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- Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth shared a four-step plan for resolving workplace conflicts.
- Bosworth emphasizes seeking valuable feedback in corporate conflict resolution.
- Bosworth said the approach has helped him understand when he’s having an “emotional reaction.”
Workplace conflicts spare no one, and often it’s the C-suite that has to find a way through.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, has dealt with a fair share of conflict in his career. In a post he published on his personal blog on Monday, he shared his four-step plan for resolving interpersonal conflict.
The big takeaway is that in such conflicts, it’s better to seek valuable feedback than to let ego take over.
Here are his four steps for managers:
- Listen to the offended party. “It is healthy to make space for them to tell their story and show care for how it affected them,” Bosworth says.
- Ask that person to reflect on the “substance” of the conflict. In any scenario, “There is always some substantial critique worth considering,” he said.
- Turn to the other party and ask them to consider all the factors that impact the former’s perspective. In one recent instance, a new employee critiqued one of Meta’s new tools — to the dismay of the engineer who built it. Bosworth went to that employee and “challenged them to look past that: did they ever consider the tool was that way because the engineer couldn’t get the investment needed to make it better?” he wrote.
- Bring the two parties together and ask them to reconcile.
Bosworth said the approach has helped him countless times.
“I’ve done this so many times that I am now able to recognize this same duality inside myself,” he wrote. “I will notice I am having an emotional reaction to something when it would be more productive to find the value in it.”
Meta has been culling the ranks of its middle managers in recent years. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2023 memo that “flatter is faster.”
Zuckerberg also said at an internal meeting he’s not a fan of a management structure filled with “managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.”
That leaves the existing managers with more work, and top-ranking executives, like Bosworth, likely managing more conflict.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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