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Conflict Resolution for Tech Careers with Yvette Durazo | Ep050
Episode Information
Show NotesTechnical 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
Subscribe to Career Downloads:
Get weekly career advice from tech leaders managing their own career journeys. Available on all podcast platforms.
#CareerDownloads #ConflictResolution #TechLeadership #CareerDevelopment
TranscriptionManuel 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 am...
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By Career DownloadsEpisode Information
Show NotesTechnical 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
Subscribe to Career Downloads:
Get weekly career advice from tech leaders managing their own career journeys. Available on all podcast platforms.
#CareerDownloads #ConflictResolution #TechLeadership #CareerDevelopment
TranscriptionManuel 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 am...