I was already planning to write to you today about how you can use curiosity to manage conflict as an opening to invite you to this month’s Curious Leaders discussion on Thursday.

Using genuinely curious coaching questions can help you diffuse conflict in the moment and then get to the root of the issue to reach a constructive resolution. Building these skills before you need them can help a conflict-averse library leader feel less anxiety about managing conflict between their team members. But, this also requires you to regulate your emotional response, so that you can stay in a fully curious mindset.

But then, the universe decided that I needed a concrete example to share with you 😂

I usually write to you in relatively vague terms, because I prioritize maintaining confidentiality. Most of the specific examples that come to mind on any given topic are scenarios from a coaching conversation or other confidential context – which means I either keep it entirely to myself or create a composite scenario that is clearly depersonalized. I hope they’re still useful illustrations of the concepts, but sometimes it’s nice to share an actual real story.

So I’m going to be a little messy today and deconstruct a conversation that I had in the DMs with someone who could use more curiosity in their life. This is someone who I’ve never had any sort of coaching relationship with, even as a potential client. Even so, this feels kind of messy because I don’t generally talk like this about even non-coaching conversations – unless the person chooses to repeatedly lob insults at me. So don’t worry that a normal conversation with me could end up here!

The relevant back-story is that, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about the distant sense of grief that comes with seeing the library I used to work for lose nearly everything that I loved about it. I dealt with some toxic leadership situations, but I stayed for a long time because there was so much that I loved… until that balance shifted.

One of the policy changes that’s been happening since I left has been converting library faculty lines to staff lines. I know this is an issue that’s specific to academic libraries, but I loved being tenured faculty. Structurally, that gave me opportunities to do work that I found personally meaningful but that staff don’t generally get as many opportunities to do – including engaging in scholarship with some librarians who do outstanding work in critical librarianship and having a voice on committees that made a difference for students across campus. I’m not saying that structure is right, but as long as it exists, I have big feelings here!

I heard this as a choice that came from the Dean, and attributed it to them in passing in the post. One of the more difficult parts of being in a leadership role is that, no matter how collaborative your approach or how hard you try, it’s often impossible to make everyone happy. There’s nothing particularly special about this person making a decision that I disagree with.

This was one detail in a super long post about this near decade-long decline, and I didn’t think anything of it, until…

An account with no photo or activity and only one connection, using the name of a retired Dean at this university, charged into my inbox with:

Y’all.

Before I go further, take a moment to reflect on how you would immediately react to a message like that. What emotions would that bring up for you?

I do my best to embrace a coaching mindset as regularly as I can, but I’m human. My initial reaction was defensive – what is this person going to accuse me of? I jumped to a whole bunch of assumptions: they’re probably talking about this post that wasn’t even about [Name Redacted], but they sure sound ready for a fight.

Plenty of potential replies went through my mind. First and foremost, I don’t actually even need to respond. This felt unnecessarily confrontational and is from someone who no longer has any power over me, even in the sideways way of complaining about me to my supervisor / their peer. Then there were the ways I could have escalated things, that would have felt like a “gotcha” in the moment, but wouldn’t have led anywhere good.

Eventually, my curiosity won out, and I replied:

So here’s the response:

There are a whole lot of questions in that first paragraph, but not a single one of them is a curious coaching question. They’re quiz questions.

This isn’t all they sent, but you don’t need to be subjected to the insults they lobbed in my direction.

Taking these responses together leads me to a couple of assumptions:

• This person seems to be starting from an untested assumption – in this case that I intended to “make a claim against” someone – which led them to feel the need to confront me about it.
• This person seems to be getting really agitated, which can’t feel good for them.

So why am I spilling all of this tea?

Those last couple of assumptions are often true of coaching clients when they come to me for help in figuring out how to have a difficult conversation with someone on their team.

You know that you need to do something about something someone said or did. Being embedded in a long term managerial relationship with them gives you a lot of information that leads to assumptions about why they did it or what they were thinking. Hopefully that doesn’t lead to anywhere near as hostile of an opening, but I’m assuming this person would not have characterized their opening as unnecessarily hostile. Who goes around intentionally being more hostile than they think a situation calls for?

Honestly, I don’t even know whether you read that opening as being as hostile as I did, or whether part of my response was because that fit patterns from toxic leaders at that university.

But your own institution’s patterns are going to be recognizable to your team members if you go into a situation with assumptions about their motives, and let those assumptions shape the way you approach the conversation.

How could this have gone differently?

Imagine instead that you received this message:

How would you react to a message like that?

This clearly names the situation and desired outcome, without implying any assumptions about motive. To be clear, this isn’t a coaching question – it’s a request. But this approach embodies a curious mindset by remaining open to all possible responses, not imposing assumptions about motives.

This could have been a really simple, non-confrontational exchange that y’all never would have heard about!

Instead, it was a confrontation.

Of course, I could have objected, and then they could respond to that. But that would leave it up to me to determine whether this was a positive or negative interaction, instead of them charging in assuming this needed to be confrontational.

Coaching through this

Let’s take this scenario but change things around a bit: as a department head, I need to open a conversation with someone on my team about this post. I’m in the middle between a frustrated team member and an administrator who wants them to remove their post. **To be clear, I am not implying that the dean mentioned above had anything to do with the third party’s reaction that I discussed above. The point here is to transform that interaction into the type of scenario you may encounter as a leader.

Honestly, this may not be the time for coaching. If they just need to revise or remove the post, then it’s kinder to just clearly explain the issue and tell them the response you’d like to see, and the consequences they’ll face if they don’t do that.

If it is genuinely up to them to decide how to proceed, you could open with something more like:

Possibly follow up with other questions to understand their frustrations, depending on their response.

Then bring in the additional information that you have:

This question gets at what matters most to them, before you get into asking something like “what next steps are most likely to get you to that outcome?”

As always, this can go any number of ways. Focusing on what matters most to them about the outcome before asking what they want to do should help to get them thinking beyond their initial reaction, but there’s no guarantee.

They may need you to serve as a sounding board for a couple of different ideas.

They may start venting frustration that this is even an issue when they posted it on their own personal social media account. In that case, acknowledge the frustration, but the reality is that we’re in this situation. The question is how we move forward within the current reality – by resolving this issue in the short term, and then we can talk about what longer term responses could change the bigger picture. That could include anything from opening discussions to supporting them in applying elsewhere.

Responding to hostility with questions

From my side, this was an exchange in the DMs with someone who has no power over me. I responded with curious questions until I got bored, and then was able to disengage without negative consequences. And, honestly, dear reader, I did not ask coaching questions. I asked questions that entertained me.

But even that can be a way to make it less personally stressful to respond to hostile confrontation.