Beware of Battling Bios

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Challenge me, will you?" is the message behind bio-battling. It's unseemly, and it beneath you -- so don't do it. The next time a colleague trots out a list of credentials, don't jump into the ring and embarrass yourself. Rather, elevate the conversation to the subject at hand. Here's how:

Colleague: "Jones, you know absolutely nothing about branding. I've been doing this for 15 years."

You: "That's tremendous. Let's focus on the question of the brochure layout. Tell me what about it isn't working for you."

You can keep a meeting from descending into barbarism if you keep the conversation focused on the issues, not the curriculum vitae of the participants.

The most intriguing aspect of a bio battle, anthropologically speaking, is that it alerts you to activity in the limbic nerve of one of your co-workers. I'm talking about the person who jumps into battle mode first. In other words, something that was said by someone else caused one of your co-workers to experience a fight-or-flight reaction (that's the one that happens in the limbic nerve, the pre-intellectual, reptilian part of your brain) -- and the bio battle is the result. You can't exactly get up and flee the meeting, so you stay and fight.

BIG STAKES.

I saw this once when I was sitting in on a post-merger integration summit. This was a large off-site meeting with the purpose of deciding how to combine the two companies' manufacturing organizations. Both leadership teams were assembled (on opposite sides of the room) to hammer out the plan. The outcome of this meeting would determine whether many of the folks in the room -- as well as their staffs -- would keep their jobs. You could say it was tense.

My husband, a dedicated South Side Chicago non-business guy, had a refreshing perspective on this meeting as he helped me pack my bag for the trip. "So these guys know that some of them will win, and some will lose, and a lot of people on one side or the other will be out of work, but they're not talking about that," he said. "Right," I said. "That's called the Subtext. Since these are all professional business people, they have vowed to find the Right Decision for the Company, individuals and massive teams and budgets and egos be damned. The idea is that no one is supposed to care about the outcome, apart from whether it's Right for the Company or not." "Got it," said my husband. "That sounds promising."

So off I went to the meeting. I spotted trouble right away, in the form of the youngest and greenest facilitator from a blue-chip strategy firm I had ever laid eyes on. I swear the man was 22 years old. He was in charge of the meeting, and not exactly commanding the room.

IT'S IRRELEVANT.

After an hour or two, one of the manufacturing leaders asked for my help. "Liz, you have dealt with this issue before," he said. "Put up that centralization-decentralization model that you always trot out in these situations." I drew a model on the whiteboard: Dave Ulrich's well-known model. Ulrich, a professor of business administration at the University of Michigan, writes and talks about this stuff all the time. Every HR person knows his work.

Well, the young man facilitating did not know it. But that was okay -- a model on a whiteboard can help in a tense situation, because we can speak to the model and not so directly speak about each other's teams. But the young facilitator was not happy to be upstaged.

He picked up his whiteboard eraser, and he erased the model that we were discussing. He said, "I would like you to know that I have five years of experience in this area!" Forget the fact that his statement was thunderingly irrelevant and that everyone else in the room had 20 years of experience, or more. It was just sad. Looking back, I feel bad about what I said next. "I don't doubt that you have," I said. "It's a shame that it's not in evidence today."

STAY ON THE SIDELINES.

I will spend an eon or two in purgatory for that, but it was worth it that day. Just remember one thing about the Bio Battle: it's the kind of conflict where there are no winners. So don't join in. But do pay close attention, because I'll be quizzing you on this topic on your Workplace Anthropology midterm.

You've got to hand it to the white-collar workplace -- it's not always fun, but it's never dull. Just keep a safe distance and resolve never, never, never to be the person in that ring yourself.

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive. She can be reached at liz@asklizryan.com.