End Workplace Conflict With These 7 Steps For Leaders In The Financial Services Profession

You’re part of a strong financial services professional team, and your team can produce outstanding results… most of the time. But sometimes teams can slide down the slippery slope of discontent generating unnecessary and unwanted workplace conflict. You as the team leader may or may not be aware of it, although if you’re tuned in, you are, being aware that sometimes, just sometimes, it starts with you.

If you are noticing conflict in your office, ponder the following and do some self-reflection. The only perspective that matters is from your true self, your soul, not the amygdala:

1. Look into the future. Things must change.
2. Hiring new people won’t solve the problem. It won’t take long for a new hire to feel the discontent and they could leave as quickly as they arrive. This could generate further discontent and pave the way for your current strong members to also leave.
3. One must commit to change.
4. Empty your mind. Create space and stillness, and empty your mind. This will allow you to gain perspective and give you the opportunity to categorize, prioritize, delegate, defer, dump, and do whatever you need to do to schedule priority items.
5. Redesign your time management system 90 to 120 days out. Re-educate your clients on your service proposition i.e. that you require at least 48 to 96 hours advance notice of an appointment. As David Essex said, “I am not a bloody jukebox.”
6. Love yourself and create the time and space to love yourself. In this space, in communion, you will be given the insights about what are the most important activities in which to engage your time; segment your clients or hire more staff. Without the space, there is no answer, only more racing.
7. You can comment if the staff is not performing, but you need to do it only after endorsing good behaviour versus pointing out the negative. If the staff continue to hear negative comments then the only way they, in their amygdala mind, can gain their father’s love is to do the negative, because that’s what their father loves.

In the absence of love, in the absence of pondering from the heart, there will be blame, judgement, remarks, projecting out at others, all coming from the amygdala, because it believes that it is unlovable.

Your work is a vocation, to help your team and clients create a life of significance. In the eyes of the amygdala, your work is loveless labor, and in the absence of love, there is only toil, which the amygdala believes is a sentence and therefore it must project its pain onto others in the form of blame, judgement, remarks etc.

In short, create more space to love yourself, and from this space you will have a better perspective on how to manage on a day-to-day basis.

Your experience and knowledge are infinite and you are a master at what you do and you have an extraordinary team.

While you are addicted to racing, the highs and lows of adrenaline, there is no staff member that can meet the insane expectations of the amygdala, which voices only blame, judgement and remarks.

The amygdala is hell bent on destruction, because it believes that it is unlovable, cast out on this earth, toiling from a loveless place, looking for love from the toil, and after all the toil is done, the amygdala will say, look you are still unlovable, so as to avoid that emotion and belief of unlovable, then the amygdala re-creates itself, and tries to drag others into the darkness by venting blame, judgement and remarks.