My executive success comes in part from being comfortable with conflict

How to have constructive conflict

Welcome to a paid member-only edition of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.

Amazon's Controller (2nd to the CFO) and I once ended up in conflict.

This is how I handled the conflict constructively and you can too.

• The Controller had a mandate that no project could launch without fully automated accounting.

  • At the time, accounting automation was a lot of work (they had not made it easy to do). Still, they also had a point because many people had bypassed the work, they had an army of people doing manual accounting for a public, multi-billion corporation, which was not sustainable. A classic case of needing to pay off the tech debt.

• My team and I did not want to invest in that accounting automation until we knew if our new product would succeed.

Our goals and priorities conflicted.

We resolved our conflict by jointly creating a document that laid out the two choices and the tradeoffs.

Then we went to my SVP, who sided with the Controller.

I "lost."

My project was delayed while we built the automation.

And then…the Controller turned around and wrote glowing praise about me in my review.

My SVP could not be mad about the delay, since he made the choice.

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In this highlight clip of a past event, Ethan shares how to best maximize Executive 1:1 time.

Become a member to attend future events live and to watch the full 65-minute video recording where Ethan covers:

• The Amazon Way

• Why Jeff Bezos shifted to no 1:1s

• Amazon SVP 1:1s

• Ethan's skip level 1:1 story

• Executive expectations

• How to use a Skip 1:1

• How to ruin a Skip 1:1

• How to have good "regular" 1:1s

• How to talk about your career in 1:1s

• The Manager's POV in 1:1

• Audience Q&A

The point: you can advocate for your position but in a way that builds trust, win or lose!

I "won" by not getting mad at the Controller (who was just doing his job) or mad at my SVP (who sided "against" me).

I stayed calm, was a professional, and was rewarded for how I handled the conflict.

This is how you can have "constructive conflict"

1. If someone disagrees with you, they "oppose" you. But if they treat you with respect and conduct a civil discourse, do not treat them like an "enemy."

2. Disagreements are more easily resolved when we treat those who oppose us as people to be persuaded, not as enemies to be vilified.

Lesson 1: Focus on the problem, not on attacking the people. Attacks create enemies, not solutions.