EP239: Beth Wonson - How To Deal With Conflict In The Workplace

Michael Palmer: That for me was my biggest aha when I realized that the root of the majority of unhealthy conflict that happens is because of thoughts that are unseen to other people but are occurring in our head. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a good one. Our guest is the founder of Navigating Challenging Dialogue, which is a proven framework for transforming workplace culture. And she's also the author of Mastering Feedback: Everything You've Never Been Told About How to Give Feedback. Beth Wanson, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. It's a fantastic opportunity and it's a fantastic topic. I mean, I don't think that we've had anyone on the show that has written a book about feedback, but we have talked a lot about feedback. So I think it's going to be interesting to hear your story and also arm our audience with some great tools to get feedback and give feedback and all that good stuff. But before we get into it, Beth, tell us about your career journey leading up to this point.

Beth Wonson: So I began my career, surprisingly, people are shocked by this, as a public school assistant principal. And I often say that I'm a recovering school administrator because it was really quite an experience, particularly around navigating challenging dialogue. I then moved into a consulting and training company, and I quickly rose through the ranks. I came in in a very entry-level position position, but I was really good at what I did, the tasks that I did. I was a high-performing employee. And so I quickly got promoted to manager status, but I realized that I had no training in the— what— the soft skills or the human skills of management. And so I was really depending on what had been modeled to me, and I realized after about 8 years that while my team achieved our goals and did really great work and was high-performing in that regard, my management style could have generated a healthier work culture and a lot better results. So that's when I began studying brain-based