Conflict Resolution for Tech Careers with Yvette Durazo | Ep050

Technical skills land you the job. People skills determine everything that comes next.

Yvette Durazo brings conflict resolution expertise to Silicon Valley tech companies. As a professional mediator and coach, she helps technical professionals navigate the transition into leadership roles. She teaches at universities and works with companies to build conflict intelligence throughout their organizations.

This episode tackles a gap most bootcamps and certifications ignore. You can master Python, ace the PM certification, and still struggle when team dynamics turn difficult. Yvette explains why project managers need influence skills nobody warned them about, how unresolved conflict creates measurable health costs, and why companies should budget for these skillsets differently.

Episode Highlights: Manuel and Yvette discuss the inevitable shift from technical work to people management. Most engineers and developers focus on hard skills early in their careers. Then they move into project management or team leadership and discover a new challenge: working with people they don’t directly supervise.

Yvette shares her experience teaching conflict resolution in project management certificate programs. The programs teach scheduling, budgeting, and timeline management. They rarely prepare students for influencing stakeholders across the organization. That gap creates real problems when projects involve multiple departments.

The conversation moves into conflict health. Yvette describes how prolonged workplace stress affects cortisone levels, cognitive function, and physical wellbeing. Employees operating in constant fight-or-flight mode can’t access creativity or innovation. Companies lose productivity and face increased absenteeism.

You’ll hear why Yvette advocates for moving conflict resolution training from learning and development budgets into risk management. The training gets cut first when budgets tighten if leadership sees it as optional development. Treating it as risk mitigation changes the conversation.

The episode closes with Yvette’s perspective on “bringing your whole self to work.” She suggests companies would benefit more from supporting employees to bring their healthy selves to work instead.

Key Takeaways:
– Technical expertise alone won’t carry you through leadership transitions
– Project management inherently requires influence skills across reporting lines
– Workplace conflict creates measurable physical and mental health impacts
– Fight-or-flight responses eliminate creativity and productivity
– Conflict resolution belongs in risk management, not just Learning and Development
– Companies benefit from employees bringing their healthy selves to work

About This Week’s Guest: Yvette Durazo works as a professional mediator and coach in Silicon Valley. She specializes in helping tech leaders develop conflict intelligence. Her work includes teaching university courses, coaching individual leaders, and facilitating organizational conflict resolution. She’s the author of “Conflict Intelligence Quotient.”

Resources Mentioned:
Book: “Conflict Intelligence Quotient” by Yvette Durazo

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Manuel Martinez: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez, and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest, to learn more about their background and their experiences, to really uncover actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. I’m excited for today’s episode, because I have with me Yvette Durazo. And she’s not what you would consider your tech… Your typical tech worker. So she specializes in conflict resolution, and she teaches at universities. She’s also worked for a lot of companies. She’s based in the Silicon Valley. And it’s really to kind of help people who are looking to be leaders within the tech community. So she’s got a lot of insights there. So I’m excited to kind of find out more about how she started, eventually what led her into this career field, and how she was able to kind of merge that and help leaders, you know, again, within the technology sector. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Yvette.

Yvette Durazo: Thank you, Manuel, for inviting me to your podcast and inviting me to interact with your audience and be able to be part of this movement that you’re doing in educating people and helping to build their careers.

Manuel Martinez: Right. And thank you again for kind of coming on. And I know that we had a couple of conversations prior to this, and I think it’s important because I don’t know how much of this type of information. And again, just trying to share with others, you know, we talk about soft skills and technical skills, and those are important. But I think things like this, like conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, and there are people that, you know, starting out in their career, they’re like, okay, well, I want to be a software developer, I want to be a project manager. But at some point, you, even if you’re not a direct manager leader, you’re going to lead smaller teams. So understanding how to resolve conflict. I know that this would have been something that I can think of a number of situations where it would have helped me to kind of have some of that information instead of trying to learn it on the fly or after the fact.

Yvette Durago: Yeah, you’re right. A lot of the people are in the tech industry. They go out and learn a field of work that it is, you know, very hard skills, right? Very intellectually in hard skills. But there are parts in the process of their career that they go in, for example, into project management, because they know that somehow they will be working with teams, or they perhaps going to getting an MBA thinking that, you know, their career trajectory will lead them into become, you know, leaders, managers, and going up the ladder in the organization. And the more that you go up the ladder in the organization, one of the things that is going to be something that is going to happen and it’s common is the fact that you’re going to be working more with people, right? And it is interesting that when people going through the trajectory of learning more about project management and they go through a certificate process, little do they realize that project management leads to having to learn how to influence people. People that are working in your entire company, that you’re not directly managing or supervising yet because you’re responsible for a particular project, you have to learn how to influence these individuals that come to your team. And believe it or not, the project management certificate program back in the days when I started, you know, teaching courses in conflict resolution, I realized that project managers were not very well taught about conflict resolution. The book that is the project management book, the what is the PMP book, I think it’s called, there was only one or two pages in conflict resolution. And it is interesting that it’s a field work that you need to deal with teams, with people. Eventually I think that they realized the project management institute where I used to give a lot of my workshops, they realized that the skill is very much needed. And eventually they start upping up and bringing more people skills into this work. So in reality, what tends to happen as people grow up in their career, that is going to be the tendency, having to learn these people skills. And LinkedIn recently did a research study into what are the skill gaps that they continue to see that it’s missing in the workplace. And out of those 15 that they ended up researching, the number one skill missing was AI, right? Because right now, in the world that we are, AI is the most important. The second one was communication, conflict resolution, how to negotiate with people. So we see through the research throughout these past 15 years that conflict resolution and being able to have those difficult conversations with people, be able to resolve human conflict has been in all of these research studies in the skill gaps that is mostly needed in the organization. And the more we progress into life, we see that it’s a key skill. It’s not what they used to call it a soft skill anymore. It is one of those essential skills that is mostly needed.

Manuel Martinez: And I know we’re going to start getting into that, so I want to save that for a little bit later in the conversation. But if you don’t mind, tell me a little bit about where you grew up and then eventually led you down this path towards your career.

Yvette Durazo: Sure. I was born and raised in San Diego, California. I was very lucky to be born in a border town in where I had the opportunity to be able to commingle with the two different cultures, you know, Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego. My father used to own a company in the other side of the border and that was kind of like playground as a child because I was the youngest of seven and I used to always be with my dad because it was fascinating to be around his business and playing to be the accountant, playing to help him out in the workplace. That was my playground. And I grew up in the other side in San Diego, going to school since I was in Kinder all the way until now, right? Because of the fact that I was raised in a bi-national border, it always caught my attention, the ability to be able to understand different cultures. In San Diego, not only you have a predominant amount of percentage of Hispanics in the population, but you also have a pretty much of a very nice melting pot of a lot of different cultures in San Diego. And that led me to, instead of choosing to become an accountant because at that point I thought, “It’s boring. I would like to study international business.” But at the same time, I was raising kids and the most international that I went was to be doing bi-national border work. And while I was doing that, that led me into working for a lot of nonprofit organizations. Economic Development Council, Chambers of Commerce, universities. And one of the things that I was constantly seeing, it was that there were well-meaning people wanting to provide volunteer work and work for these nonprofit organizations, yet something that would happen very often, it was that people constantly would get into conflict, into ideas that people didn’t agree with, and on and on, you know, my youngest career I was able to experience that. Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, people would come and approach me whenever they were having issues. And I never had the skills, yet they wanted me to hear them. They wanted me to help them out with ideas or ways of how to deal with people in the organization and somehow become a very trustworthy person for them. That eventually led me to wanting to go into getting a master’s degree. And at first I thought, “I want to get an MBA because it will go very well hand in hand with my international business degree. Maybe an MBA will be the route to go.” Little that I thought about any other degree, but eventually while I was doing research, I learned about this degree in negotiation, conflict, resolution, and peace building. And I immediately felt that if I were to gain that skill, I would be able to work with a lot of people and be able to help them to do what they want to do best, which is focus in helping others, focus in developing their careers towards doing better work towards the movement of working with people. Because I used to enjoy working for nonprofit organizations a lot. So I saw that as an opportunity.

Manuel Martinez: Did a lot of the reason that people came to you, were you a pretty outgoing person? Did you talk a lot? What is it? Or were you maybe more quiet and people came to you? So I’m just curious what made people gravitate towards you and just to develop that sense of trust and to think that, “Oh, well, you’re a person that can help me solve the problem.” Is it you did it once or twice and people just repeated coming back to you? Or was it you were very good at it just naturally? So I’m just curious.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah. Well, I was an introvert, now I’m a hybrid. Otherwise, I couldn’t do the work that I do. But as an extrovert, I was a people’s person. I used to like to work with a lot of people and then I was a connector by nature. I would see somebody that was running this business and then somebody else running that business and I used to like to connect them. And I would say, “You have to talk to this person.” And that comes very natural for me. And I think that because of that, I created a trustworthy persona and where people would say if Yvette has the ability to see potentiality in connecting me to develop my business or to work in collaboration with somebody else, she probably has those skills of helping people to resolve issues, right? Because they see my willingness to be able to connect people, right? And eventually when I went through doing my master’s degree, little did I realize that indeed I was already resolving and negotiating from the cradle. Why? Because I was the youngest of seven children and I was the child that my parents were not expecting because they were already in their 50s. And eventually I showed up and I had to negotiate resources, attention, and you name it. But I never, never realized that I had those abilities until I eventually did my master’s degree and I was doing my practice, doing internships. And that is where I realized, wow, everybody’s saying that I’m very natural at doing this. So it must have been because the way I was raised, the way that I navigated through life. And then eventually I also remember when I graduated from my bachelor’s and working for these nonprofit organizations that people will gravitate to me. But at that point I thought they gravitated towards me because I’m a connector. I see potentiality in people and getting them connected.

Manuel Martinez: And that’s good to know so that I know other people like that that are just natural connectors. And that’s probably why they gravitate towards you and gravitate towards those other people is just because that does help establish trust outside of work and even within side work. If someone comes to you or if you’re like, “Hey, I know that you’re working on this project and let me go, this person’s doing something similar or there might be a good potential, good synergy in there.” So just the reason I wanted to bring that about is just if someone has that natural skill or they’re used to doing that, they can understand that this might be a path forward for them. So then you go through and you’re going to get in your master’s now and you decide it or you found out about conflict resolution and peace building. What was that like kind of going through getting that degree and what did you think you were going to do with it after?

Yvette Durazo: Yeah, interesting. Obviously this field of study does not go directly towards a job title. And at first, obviously I fell in love right away with the degree, but I knew that it was going to have to be an art to figure it out. How am I going to build in this degree with a career path? But at the same time, I thought based on what I know about my field of work and based on the fact that working in an organization and trying to do this work, sometimes it affects the level of neutrality. And we can see that in the HR field, human resource. The majority of people don’t trust HR. People don’t go to HR, right? And it is interesting that not a lot of the HR certificates, HR bachelors, perhaps in the master’s degree, they don’t teach these fundamental human skills that I learned through my master’s degree. And because of the comparison to the HR field, I said, “Well, wouldn’t it be better for me to start establishing a consulting business in where I can be a neutral in all aspects and I can go in into an organization and really help organizations to build a better culture?” Versus if I were to be working in an organization and trying to do this work, I would not work that well because then they will box me into working for an HR department, perhaps, right? And immediately an HR department already has a reputation. So that is where I started thinking, “You know what? It would be best for me to start developing little by little, my consulting work and then eventually go from that.” And I knew that this was going to be a field of work that I was already in love with and that I would want to always do forever, right? I don’t see a path to retirement doing the work that I do, right? Giving trainings, facilitating conversations, coaching, and doing all this work that I do. So I said, “Okay, let me start doing this.” And I started developing my logo, you know, little by little. Started talking in the organizations of my field of work and I would travel and do public speaking and doing that work little by little. And that’s how I developed the consulting business.

Manuel Martinez: You make a good point there is HR does have kind of a, I don’t want to say a stigma, but there is a certain box, right? That people are like, “Oh, HR, they’re the bad people. You know, if you get called in, there isn’t that trust.” So a lot of what you were doing for consulting, was it to kind of help HR in the way that they kind of manage conflicts or were you more, like now that I kind of think about it, almost like attorney, sometimes there’s mediators, right? They kind of help and, you know, negotiators. So I’m just kind of curious what your role in that consultancy was and kind of what’s the difference between like a mediator and negotiator versus someone like you who’s doing conflict resolution, would this be, would what you do be the step first so that you kind of avoid going to like a negotiator or mediator?

Yvette Durazo: Well, the field of work that I’m at, it’s called alternative dispute resolution. And if you can envision this as an umbrella of different skillsets that go underneath this field, one of them is mediation. And by that means there’s like seven distinct or a distinct type of mediation processes. And attorneys gravitate to becoming mediators because they know that sometimes people do not have the enough money to pay for attorneys all the time or they don’t want to end up landing in a court system and the mediation that they do is very evaluative. The type of mediation that I gravitate towards, it’s more transformational, more about working with the human condition, not about dividing assets, gadgets and things, but rather than how are we going to transform the relationship so that you guys can continue working together? How are we going to restore the, perhaps the wrongdoing in order to be able to establish ways of how to move forward in order to work together, right? Which is very distinct than what HR will do sometimes, right? They’re more about policy and procedures. Did you break policy? You didn’t break policy? Okay, what else can we do with you? Because if you’re not happy here at work, it’s best for us just to let you go, right? It’s pretty much that. Versus in the work that I do is I have those difficult conversations with the parties involved and I help them through pathways of how to get to a process of restoration so they can continue working together. And the company wins because then when an employee see that the company takes charge of bringing in neutral to resolve the situation and that these individuals in the workplace feel comfortable enough to open up with me because what the work that I do doesn’t require me to document everything. HR documents every single thing. I don’t because of the nature of the work that I come and do, right? So right up there, people feel very comfortable. They know that this is a voluntary process. Nobody’s forcing them and that the person that they’re going to be talking to does not have any stake in the company’s hierarchies, right? They’re just, I’m just coming as a neutral. So that really helps for people to open up, to be able to humanize the conflict and be able to resolve it from that standpoint.

Manuel Martinez: Okay. And then as you’re doing a lot of this, right now, or at least at that point, you’re doing the consultancy to kind of do the conflict once something’s already happened. But are you also at the same time teaching HR and probably teaching this person how to potentially avoid to the point where you’re having to go to HR versus policy? Because now, what could we have done with the managers? It’s something that the manager could have or the leader, could we have taught them a skill to kind of avoid getting it to this point or even the employees, right? Because it doesn’t necessarily have to come from the top down. It could be really bottom up. I could be an employee, understand these skills so that I’m dealing with somebody, either a coworker, a peer, or somebody above me to kind of be able to handle those same types of situations.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah. You know, that’s what I talk about in the book, Conflict IQ, that I developed. It’s a methodology that it would be ideal for companies to really invest to develop these conflict IQ in people from any level of the organization. As imagine, as a customer, for example, coming in into, let’s say, a store or any place that you go, and if an employee has the ability to de-escalate situations and be able to resolve the issue with that person, imagine the work that they’re not bringing into HR, their managers, their supervisors, because they’re taking charge and they’re working to de-escalate situations. That helps overall the organization. The ideal would be that every single person in the work would learn these skills. That would be the ideal. Having leaders that understand conflict resolution, HR, having these other mechanisms that they can use aside from their policy and procedures can be ideal, again, to de-escalate situations that perhaps could have landed in a formal complaint, or there has been already a formal complaint and how can we de-escalate? Sometimes where HR is very difficult to see that happening, but I do it in my day-to-day work. I have gone to organizations where formal complaints have already been filed, and with the work that I do, sometimes people will remove those formal complaints and not continue. A formal complaint takes about 90 days in order to investigate, which is a lot of time, a lot of resource. In the meantime, it’s almost three months in where people are alienated and they’re upset with each other because one person said something about the other person, and then it escalated the situation in order to investigate the other person. Once they do the investigation, HR does not do anything, and then just tell the employee, “I cannot tell you anything because it’s confidential,” and just know that we’re just going to take care of it. The employee sometimes feels that HR didn’t do anything, most likely than not. Versus in the work that I do is I work with the human side of people. I work with them in order to have those difficult conversations, in order to see whether there’s pathways, in order to resolve the situation, in order to continue working together. Because you might have two very good employees that might cost you a lot of money to replace, and they’re having a human interaction that didn’t go well. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to find mechanisms for those individuals to be able to work together and be able to dialogue and come out with resolution? It would be for the betterment of a company, for the bottom line of the company, and then employees that see that companies take care of building more inclusion, most likely employees become more loyal because they see that the company cares for them, instead of just investigating and trying to get rid of the cheapest employees that will cost in order to replace them. Because it cost money in order to fire people and replace people. And usually what tends to happen is that HR will side more with leadership because it will cost more. And the fact that they earn more is more likelihood that they can go out into the outside world and hire an attorney. So all those factors take into place while HR is trying to analyze risk. And that’s how we see it happening.

Manuel Martinez: That’s interesting. So then now as you started your career and you open up your consultancy and you’re starting with kind of these HR departments, how are you continuing to kind of develop and get into more of these different companies? Because at some point, and I don’t remember how long it is or how short, but at some point you start working and realize that there’s a need for it within tech industry. And it’s very specific in what they’re looking for. Because you mentioned at the very beginning, these are very tech focused, very knowledge based, and that human element isn’t always there. And that’s something, and I think that’s part of the reason that we kind of came in contact is I started sharing a lot about like, hey, you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you can’t deal with people, that kind of limits you as an individual or even as a leader, because a lot of times people who are knowledgeable, they think that, well, this person is very smart. Let’s put them in a leadership role, but they don’t thrive there because they don’t have the skillset to be able to go ahead and do that. Could they learn it? Yes, but they’re not given that. And it’s not… It might be a little bit easier now. But at that point in time, at least when I remember kind of going through, it wasn’t as prevalent to just be like, well, I’m going to go on YouTube where there’s tons of books, or maybe there are, but I was more of a, well, I know how to go get my Cisco CCNA, or I know how to get my Microsoft certs, or my VMware certs, like all these different things. So how are you kind of building your consultancy? And I don’t know if at this point you’re still in San Diego, or if you’ve already moved to the Silicon Valley, but kind of what transpires to help you get to that point?

Yvette Durazo: Yeah. Well, I was in San Diego, and I was working for the University of UC, San Diego University, University of California San Diego. And building my career there, I found that there was a stagnation in that university. I couldn’t grow anymore. And I was already teaching at a university level. I was teaching undergraduate master degree students. And yet I wasn’t seeing my progression in the ability to integrate my degree while I was already doing my consulting work outside too. And eventually the opportunity showed up that the Alameda Superior Court was looking for someone to help them develop a mediation program. That somehow they tried to start, and for many years they have it dormant. So I saw the opportunity. I always make the metaphor as the surfers when they go to Hawaii or they go to different places in the world because they want to ride the highest wave. For me, going into the court system and help them create a mediation program was the ultimate area of my career. It’s like, wow, I’m going to go into the court system. And by the way, I want to learn why sometimes the mediation programs don’t work very well. Maybe I can be of influence for these programs to really work because a lot of people do not know that there are these mediation programs in the court system. And the most that we learn when we go through a divorce is that supposedly a mediator helps to mediate the child custody. And there is a erroneous information about these individuals because they’re social workers. They’re not trained in mediation. But for a while they were calling them mediators, but they’re not skilled in mediation. They’re just social workers that decide where the child is going to be best in a couple of hours. So the mediation program was going more to be built in the small claim courts and in certain courts that people go in and try to sue one another. And that helps the judges to be able to reduce the amount of cases they have by offering a voluntary process of a mediation. And with that mediation, be able to give that information to the judge of what happened in the mediation, but what is it that they decided to do and how they were going to work through the situation or how they were going to divide the money or who was going to pay what. Right? So I went into a superior court. I moved here from San Diego from living all my life there. I decided to move up here and I start working with the superior court in building that program. And it was amazing for me, just having that opportunity to be able to work with judges and be able to work with them in order to develop a program that would fit the superior court system. And then be able to start educating people about the mediation programs that we have and then be able to train mediators to be able to do these mediations inside the court system. And with that, there were mediators, there were attorneys that wanted to go into that field of mediation. And there were neutral people just like me that study to become mediators from a neutral perspective and they were also doing and coming in and doing mediation. And I was able to train them to develop the whole program and leave it running for the court system to continue using it. That’s how I move here to the Bay Area.

Manuel Martinez: And how is it that you… What did you find out was what stalled that within the court system? Was it someone that just kind of didn’t take the initiative? Because it sounds like apart from conflict resolution and kind of putting people together, you also seem like you are also a problem solver. You like that challenge of like, “Okay, these people can’t get along.” That’s one thing to kind of conflict resolution, but it’s also like… Would it be fair to say that it’s the challenge of how can I get them to agree upon something? They’re never going to see exactly eye to eye or be 100% happy, but they’ll agree that, “Okay, this is the path forward.”

Yvette Durazo: Well, it is because of the studies of this field of work. The baseline of this field is in the study of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. So when you get to learn the aspects of how people’s psychology works, of how the neurology of conflict resolution happens in the brain, of how people influence one another through sociology, and understanding that prior to having a legal system in the United States, people were resolving problems in tribes. And anthropology is brought into the light, how is it that people in tribes used to resolve conflict, right? And brought that to the light of the field, right? So by understanding humanity, it is not necessarily that I’m interested in problem solving. I’m more interested in the possibility, in the capacity of helping people to transform, to be able to see things from different perspectives. Through the process of doing this master’s degree, I also studied coaching and neurolinguistic programming, because I knew that these areas will work very well hand in hand to help people to see things from different perspectives. And that gives me a whole advantage, because by helping people to get them to think, by me asking them key questions, perhaps helping them to position themselves in other people’s shoes, I help them to see things from a different perspective, and be able to help them to lift the level of consciousness to other levels in where things can be resolved. And that idea didn’t come necessarily from me. Albert Einstein said that. You cannot resolve problems from the level of consciousness where the problem was created, right? Or from the level of thinking from where the problem was created. And that is part of the basis of the work in Conflict IQ. That if you work with individuals to be able to perhaps see things from a different perspective, be able to understand their emotions and how their emotions play a role in the situation. Because people tend to say it’s everybody else’s fault except you, right? And even though that it’s so, what is it that you’re thinking or the way that you are showing up into the world or with people, that it’s allowing that experience to come to you, right? And that is what really fascinates me. Because this work can become very addictive when you see transformation on people. And even though that it is for a certain amount of hours that I’m working with people, I know that the experience that they have whenever they realize that they can resolve conflict, that they never thought that they could resolve it because they don’t see eye to eye with other people, that changed people’s life. That gives them an opportunity to see that indeed things can be resolved. And we don’t live in a society where we are taught that, right? We live in a society that we glorify conflict. We glorify people fighting. We see it in sports. We see it in the reality shows. So, in reality, humanity does not have a lot of people that give us good examples of conflict resolution. And the majority of people learn their conflict resolution skills as they’re growing from the age of zero to about seven, where psychology says that people by that time pretty much develop their personality styles, right? Because when a child is brand new into this world, they’re learning from other human beings how to navigate world. They’re not interested in learning how to read, write math. They’re just observing humans and observing from that how to navigate world. And if they happen to have good conflict resolvers, negotiators, their parents, their teachers, their grandparents, people that were around them, they might be able to absorb very useful skills, right? And those are the skills that they will be using throughout their life. And especially because we know that throughout the educational system, if you don’t happen to have a degree in what I do or perhaps a degree in psychology, anthropology, you might not be able to catch other skills and upgrade the skills that you learned when you were little or add to these skills if they were good skills to be able to add to it.

Manuel Martinez: And now I’m starting to see the parallels in, you know, it’s very similar to technology, right? You are… If you’re just within your one discipline, it’s very difficult to be… I’m not saying it can’t be done, but to be very successful. And it sounds like you kind of took that same approach. If you were focused only on conflict resolution, say, “Okay, this is it. This is all I’m going to do.” You could be successful, but then you’re limiting or you’re almost kind of putting a ceiling on yourself, but by going through and saying, “Hey, there’s parts of it in sociology and anthropology and psychology and all these different areas,” it’s the same thing like within technology. Like, I can be the best networking person, but I would be even better. Again, I don’t have to be a specialist in, you know, software and infrastructure and all these different areas, but having that understanding can kind of help tie it all together. So I’m starting to see, you know, these parallels within, you know, the two different fields.

Yvette Durazo: Let’s talk about a little bit of AI and how AI has been, you know, has been revolutionized to be able to think like a human. And in AI, there is what they call NLP, right? They call it neuro-linguistic, not programming, but they call it neuro-linguistic, right? And it’s the pattern of the language and how you use the pattern of the language to enact actions on other people, right? So in order to develop software, you also have to learn about human being, how human being functions from the inside out, right? It’s the same thing with helping people to resolve conflict and helping them to negotiate, helping them to restore relationships. I see it very similar because in technology, you have to learn how the interface, the human that is going to be using that interface, it’s going to interact with that in order to be able to build better software, better systems, right? It’s very similar.

Manuel Martinez: You touched on AI there. And do you think, I mean, obviously it takes, you know, training it and being able to do that, but a lot of the conflict resolution, a lot of the work you do, do you see a point in time where that could be almost like a stepping stone, right? Maybe they develop you, maybe you develop it, or maybe somebody you work with develop something that says, “Okay, I’m a business and I have this technology that I’m already using. Can’t I create something that would create this conflict resolution, this intelligence, you know, IQ to go through and say, “All right, here’s the situation.” Again, it’s not going to be perfect, but at least kind of give them as a starting point to kind of go through and not replace what you do, but almost either be a starting point or kind of help give you better information and say, “Okay, hey, here’s what we’ve done. We went through AI, we did a lot of this. Here’s what it came up with and we still have a problem.”

Yvette Durazo: Remember when I mentioned about the umbrella of the field work that I do? There it’s already something in place for that. There is an area called, what is called, dispute system design, right? Going into organizations and studying the issues that people are having and helping to develop a dispute system design that will be adapted into the organization to resolve issues, it’s part of this process. Now they took that and they integrated with online dispute resolution. And there was somebody here in Silicon Valley already that helped eBay to develop what is called dispute system. His last name is Rule, Colin Rule. He was the one that helped. Somehow he got a hold of understanding mediation and brought it into existince into eBay, because in eBay, you’re not physically interacting with people, but they’re people from the outside world, not from the company, that they’re selling products, right? And there’s gonna be conflict. Some people are not gonna be happy with the product or they’re gonna be upset that they found the product elsewhere cheaper and there’s always going to be that type of problem. So in order to resolve those human conflicts that people were having while they were purchasing these products from other people, they developed the online dispute resolution systems in where you have people trained that are in the computer trying to help people that purchase products from each other to resolve issues with one another. And then you have the facilitator that it’s an employee from eBay supporting the whole system. And then you have it on Amazon. You have it in many companies already, but perhaps you have come across with that, but you have never thought that it was part of this field of conflict resolution, dispute resolution, mediation, restorative practice.

Manuel Martinez: That’s very interesting. You’re right, I have seen a lot of those types of systems and just never realized that that’s what it was.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah. So within the tech industry, right? So at some point you’re in Silicon Valley and you’re working with these companies from an individual standpoint or even from a company, what are some of the skills that you see that we’re not equipped with that, if you had to give say three, two or three points, right? Because it’s a lot of information, but two or three things that somebody could say that you would say, this is what you should work on or here’s something to be aware of. Maybe advice you would give me, hey Manuel, as you’re going through, you’re starting to get in these leadership positions, these are the two or three things you should be aware of and start to develop and it will make your life and your job just that much easier.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah, I always tell to my students and people that I train because one of the things that I can share with you is that, I don’t always get called in when the conflict already happened. I get called in as a sub-potential preventative process to provide training, right? Or perhaps already the situation is happening and they need somebody to come in or perhaps the problem happened, it created the disruption of people and then I come in and do more restorative work, right? But going back to your question as to what is it that will be the advice that I can give someone is it’s about getting to know yourself. Asking yourself the question, how is it that I really learn how to resolve conflict? How have I been doing it so far? And do I get good outcomes? Maybe perhaps sometimes I get good outcomes, sometimes I don’t. Do I tend to be a person that avoid conflict at any cost? Do I tend to be a person that wanna win at any cost? Do I tend to be a person that likes to collaborate all the time but it doesn’t work because it takes a lot of work? And sometimes there are situations that collaboration might not be the right fit because we need to make decisions right away. Do I tend to accommodate? And do I get tired of accommodating all the time, right? So these are styles of people, skills of how to perhaps deal with situations with conflict and inner conflict, outside conflict, intergroup conflict, right? By getting to know yourself better, it’s kind of like you’re opening up a door of creating awareness about how to, what are the skills that you already possess on you, right? What are the ones that you learned from whom? From my dad, from my mom, even though perhaps I saw my teacher in elementary and she or he taught me how to listen to the other student. So starting to figure it out, what are the skills that you already have? That you do it with your eyes closed, right? And that opens up the curiosity as to wanting to learn more. If I know this skill, but it doesn’t work 100% of the time, what are other skills that I need to learn, right? Obviously having empathic listening can be another one, right? We tend to listen the majority of time with the idea of what are we gonna respond? Instead of being physically present there to allow the person to be able to tell you all the information that they wanna share with you and then be able to create a space with that individual feels like you’re really, really paying attention to them, right? So those will be some of the skills. Becoming a conflict IQ leader requires what I call meta skills. It’s just not one skill, it’s several skills, right? And then be able to introspect and learn who you are and be able to create like what I call the step before conflict intelligence, the emotional intelligence. Be able to understand how do you function from within out, knowing how you react to emotions, right? Because if you’re a very active person and you’re fast brain, the one that is equipped in our brain to be rapidly acting because for whatever reason is protecting you and you don’t have that well-trained in order to use your analytical brain to be able to realize what is going on in here, why am I feeling this way? How can I react differently? Because the way that I react in anger might not lead me to the outcomes that I want in this relationship with people. So by understanding yourself better, it’s part of the process. And then eventually you’re opening up yourself to wanting to be curious to learn more skills.

Manuel Martinez: And I think you’re right. So recently within the last few months, I read the book, Crucial Conversations.

Yvette Durazo: Very famous one.

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, it’s a very famous one. And it does make me start to think about this. There they, it was a little bit about conflict resolution, but it’s really just being able to have those conversations. And they do talk about like understanding how you process things and how you react to conversations. So if there is an argument, what are you doing? And one of the, and I don’t remember where I heard it, but it’s something that I start to think about a lot within conversations or within different situations is the saying is that you wanna be the thermostat, not the thermometer. Because you talked about like, how do you react? If I’m very reactive, like, okay, I’m being the thermometer in that I’m taking the temperature. So whatever that temperature is, like if you get upset and mad, am I raising to find out like where you’re at? Am I raising to that level? If you’re calm, am I going down? As opposed to being the thermostat. I don’t care if you’re upset or you’re here. I’m not matching that temperature to find out where you’re at and kind of reaching to that level. Instead, I’m the thermostat. I’m saying, hey, I’m gonna be 75. You can go up to 85 and be hot and upset. That’s fine, I’m gonna stay here. And in doing that, and again, it’s not perfect at it because it is something that I’m learning, but it does help to kind of help regulate the other person. But again, I’m not doing anything to do to that person, but it’s myself, hey, if I can stay calm, or if this person’s very too relaxed, I’ve gotta kind of bring the energy up a little bit, but understanding that. So it makes perfect sense to me that, oh, you have to start with yourself. How do I, am I the kind of person that’s more of a collaborator? I think I feel like I try to collaborate more, but I have moved away from being more of that accommodator. And that’s something that over time, I used to think like, oh, again, how you grow up. It’s, well, I have to do that. I have to be that helpful person for everybody. And at some point you realize that that doesn’t work. I can collaborate, I can help, but then if you over accommodate for, accommodate to everybody, then you end up in a situation that’s probably not healthy.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah, and like I said, building your toolbox and understanding that being an accommodator all the time, it’s not a good thing, but then realizing when it’s good, when it’s a good choice to do, right? Sometimes being an avoider, sometimes it can be a good choice, but it’s analyzing and understanding when, right? So, you know, understanding of the different styles of how people deal with conflict, and then how do you can choose from one to another and recognize which one is your predominant one so that it doesn’t win you and use it all the time. One of the things that you were mentioning about the thermometer, it reminded me about the understanding that we as human beings, we have these ability to have what it’s called mirroring. When you have a person that is very, very upset, right? And let’s say, for example, you become calmer, you influence people because then people want to mirror you back. And that plays a very huge role and how do you manage the situation? Because like you said, that person can be in a high 70s, but if I’m the thermometer and I choose to be able to go lower, then I will be the influencer of the situation because then I’m gonna help that person by me calming down to be able to calm that person down. And that is called mirroring, right? How do you mirror people? You can mirror them also in the way that they’re interacting with you, but if you know that they’re interacting in a very high pitch and they’re upset, how do you mirror them down? How do you influence them so they can calm down, right?

Manuel Martinez: Are you seeing a lot more of this type of training and kind of knowledge sharing within the tech community? Because you mentioned it before that they’re starting to integrate it more. What’s the value that you would see in developing these types of skills? Maybe somebody who’s watching and listening says, you know what though, I don’t wanna be in management. I don’t need to learn that, right? Because I don’t plan on leading people. I’m just gonna be me, I’m gonna be an individual contributor and I’m good to go.

Yvette Durazo: Well, it all depends with that individual contributor. They’re also going to be part of those project management groups anyways, right? And if they’re gonna be influential in a group and they perhaps would like to be in a position and where they can share their knowledge, their ideas, it is a good idea to learn these skills because part of learning the skills helps you to become more assertive. We typically see in the technology world that we have a lot of people that are extremely introverted, right?

Manuel Martinez: Yes.

Yvette Durazo: And those introverted tend to be more in the side of avoidance. And when people constantly avoid situations, they’re putting at risk their career, they’re putting at risk their abilities to influence their innovations. So they pretty much put themselves in a risk of not being able to grow in their career. And maybe it’s okay, they’re earning pretty well. And maybe they don’t want nothing else than that. But also take into consideration that you’re going to be working no matter what, you’re gonna be working with people, even if you’re doing through an email, right? Even if you’re just interacting through an email.

Manuel Martinez: I think the timing’s perfect because I recently put a post out that where, again, conflict resolution can also be influential, right? It’s understanding how to deal with other people because one of the things that I learned, again, even as an individual contributor, maybe there’s a project or there’s a way that I want to move forward with how we’re configuring things, how we’re doing things, in order for me to be able to influence it. Now looking back on it and reflecting, there is some of that, I wouldn’t say it’s a, it could be conflict resolution, but it’s some of that peacemaking, is I went through and said, okay, here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s the outcome. Well, it’s not just laying it out, but being able to kind of go through and say, hey, I want to, I think this is the direction we should go with this project. And here’s why. Most people would be like, okay, yeah, no, thanks, right? To your point, if I am less assertive, if I try to tend to avoid it, then it might get dismissed and people just think that, oh, it was a bad idea. It’s not so much that it’s always a bad idea, it’s just that it’s not communicated properly or you didn’t do the proper, I don’t want to say the proper, but the right amount of work to be able to influence that and say, well, here’s why. And if we do it this way, here’s the trade offs, because there are trade offs, it could be budget, it could be people resources through project management, through any number of areas where I can go through and say, hey, let’s do this. Manager might say, well, we have three projects. If we do with your project, we can’t do these other two or we can’t do this one. You kind of have to be able to go through and work with that person and probably work with various teams and say, okay, what’s the importance of this? How do we work for there to be able to find it? It’s not, I guess at that point, it is a conflict, it’s a conflict of interest, but working through those different skills that at that time doesn’t seem like this is important, but now looking back, I can think of a number of situations like that where I’m like, oh, it would have been good to have those skills to be able to go through and negotiate or mediate my way to have the work that I’m doing have a bigger part than the organization.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah, you said a key word in there, how do I influence people? How do I influence my ideas? And that is part about learning the skills of people skills, right? Learning that if you bring forth an idea and the way that you deliver the idea, might come across of something that people will block you, right? Or might come across as you might not have the influence or the assertiveness to really demonstrate that it’s something that is of value to the organization, right? So learning how to influence is the ability to know and deep listening, getting yourself into the other people’s shoes, because if you wanna influence an idea, but you’re not listening to the ideas of others, they’re not gonna be receptive to hear your idea, right? But if you know that you have an idea, right? Let’s say for example, you already say, from A through C, I know how this can come through C and be able, but you don’t wanna come and impose that, but you come into the meetings and start asking questions. You know, we see that there’s this situation happening, this issue happening, what do you guys think can be the solution? How can we work on these together so that we can come out with solutions about how to work together? And when you approach people in that way, they’re gonna be open and receptive. If you want to come and push something towards them, an idea, it’s going to affect their values, their beliefs, and they’re gonna become closed down, right? But you want people to be open. Once you, you know, I always call it like a dance, when you’re dancing tango, right? You both are leading each other. You’re not just leading the person, you’re leading each other. And when you come in and you bring the openness of the communication and allow the other person to step forward into that conversation, and they’re open and receptive, then you can bring little by little some idea. What do you think about this? How do you think about that? And through those questions, you’re already perhaps honing them to think that your solution can be the solution. But in the same dance, you’re also in a position of learning, because you might think that your idea, it’s 100% good, right? But how about if you forgot or you didn’t think about different aspects, and that gives you an opportunity also to learn, right? So that when you present your idea, these people will be more receptive. And you’re also inviting them to be part of the idea. And when people feel part of something, and they feel that they’re part of the idea in the collaboration process, most likely than not, you’re gonna gain more tokens, more yes, we can do this, right? It is very difficult for the egos of people just to come and push ideas into people, right? And even though that it could be the best idea that you can have, sometimes people’s egos will chop down things out.

Manuel Martinez: And I like what you said there is first coming in and starting asking them questions. Like, hey, what do you think about this? You’re trying to influence what it is that you think is gonna be a good solution, but then realizing that it’s not all just influence one way, right? You might be learning, you might not realize things. So not, and this comes up a lot, is not listening to respond, but listening to really understand. Because then, to your point, if you’re really paying attention and you’re like, hey, what do you think about this? If it’s always just your idea, your idea, your idea, people are gonna catch on.

Yvette Durazo: Yeah, people, you know, we always, I always say this, people are spirits inside a body. And scientifically, they have already proved that when you’re already thinking about something and you haven’t enacted, they have the, people have the ability to know somehow. Because we’re like little antennas. We’re like cell phones, right? And that has been proven already that you might be able to think about doing something and somehow the computer already realized that you thought about it and you’re planning the next step. It’s already out there. I’ve known this for a long time because I studied neuro-linguistic programming and I like to read a lot of neuroscience, right? So we are a spirit in the body and we have more information than we can, we can verbalize. And when you’re trying to utilize the questions and people can feel through you that the questions are a form of manipulation, people immediately feel it. They don’t trust you, right? You lose people’s trust. But when you come genuinely with curiosity and people feel that you’re coming from that angle, people trust you and people open up. And that is where you can start planting the seed of your idea to see whether they will be able to and receptive and open to work with your idea. And then inviting them to co-participate. And when you do that, you influence the process. If you are flexible with that, you become the catalyst of the process, the system, right?

Manuel Martinez: Yeah, and it completely makes sense because you’re right there. I’ve been in situations where you can tell when people are asking those questions and you’re just like, you’re asking the question to get your answer, not you’re asking the question to get an answer or my answer or the group’s answer. It’s, you already know what you’re looking for. You just wanna ask it instead of telling it. So that’s very interesting.

Yvette Durazo: And that is called manipulation. And a lot of people does it, but sometimes they’re not doing it from a standpoint that they know it, that they’re manipulating, but they’re just so eager to push their idea that they don’t realize that they’re coming across that way.

Manuel Martinez: Right, interesting. So I know you’ve been very gracious and answered a lot of the questions that I had. I just wanna give you the opportunity. Is there anything about the type of work that you do, anything within your career that I haven’t asked and you’re like, you know, Manuel this is something that I really wanted to talk about, but we didn’t get a chance to just because the conversation didn’t lead there. So I wanna give you the opportunity to kind of bring up a topic of anything.

Yvette Durazo: Well, I would say that wherever there’s two humans, there’s always going to be conflict. And I have had the opportunity to work with many industries. And every industry has their own particular issues, right? And on top of that, you know, the humanity that works around that. But it’s just very interesting that companies and leaders in organizations, they still have, you know, they still have a negative denotation about the word conflict. And it’s something very natural to human beings. And sometimes we try to hide and say, no, conflict doesn’t exist in a company. And it is very interesting to see that, you know, that kind of like rejection to the real nature of humanity. Whenever there’s more than one people, there are always gonna be conflict. Whenever there’s one people, you’re gonna have internal conflict, right? And then the idea behind that, why don’t we learn to normalize more the idea that conflict exists? And how do we transform the conflict from a toxic, emotional conflict to more of a cognitive conflict that builds upon ideas, builds upon innovation, builds upon inclusivity. Because when people get together without offending one another, without accusing one another, without blaming one another, what you create, it’s a diversity of thinking that would allow for more innovation and to be able to serve the community as a whole, right? When you’re open and receptive to that. Because you might be able to have a product that might work very well in the United States. But if you don’t work with other cultures and you understand how do they resolve issues and you don’t understand how to work culturally with those individuals, that itself creates a lot of conflict, not understanding people’s culture. But if you learn that this is important and that is part of humanity, then you create more diversity of thinking and you might be able to transform products that not only work here in the United States, but they work elsewhere in the world, right? What I’m trying to say with this, that these skills are extremely valuable to the bottom line of companies.

Manuel Martinez: I think you’re right. We tend to avoid it. So I think there’s a lot more conflict avoidance than conflict resolution. And just the way that you were saying it is kind of going through in this diversity of thinking, it’s no different than saying the word problem solving. Yes, they’re different, like a problem and a conflict, they are different, but they’re similar, right? How is it that we’re okay with constantly solving problems? Oh, I ran into a problem and hey, let’s work together and let’s solve this. If we kind of take that same approach from a conflict standpoint, I think you’re right. I think we would be in a much better point is instead of going through like, oh, I don’t wanna talk to this person because I know there’s gonna be a conflict and you keep doing it and keep doing it, why avoid this conflict multiple times a day if you’re working with somebody, right? And you know that it’s gonna cause a conflict. Instead of avoiding it multiple times a day, every day during the week, why not just take the time to go through and say, hey, how do we work through this? How do we get past this so that one, you don’t probably build that anxiety in yourself to say, oh my God, I don’t like dealing with this. I don’t wanna go to this meeting because again, it’s affecting probably the quality of the work that you’re doing. Go through and you’re open to say, hey, you know what, I know that there’s gonna be a problem. I know that there’s gonna be a conflict. How do we work through this, find a solution? I think the next time it comes up, and I’m sure you would agree that it’s gonna take time, right, that’s not gonna be like, hey, we solved this conflict in 20 minutes so from now on, it’s gonna be super fast. Like it might take some time, right? Like it’s not gonna happen probably in one session. It’s gonna be multiple sessions, but then eventually the idea is that you’ll learn how that person thinks, how they operate, how the business, how this group, right? Because a lot of times it might be a group, like you said, in a project. Eventually they’ll get faster and faster at resolving those conflicts and coming up with better products and better ideas.

Yvette Durazo: Right, and if we don’t address the human conflict from its core, it tends to be, you know, hide under the rug in thinking that it’s just gonna go away, and it doesn’t, because it keeps, you know, it’s stacking, it’s stacking until people explode, and then you physically see that they’re already screaming into each other, or they’re already, you know, upset with each other. And the majority of the times, the conflict didn’t happen there. It happened a while ago. It happened perhaps at the time that, you know, you mentioned something, you were coming from home, and you were dealing with some personal issues, and you miscommunicated something, and that didn’t clear out, right? And the other person started unliking you, right? Because it never gave the opportunity to open up and establish more conversation with you, right? And situations like that keep stacking and stacking and stacking, and all of a sudden people don’t like each other. MIT, in 2023, when they were doing more research study as to how to bring people back from home to work in companies, one of the research studies shows that people didn’t wanna go back to companies because they didn’t wanna deal with the “politics.” And the politics, what they call “politics”, is that people sometimes don’t get along well with other employees. They don’t get along well with their supervisors, their managers, right? And that is what they call politics. They don’t wanna be in environments in where clicks are happening, and clicks create a lot of power over one person or other people in the workplace. And if we don’t watch out for that toxic culture in the organization, then we’re not gonna have very inclusive environments in where people come to work for what they’re hired to come to work for. Instead, people come in into work and they feel like they are going to a war zone and where they have to defend themselves and where they have to up their gear, right? And eventually, if people are functioning at that level, it affects not only their mind, but every single bodily in your body, every single cell gets affected. And when you have people in a state of fleet, flight and flight mode, they’re not gonna be in a space of creativity, innovation and productivity. And on top of that, if people continue to be in that state for a prolonged amount of time, people start developing cortisone levels that affect other organs in the body, and that employee is gonna become more absent to work and they’re gonna be sick, they’re not gonna feel well, their mind is gonna be foggy. So if companies don’t see these skillsets as part of the risk management opportunity, they’re losing out. I think that they’re losing out. Sometimes companies come to me and it’s like, we didn’t have this in our budget because they’re putting it in the budget of learning development, right? They’re putting this work in the learning development. It’s great to have it, we have it, but if not, that’s the first thing that it gets cut when budgets are cut. But these skillsets should be seen in the risk management line item, right? How can we mitigate risk that employees are healthy enough to come to work for us and they can be in their best state of being in order to do the work that they’re here to do? For a couple of years ago, we have been hearing people bring all yourself to work, right? Bring all yourself to work. And they don’t realize that the reality of things that will be in a better effect for companies, it’s bringing your healthy self to work. And then how do we support you here in order to continue to be healthy mentally so that you can be in a state of creation productivity and innovation?

Manuel Martinez: I am so thankful that you came on and we were able to kind of make this happen because you’ve shared a lot of good insights. And again, it’s not all technology-based. And I think that that’s a good thing, right? It’s just making people aware of these aren’t, the things that when people go through a bootcamp or to try to pick up skillsets to try and get a job. Okay, maybe the fact that you came in and said, “Hey, I have conflict resolution on my resume. I’m probably not gonna help you, but it is gonna help me make you successful once you’re in that role and as you start to progress within your career.” So again, I’m very thankful for you coming on I definitely, you have the book, “Conflict Intelligence Quotient” and I will make sure to kind of link that in the show notes so that people who are interested in kind of learning more about this area of work and what you do so that they can go ahead and find you. So thank you, I appreciate you coming on.

Yvette Durazo: Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a pleasure coming and visit you here and have the opportunity to not only talk to you but your audience as well, thank you.

Manuel Martinez: And for everybody watching and listening, I hope you found this as insightful as I did. I know that there’s a lot of what Yvette was talking about that I wish I would have known earlier on in my career and definitely looking forward to kind of learning more about this area and helping it be successful from this point forward. So with that, continue to plug in and download the knowledge and until next time, thank you.