Question of the Day: I Disagree!

Recently there were some major layoffs at the craft brewery I used to work at. As such, I’m in the midst of a job hunt. An important part of job hunts is the interview it leads to, so I’m going to practice answering some interview questions each day. Hopefully this is useful for you too! Oh and I’m going to add a bonus picture at the end that is related, inspiring, or just good to look at!

Question: What do you do if you disagree with someone at work?

There are several types of disagreements at work. The easiest disagreement to resolve is ‘which beer is the best.’ At Goose Island, (in my (correct) opinion) there is only one correct answer; it’s Honkers on cask. Solved!

But to be serious, often there will be differences of opinion in the workplace, especially when the stakes are high. One such disagreement I had to handle was over strategic direction on one of our brands. This brand was a high alcohol beer that depleted its yeast, yet was a high volume brand, so supplying it enough fresh yeast was a challenge. There were a few options that ranged from finding an alternative yeast strain that was more plentiful to seeing if the ‘depleted’ yeast could be reused (and wasn’t actually depleted after all). The stakes were high since the smallest amount we could make was 1,000 barrels (enough to fill a studio apartment from floor to ceiling and quite a lot of cost should it be non-salable).

The first thing I had to do was recognize those stakes and create a framework that allowed us to tackle this problem and evaluate possible solutions. By first directing the team’s attention to creating success criteria and understanding the constraints, we removed the pressure for any individual to be the winner and made this a cooperative effort. As it turns out, the reason there was a difference of opinion is that most of the ideas people proposed were good ideas. They were right to be passionate since they were all viable! I documented all of the ideas, and since we could only test one at a time, we created a priority list. In the end, we proved out nearly all of the proposed solutions and evaluated the outcomes based on the previously agreed upon success criteria. By staying solution oriented and creating an agreed upon framework, we removed created the space for everyone to align and contribute. This was now a problem we can all work on together without conflict. So naturally, we celebrated with beers!