The most memorable glass of water Bill Gates ever had, he didn’t drink it. When he was twelve years old, Bill Gates had a conflict with his parents. He got angry, yelled at his mother and his father admonished him. What was remarkable about that unpleasant but not uncommon exchange, the kind that happens in most families, was how remarkable it was to Gates.

Conflict per se was not unusual for the Gates family as Robert Guth reports in last weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. Through conversations with Bill Gates Sr. and other family members, Guth discovered that the Gates family atmosphere was highly competitive. They often played cards, board games, table tennis, and other sports. There were also discussions. Even as a child, Bill Jr. was confrontational and provoked heated arguments with his parents.

In the article, Guth focused on what it was like for Bill Sr. to raise Bill Jr., who would go on to become one of the most influential business leaders of our era. At 6’6″, Bill Gates Sr. towers over his son even as an adult, though he never wielded a commanding presence. And regardless of competition and family feuds, Bill Sr. rarely lost the composition of the.

Until one day Bill Jr. yelled at his mother in an argument. Bill Sr. quickly doused his son with a glass of water and told him to be more respectful.

This was an incident so atypical in the Gates family experience that it vividly survived in family lore. They remember it and talk about it, and Guth even led his front-page story with this “water throwing” anecdote.

However, as Guth relates, the Gates family rarely entered into negative conflict. The splash of water puts a memorable punctuation mark on the incident, but it was an isolated incident of loss of temper and poise on Bill Sr.’s part, not one of many examples.

The glass of water that Bill Jr. used but did not drink stands out as an exception. It was a rare departure from the way the Gates family used to deal with conflict, and from how Bill Jr. learned in his early years about handling conflict and dealing with difficult people (like himself!).

Aside from learning about conflict, there are obviously many factors that helped shape Bill Jr.’s eventual commercial success, including, for example, his natural drive and intelligence.

Surely chance also played a role. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell recounts how Gates, as a child in the 1960s, had extensive access to state-of-the-art computing resources that were located near the University of Washington. Bill Jr. spent more than ten thousand hours working with computers when he was young, which was more than the time even most world-class computer scientists had at the time.

Gates’ unusual access to computers in his youth equipped him with invaluable technical knowledge to help him succeed in the software industry. His computing background, however, does not explain how Gates achieved the even more unusual feat of successfully leading an organization for decades of sustained success through all stages of growth, from startup to global leader.

That story is not just technical, it’s interpersonal. Among the important interpersonal factors that drove his leadership success was how Gates managed to handle conflict effectively enough to keep talented people working with him through myriad challenges over the years. .

It’s worth considering that Bill Jr.’s family experience may have helped him internalize the distinction between intensity and insult that often makes the difference between creative conflict and negative conflict.

We should all look to our own “water throwing” incidents to remind ourselves to manage the crucial difference between creative conflict that helps people move forward as a group, whether it’s a family or a business team, versus the negative conflict that arouses resentment and fragments a grouping into factions.

Twelve-year-old Gates, by the way, said in response to his father’s water throwing, “Thanks for the shower.” Because this incident is apparently the worst conflict the young Gates ever had with his father, who otherwise so successfully modeled the composition and walked away from the negative conflict, he could now say, in retrospect, “Thanks for the lesson.” “.