Conflict Management In the 21st Century
Conflict is inevitable in life or work - not all conflict is negative. Ideas and opinions can be constructively challenged in order to obtain a more beneficial outcome.
Discord can be tolerated to allow productive ideological conflict and passionate interchange of opinions. Without this kind of conflict, decisions are often suboptimal.
Whether you’re new to working in business or an experienced CEO you will have heard of, or maybe attended a course on “conflict management”.
Our courses are tailored to provide communication strategies in the work place and tend to rely on the assumption that most people in corporate land are well behaved and that any conflict arising will be from disagreements on budgets, or the way forward in projects etc.
But what about the day to day posturing and scrambling for position? The colleague who will happily take credit for your work? or the colleague who makes it their mission to undermine your position by discretely casting aspersions on your ability. Sounds familiar?
Unpalatable maybe but stress in the work place is on the rise and according to the UK Health and Safety Executive (see fig 1. Below) 12.5 million working days were lost in 2016/17 by 526,000 workers who were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety.
Ref fig 1. Depart for statistics http://www.hse.gov.uk
Given the statistics above, managing conflict clearly isn’t working, why can’t people say no to the increase in workload, or deal with bullying, or change, or the other things that are causing them stress? Why can some people manage stress and others not?
The answer is perception.
Some people are wired to see the glass half full some see it as half empty. Background and upbringing and education seem to have no bearing and an individual can switch their perception depending on circumstances, and environment.
What is key - is to make the distinction between Productive Conflict versus Destructive Conflict.
Destructive conflict can lead to multiple issues such as:
Stress and a decrease in individual/team morale/self esteem
Increased sickness and staff turnover
Decrease in communication which may become increasingly aggressive in nature
Destructive conflict needs to be avoided.
Productive conflict ensures decisions are made only after all knowledge and perspectives are put on the table. Not every individual’s perspective and opinion can be agreed with, but they can be considered. When all available knowledge and opinions are considered – the likelihood of optimal decisions is greater.
At the Moment of Conflict:
Anchor yourself and Wait, Deep Breathing: whilst breathing in and out count to 12 in your head.
Keep Calm and Carry On - the famous phrase ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ is a motivational poster that was produced by the British government in 1939 in preparation for World War II. The poster was intended to raise the morale of the British public, threatened with widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities.
It is a principle to adopt to controls one’s feelings in situations of conflict
Your Truth, My Truth and The Truth is a saying that has sometimes been popular in Ireland. It means there are three sides to every story – Yours, Mine, & What really happened: the Truth.
Transactional Analysis – is a system of popular psychology written by Eric Berne and is based on the idea that one's behaviour and social relationships reflect an interchange between parental (critical and nurturing), adult (rational), and childlike (intuitive and dependent) aspects of personality established early in life.
When two people communicate, one person initiates a transaction with the transactional stimulus. The person at whom the stimulus is directed will respond with the transactional response. Simple Transactional Analysis involves identifying which ego state directed the stimulus and which ego state in the other person executed the response.
The models above and others such as the one written by Thomas & Kilmann can be used to analyse a given situation where opposing parties who are in some form of conflict, will adopt a greater or lesser degree of co-operativeness or assertiveness.
What Sow to Reap advocate is the combination of the best of academic theory applied in real work / life conflict situations.
How to deal with the Ups and Downs in Life and Work:
It is a truth that for every person there will be good times and bad times in life and work.
The key is to have proven methods available to (i)deal with the hard times and (ii)to be able to come out the other side still with a happy feeling to move on.
Sow to Reap help reduce stress in the workplace. We provide support and guidance on how to reframe situations (change your perception).
Reframing is a technique used in therapy to help create a different way of looking at a situation, person, or relationship by changing its meaning. Reframing helps by literally reframing the situation and approaching an issue from a different perspective.
We recently helped an individual who was tired from working a full corporate day, 5 days a week whilst having to drive nearly 1,000 miles per week commuting. At weekends this individual had to visit their ill parents who lived 200 miles away and expected them to cook, clean, take them out etc, then drive 200 miles home to do it all again the following weekend.
Feeling the physical manifestations of stress, palpitations, not sleeping etc. the individual asked their family to get a cleaner, cook, gardener, as they could afford it. The family were incensed that this had even been asked, as in their view family should look after family.
The individual’s work was beginning to suffer so they came to us for help.
We worked with them to reframe the truth and present it in a different way to their family.
The individual took their ill parents out for dinner, (a safe environment) and started to tell them about a person they knew who was driving silly miles for work, then having to drive 3 hours plus at weekends to cook, clean, garden, shop and chauffeur the parents around.
When the parents were told this story they stated how awful it must have been for the person concerned to be treated that way. When it was revealed that it was they who had been the culprits in the reframing story they immediately employed cleaners and cooks so that the individual no longer had to visit them every weekend just to be a cook, cleaner and chauffeur.
References
P. Lencioni - The five temptations of a CEO: a leadership fable 1998
Dr. E. Berne – Transactional Analysis 1957
Kilmann and Thomas – Conflict Mode Instrument 1977
UK Health & Safety Executive.
For copies of this article or further information on how Sow to Reap can help your organisation please email us at: info@sowtoreap.org