Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. And if you notice this pattern insistently with your boss, I would say this is where you do have to really step back and navigate for yourself. Go out into the future 10 or 20 years and look back on the current situation. And ask yourself truly in your heart, what is most important here?
Because in that situation, maybe there's one employee who has two little kids to support and they go, what's most important is they keep my job for the kid. And so I'm just gonna, I'm gonna stay, right? Even though it means that I'm gonna have to carry some of the workload for others. And someone else might be in a situation where they're going,
No, the most important thing is for me to go find an environment where the leadership is not threatened by me and where I can really flourish. I would never, as a coach, tell someone which of those choices is the right choice because it's whatever is the right choice for you and what you need to do, looking at your situation and looking in your heart.
Because if you find a consistent pattern where the boss is just simply easily threatened by the stronger performers, That is what it is, right? There is not necessarily a lot that you can do to influence that. Not in a real significant way, not from where you sit as an employee. Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the reasons that I think it is so important for leaders to not just somehow think we aligned on our goals and now we just march forward because goals are pretty dynamic, right? And the different pressures that businesses are under change as markets change, as the geopolitical environment changes, you need to stay well-seeked up and well-aligned as a leadership team.
or you're going to be giving differing direction to the people who work for you. And then those people will find themselves at loggerheads and starting to do some infighting with one another, in part because you did not stay aligned at that higher level. And really, also, I would say of great significance, didn't learn how to raise and address conflict in a way that was healthy and effective.
Yeah, we could probably eliminate a good chunk of politics by just improving the ability to raise and resolve conflict in a healthy way.
Sure. I think that often when people get together to have conversations about business or whatever it is that they're accountable for within a business, they talk about the goal that's passed, the things that seem very concrete and hard and in a plan. And then when one person believes that one thing is true and another believes the other is true, they just start talking at each other.
Instead of stepping back to say, wait a minute, it seemed like we're in conflict here. How many times have people done that in the business environment? Pretty rare. To step back and say, it seems that we're in conflict with each other. Let's step back. Let's put ourselves in one another's shoes. Let's ask some more questions. Let's make sure we understand the situation.
And I've had a number of early clients say, oh, I don't have time to do that. How much time are you wasting now on the political battles because you didn't step back and try to put yourself in the shoes of all of these other people and understand where they're coming from?
Check to make sure you actually understand where they're coming from and what's driving them because you're probably making some false assumptions about what that is. I can just about guarantee it. Are you stepping back to list the areas where you're in agreement? Probably not. Most people don't. As you start to work through these things, differing dialing is another one.
Oh my gosh, I've had teams that were leadership teams. See, you said we're just starting to backbite one another and get into a little bit of gamesmanship. And when we analyze the different styles on the team and we were able to step back objectively and look at that and say, can you come to some agreements? on your behaviors? Because you all have naturally different styles.
You're all coming in with naturally different assumptions about what it means to be on a team, what it means to communicate, what it means to commit. You all have different assumptions about what that looks like. And so stepping back to look at the style and do you have conflict that is really exacerbated by these different styles and the fact that you haven't talked about it out loud?
You've just frustrated one another. So as you start to work your way through this checklist of things, eventually what you come down to is the substance of what you don't agree on. And from there, then you can start to work through what that is. But it's often quite small compared to what it looks like because people are not taking the time to raise and deal with conflict.
It's exacerbates the politics in the situation, right? Because it feeds... That lack of trust. And where you know the lack of trust, of course, you're going to have more politics. You're going to have much more of those power battles. Where you have more trust, you're going to have less of that. Just because of human nature.
Yeah. You need to find the environment that is the best fit for you and for what you enjoy. I love your example of the person who said, yeah, we could probably be a lot more effective or successful if we had left from the political animal thing. But the reality was that was what that organization was like and he saw it. And so maybe that was not the right fit.
But maybe for someone who enjoyed that culture, it would be a great fit and they'd be pretty happy there. I do think what you said reminded me of The advice that is actually, it's not my own. It was from Martin Luther King's personal attorney, Clarence Jones. And he was part of the core group of activists who worked really closely with Dr. King.
And I was super fortunate to hear him speak a number of years ago. Imagine your situation now. They have figured out that their movement is never going to get what it needs if they do not get a powerful white man from the South to align and to become an advocate. And that's got to be something that was pretty painful for them to realize.
But the realization was there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. So what are your interests? What are theirs? Well, in this case, they figured out that they needed a stakeholder who was a powerful white Theternet.
In your case, you might find that your personal interests and the personal interests of a firm that has that more intensely competitive political culture are aligned or not aligned, right? What are your interests? What are their interests when assessing the environment that you're in and the ones you're considering?
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