Why constructive engagement is good for you.
One of the most explosive confrontations I experienced in my career happened while taping the third episode of the first season of my show Bar Rescue, and it came out of nowhere. The declining bar in question was an Irish pub called the Abbey, in Chicago. During a key moment on camera where I introduced myself to the entire bar staff and owner, offering them advice and letting them know what the stakes were if they failed to improve their performance, an executive of the network Iâd never before met decided to insert himself.
This gentleman, whom weâll call âJoe,â stepped right in front of me, stopped the cameras, and started giving direction to the Abbeyâs crew.
âYou, over there, I want you to look angry,â he told one of the bartenders who had the misfortune to make eye contact with him. âAnd you, youâre boring me! Start reacting. I wanna see tears!â he shouted at a waitress, insulting the poor woman to make her cry.
As I watched this aggressive and uncalled-for interference unfold, I could feel my temperature rising, so I removed myself from the scene to quietly process what was happening and formulate an appropriate response. I walked out of the bar and across the street to the building where the crew and monitors were, with Joe following close behind me. I said nothing as he continued talking, throwing out orders at me, one of which was the suggestion that I take a tampon, cover it in ketchup, and plant it on the bathroom floor of the bar.
By then Iâd had enough, so I spun around to face him.
âAre you telling me to be a liar on camera?â
âJon, Iâm just telling you how to make it a better show.â
âOh really? And is that why you interrupted and undermined me in front of people who need to respect me if theyâre going to heed my advice for the rest of filming? What kind of an idiot does that?â
Now, I was a newbie to the world of reality show production. We had a crew of fifty people running around, showrunners, producers . . . a lot of folks who knew more than I did. I was in awe of the process, and excited by the prospect of filming my first ten-episode season. But the one thing I told the producers from the beginning was that we had to be authentic. I knew other reality shows were scripted, but I wasnât impressed by that fact. This was about me maintaining my values rather than working for the network. Others might be okay with flipping over tables and manufacturing arguments for the sake of being on TV, but Iâd already made my money. I was in this to educate bar owners and hopefully make an entertaining TV show, not sell myself out or humiliate the folks I was there to help.
The exchange with Joe was getting heated. He was rude and disruptive, coming at me like a tough guy hell-bent on imposing his will. But I was not having it. I persisted in challenging him until it was clear we were getting nowhere. This man had no integrity and was not worth my time. In that moment, I made the conscious choice to risk it all.
âYour mind isnât right. You donât think about things correctly. Go fuck yourself!â
I threw Joe off the set, and he spent the next six hours sitting and, by all accounts, sulking inside a McDonaldâs a block away while we shut down filming. The next morning a group of senior executives flew in from Los Angeles to talk me off the ledge. They knew I was prepared to walk away, and they had a show to save.
âJon, you can have creative disagreements with us, you can be angry with us, but you cannot tell an executive to go fuck himself!â the executive vice president told me.
But he realized I meant what I said, and that I was prepared to shut the show down. I might have been a young punk to television, but everyone from the gaffer to the sound guy was clear on where I stood. This wasnât just about the quality of the show. It was about my integrity. We resumed shooting and the subject was dropped. From that day on, I was never asked to film anything that wasnât truthful, and Joe never again appeared on my set (nor did he last at the network for long).
Your Values Matter
I donât care who you are, where you come from, or what you do. There will always be moments in life where you must be prepared to face conflict. As long as you are living and breathing, there will come a point when you must stand up for yourself and what you believe in. You matter. Your values and opinions matter. Knowing this, how dare you stay silent in the face of a challenge? How dare you allow yourself to be bullied into disavowing your principles by anyone, be it a business adversary, a spouse, an employer, a family member, or a bunch of angry strangers on social media?
In a society as free as ours supposedly is, where we have been blessed with a depth of choices, we have an obligation to stand by the decisions we make or the identity we choose. Whether you are a young LGBTQ person or a born-again Christian, a Democrat or a Republican, a baseball player who kneels for the national anthem or a basketball player who stands, the day must come when you are prepared to step into the ring and fight for who you are and the things you care about, your Facebook âfriendsâ be damned!
Yeah, thatâs right, I said it. We live in an era where any dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy of political groups or movements, on either side, can get people fired, doxed, or deplatformed. Speaking up can result in maligned reputations, families and lives threatened or destroyed. Thatâs why, for many, conflict is scary. It leaves them frozen in fear, deflecting and even apologizing to avoid having to engage in vigorous debate. They would rather stay part of the silent majority, watching in quiet horror as all they hold dear gets eviscerated by a noisy few.
And how is that working out for you? The less often people take a stand, the more the mob rules. When you keep sitting there and taking all the abuse, you diminish yourself. Youâre not living your life fully, and youâre giving away precious little pieces of your soul. But itâs never enough for the bullies. The more you back down and apologize, refusing to engage in confrontation, the less theyâll be satisfied and the more they will demand. Worst of all, youâll be letting yourself down.
I get it. The thought of conflict stirs in most of us, well, conflicting emotions. It can lead to disagreements that destroy friendships, make office politics unbearable, and, in the extreme, trigger riots, war, and bloodshed. You might be thinking, Wait a minute. Isnât the goal of civilization to reduce or eliminate conflict? War is bad. Strife between peoples is bad. Not necessarily. Would Hitler have been stopped? Would the Civil Rights Act have passed? On a personal level, would your kid finally have stood up to the schoolyard bully and ended the daily torment by fighting back? No, no, and no.
Without conflict, none of us stands for anything. But what we can gain when we are willing to engage in positive conflict is immense. I risked everything in that moment with Joe the TV executive. But we probably would not have made it to eight seasons and more than two hundred episodes of Bar Rescue had I not engaged in that conflict.
Today, we have rewritten the rules of reality television. Many of the fans among our more than 118 million unique viewers (at the time of writing) have said they love our show precisely because we are authentic and unscripted. Weâve inspired millions of small business owners to take back their lives and their businesses, and Iâve been blessed with a media platform that allows me to continue to inspire millions more. All because I was willing to go toe-to-toe with the network and battle for my right to uphold my values and keep it real.
Forcing the Issue
Iâve lost count of the number of inflection points in my life where my willingness to engage in constructive conflict has raised me to the next level. Although I wasnât always in control of the circumstances and timing, once put in that situation, I was deliberate in my response to it. I guarantee that moment will inevitably come, because taking risks in business and in life is never without conflict. I repeat, thatâs a good thing. The conflicts that come up between employer and employees, for example, can produce great outcomes if handled well.
There are moments when, in order to resolve a toxic problem, you may even have to force a conflict, like I did during a Season Three episode of Bar Rescue called âHostile Takeoverâ in which three bar owners constantly argued with each other about numerous trivialities instead of focusing on the root cause of the barâs business problems.
One partner, Jerry, held a 40 percent interest in the bar. He was also a drinker. The other two partners each held a 30 percent interest. Because they mistakenly believed that Jerry was the majority stakeholder, and because they were so uncomfortable with the idea of addressing Jerryâs drinking problem, nothing was getting done and the useless bickering continued. Until I came along. I told the two minority stakeholders that together they were actually majority owners. That gave them power and confidence. It took some doing, but I was able to get them to address Jerryâs problem together, escort him out of the bar and the business, and get back to what was importantârunning a profitable bar. Once they understood their combined majority stake, they were able to harness their power together and resolve the elephant-in-the-room conflict: Jerry and his drinking.
That episode illustrates one of the many positives that constructive conflict can bring to your most important relationships. Doing battle for a worthy or righteous cause can evoke emotional ties we have to those family, friends, and allies with whom we have faced adversity together. Confronting conflict with allies strengthens the bonds of family, friends, and colleagues. By acknowledging those feelings, weâre also recognizing that facing conflict gives us the chance to build even stronger relationships. (And Jerry, now sober, has since become a dear friend who reaches out to me every holiday.)
Conversely, unresolved conflict can become so toxic that it destroys relationships. It also stifles growth and forces individuals to retreat from engagement in any worthy pursuit. Consider what it must be like for the astronauts and cosmonauts orbiting Earth and living in confined spaces with each other for months on end. Imagine how those tiny annoyances can fester inside a space station where thereâs no escape from ...
