul, a nonprofit human services organization, seven years ago, she was new to executive leadership. In order to gain more skills, she decided to enroll in the Batten Leadership Institute. The program offers undergraduate classes and an executive education leadership certificate.
“The experience was transformational in terms of my own learning and how I put it into practice,” she said of the program.
She noted that a large portion of the work that is down at the institute is “below the neck,” training people to feel things on a gut level. “There are so many things you can learn intellectually and never put them into practice,” she said. “The real shining light of the program is its ability to get you to work things out in real life.”
Since graduating from the program, Stanley serves as a distinguished fellow at the institute. She said that she uses examples from her work at DePaul to illustrate leadership strategies. “I’m able to show students what things look like from the perspective of a real job with real people and real problems,” she said.
Stanley explained that she doesn’t know of any leader that doesn’t have to deal with conflict on some level, whether it be directly related to their work or outside conflict that is brought into the organization by the people who are a part of it.
“Conflict is an important topic for anyone breathing in our country right now with all that’s going on, but for business leaders in particular conflict exists within our organizations on many levels,” Stanley said.
She went on to stress to those in attendance that it’s important not to just tolerate conflict on the organizational level, but to leverage it to move their organizations forward.
“Conflict is a much better tool than harmony in getting traction on important things if you know how to artfully work with it,” she said.
To illustrate her point, Stanley pointed to the transition in leadership style that DePaul has embraced from artificial harmony to embracing conflict.
“We were a super supportive team. If someone brought an idea to the table, we would often talk about all of the ways we would support it,” she said. “One of the shifts we’ve made in our culture is that we now recognize the value of conflict. It’s no longer acceptable for someone to bring an idea to the table and there not to be any conflict about it, which requires the perfection of ideas.”
She added that before making the shift in approach, her team had a conversation about how they were going to “fake” the conflict in order to get comfortable disagreeing about ideas. Even if there wasn’t disagreement about an idea, she said, various members of the team would play devil’s advocate just to get used to voicing opposing opinions.
