My Biggest Early-Career Mistake

Today I wanted to share my biggest early-career mistake, one that I think a lot of early-career people make not just in diplomacy but in many fields. I hope that there are readers who benefit from this and can avoid some of the pitfalls I couldn't, since those lessons can be very painful to learn. Without further ado, my biggest early-career mistake was not knowing how to manage workplace conflict.

People would say and do things that offended me, bothered me, and even undermined me professionally and it wasn't obvious to me how I was supposed to resolve it. I consulted my mentors and most of them said they were conflict avoidant themselves and would choose to ignore almost everything if they were me. They were well meaning, but I don't think this advice was the most helpful. In professional settings (and life) there are a lot of people who bottle up resentments and talk badly about people behind their backs, but far fewer people who are willing to address difficult conflict in an open-minded and productive way directly with the person they have conflict with. I, too, kept many of my grievances to myself and bought into negative narratives about people (which in our line of work we call bad corridor reputation) without giving people a chance to address the issues. I'd like to think this is something I've improved at over time.

Here's a real, anonymized example from my life. I once took notes at a meeting, and one of my coworkers didn't like my summary of the conversation. He said, "You shouldn't have included that quote from that person!" I stood my ground and said, "That's what she said, though." He replied, "She was misinformed and now you've spread incorrect information with these notes!" Clearly, my notes bothered him, but it was too late for me to go back and change them since I'd already circulated them with our internal offices. Moreover, I wasn't convinced that I needed to change them. He lost his temper and began sending emails to my colleagues saying I didn't know what I was doing and that I was unqualified. He would raise his voice to me on the phone and send all-caps emails. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back: when I had a meeting with contacts at another organization, he told these people, whom I was meeting for the first time, that I was ignorant and didn't know what I was talking about.

The entry-level me would have simmered until I boiled over, railing about this guy to anybody and everybody except him. I might even have taken steps to switch portfolios and projects to avoid working with him again, writing off our professional relationship as irreparably doomed. This time, I took my concerns up the chain of command and began documenting everything in case it got worse and I needed to escalate. (I had learned the hard way earlier in my career that sometimes documentation and witnesses were necessary.) To my shock, multiple people I raised my concerns with made comments like, "Oh, yeah. Everyone knows he can't work well with women" or "He's just sexist; don't take it personally" or "There have been so many women like you who have complained about this before." I guess these responses were supposed to make me feel better, but instead they made me extremely frustrated. If this was a known issue, why didn't anybody address it? And had we all really just decided to tolerate someone who couldn't work with half of the population? Was that even really the problem?

I told leadership that I was going to try to resolve this directly with the colleague, but if that failed I had no choice but to escalate. I knew I couldn't do my job effectively with a coworker harassing me in the office and deriding me in front of others. When I first asked him to sit down and talk one-on-one, he avoided me, ignoring my calls and emails. (Note: I find these conversations are always best one-on-one if you have a choice.) Finally, I asked him to hang behind and talk one-on-one after a group meeting we both attended. In that room, I told him that I didn't know he felt that strongly about the initial meeting notes I had written. I told him how his actions since made me feel like he didn't respect me as a colleague and undermined me and my work, making it difficult to do my job. To his credit, he admitted he lost his temper. He apologized to me and said he wouldn't do that again. We discussed together a solution for the next time we faced a disagreement. And you know what? Despite all the horrible things everyone had said about this guy, he never did do those things again. He did work with me constructively when we disagreed. He helped find compromises. I was not only able to tolerate working with him again, but we both enjoyed working together again.

This experience made me realize people were perfectly happy to make assumptions about his character or the reasons why he behaved the way he did, but those same people hadn't been willing to have the tough conversations necessary to find out if their assumptions were correct or to move forward. People tried to marginalize him and his work when they reached a point of friction instead of addressing the friction itself. I thought about all the misunderstandings and conflicts that arise in typical working life and accrue over time and wondered how many of them could be completely transformed by a simple, honest conversation.

I'll be the first to admit I didn't have the skills to do this when I first started my career, and it's still not easy. It's not fun to have difficult conversations about how someone has hurt or impeded you or to hear about how you might have hurt or impeded them. But those conversations are essential to people and teams achieving their full potential. It's easier in the short-term to avoid conflict, bottle things up, and then message your group chat what a jerk your work rival is. In the long-term, though, everyone is better served by healthier conflict resolution.

When I tell that true story, the response I most often get is, "But what if he'd doubled down instead?" In that scenario, I still see the difficult conversation as necessary. It shows that you tried to resolve things at the lowest possible level and it gives you the information you need to know whether you need to escalate: whether that's bringing in your supervisors or requesting a mediator or in some cases even filing a formal grievance or complaint with that documentation you prepared in advance.

It may be my inherent optimism, but deep down I truly believe that if more conflicts were addressed sooner in healthier ways, they would never get to that point. I can definitely think of conflicts earlier in my career that I might be mature enough and savvy enough and skilled enough to defuse better now. And there are probably others I will experience in the future that could be de-escalated, but that I may lack the ability to defuse now. It's reassuring to me to think of this as a skill you can never "complete" or "master" but one that grows in strength with repeated use over time, like a muscle of emotional intelligence. It reminds me that nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes, so hopefully when others make mistakes the least we can do is give a fair shot of repairing the relationship - just as we would hope people can do for us when we mess up.

Of course, I don't want to take this idea to the extreme. I don't think people need to tolerate abusive or toxic environments, and some working relationships are not possible or worthwhile to save because the (emotional, mental, physical, and - in the case of some formal grievances requiring legal representation - financial) cost is simply too great. However, I'd like to think those cases are a small minority. I fundamentally believe that most people are good people trying their best and falling short from time to time. The more positive experiences people have of resolving conflict and repairing relationships, the more I find they too begin to believe it's possible and approach conflict with a healthier mindset. This is a small impact each of us can make in our circles every single day, and it can ripple outward and lead others to start doing the same.

Would you agree that this is a common mistake people make early in their careers? Do you have any tips for resolving conflict in a healthier way? If so, I hope you'll consider sharing in the comments. Thanks for reading!