Collaboration, Politics, and Challenging Conversations

This lesson is focusing on collaboration and getting things done even when a particular relationship may prove challenging. Navigating the politics of a situation or within an organization is often crucial to the success of initiatives, projects, and individual career trajectories. 

Anything with significant impact requires the work of many people. Since no two people are the same, challenges in relationships and communication can arise. This training will walk through perspectives, tips, and techniques to help everyone reach goals together.

Win-wins: This is the ideal scenario for all involved. Each stakeholder walks away fully satisfied with the result. This is very easy to do within the same organization when people are working towards the same goals.

Things become much harder when there are competing or conflicting goals, which often happens in the real world. Think about a contentious debate like abortion in the US. If one side wins, the other side loses. In those more difficult situations, it's then compromise and partial wins shared with partial losses by both sides that end up being the best path forward.

Abortion is seen through a moral lens in the US and moral lenses tend to be uncompromising, making meeting stakeholders halfway very difficult. Fortunately, most decisions within a company are not so overarching. 

But the same dynamic of compromise still often exists. For example, the government has a fixed amount of money and, if one organization succeeds in getting more dollars, it automatically means another organization is losing money, if we increase spending on healthcare to the poor, then we need to pull budget away from education for the poor. It's often a zero-sum scenario. Companies have the same dynamic. If the marketing department wants a $10,000 increase in their annual budget, then that means HR doesn't have the money to use for raises or benefits, and vice versa.

A win-win in this scenario would be that the increase in marketing budget drives additional client acquisition that can then be used to fund HR's raises and benefit increases. However, the increase in marketing may not have an effect or maybe results aren't seen for 6 months to a year, meaning HR has to delay some of their budget items. 

At the end of the day, we're all working together to connect patients to quality care. So the real answer to difficult decisions should be which direction is going to have the biggest impact on our mission. If that's clear cut, then the decision is easy. If there are a lot of uncertainties, then there is more room for debate. See our lesson on Decision-making to better understand how to work through hard to make decisions.