What have you seen?

Well, I...

What I can say is, when you have a high-conflict individual at the center of a conflict, what's different about it, because, again, conflict is normal in the human sort of set of relationships at work.

It happens all the time and, again, even good things can come from conflict.

It's very often how we work through it.

But, but when we sometimes look at a way an individual is showing up, they're complaining about an issue, and then, uh, we resolve that one, then there's another one.

They're complaining about how their supervisor deals with them or complaining about a colleague, or they didn't get the right workspace, whatever it may be, and there seems to be a genesis of this.

What about role modeling, Michael, by the leadership, top tiers?

Once a leader, or let's say someone in the HR department, a H-- an HR professional, has identified a high-conflict pattern, let's say there's a lot of complaining that, you know, s-something bad has happened, "I'm the victim once again," [chuckles] "It's someone else's fault," or whatever the pattern might be, what usually goes wrong next? Why do smart leaders get pulled into these conflicts?

I'd probably say a couple of things just to start off with.

For people listening, they might worry that, "Do I have to kind of diagnose this person as a high-conflict person and sort of fit them into a bunch of criteria?" No, we don't need to do that.

In fact, we would discourage you from tyin-trying to diagnose this person.

Instead, it really is looking at these behavioral patterns.

We can all get upset, and we can all sometimes act out at work, but then realize, "Okay, I sh- I shouldn't have done that." And sometimes situations can overwhelm average people, and sometimes for a long period of time, big organizational restructuring, "I'm worried about losing my job," or other big changes at work, or life events outside work.

All of those things can cause us to show up differently or in problematic ways.

So what do you see in the workplace? Do you see other ways this is applied, other co-problems it causes?

That's a problem.

And then in an organization, if someone filed a complaint like that, we focus on the incident, investigate the incident.

And at the end, it may be that complaint was unfounded.

Everybody go back to work.

And, and instead of, "Okay, what, what just happened there? What led to that?" So we focus on, in human resources, we focus on those incidents.

We don't focus on the patterns.

We don't step back sometimes and look at this is the third or fourth complaint this person's filed.

You know, like you said, Michael, it doesn't reach the level that it really triggers-

How does that influence the likelihood of conflict and, you know, and friction?

There's a lot of leaders themselves who are uncomfortable dealing with conflict, who might avoid it, and until it gets really difficult or it's escalated, and now, now they must.

Or they are dealing with conflict, but maybe they're too, uh, aggressive, too direct, uh, too, too controlling.

And Bill, as you said in your description of the generational differences, there are people nowadays who just won't put up with that.

They'll leave.

They'll go somewhere else, right? So leaders do really need to find that middle ground where they're comfortable addressing conflict and dealing with it early, but not in ways that alienate the, you know, the vast majority of the employees that just wanna come to work and enjoy their jobs.

And, and conflict is a natural fabric in the organization.

So there's this focus on achieving those objectives, and often just a complete lack of attention to conflict.

Beyond the dollars themselves, how do you plan to leverage this gift in your messaging, in your partnerships to attract more donors and more institutional support?

We're trying to make sure that people understand that we're a good bet and that their funds will be very well used, and gifts like this will, uh, help tell that story, but we're also trying to tell people just how important this gift is, uh, for the...

In the case of UNCF, we have 50,000 students attending the 37 institutions, uh, that we represent, and we really just don't have enough support to help those students get to, through college, and on to careers without taking out tremendous debt.

So, scholarships are very important for us.

It's- it's what we're best known for and this- these endowments will help our institutions cover more of the costs of their students, of faculty, of facilities, and make them less reliant on debt, uh, to borrow to get those things done or for their students to borrow and, uh, uh, pay their tuition.

So, how will UNCF make sure that philanthropy doesn't become the substitute for longer term structural support provided by state and federal governments?

Well, right now, philanthropy is- is not gonna be, uh, uh, leading what the federal government does.

The real question is, in my mind, whether philanthropy is going to raise the bar on the amount and size of the gifts that they make available to HBCUs.