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Conflict

Introduction

Accept Conflicts as part of life. Many people shy away from conflict both in
their personal and business lives. Instead accept conflicts as part of your life.
When personalities meet they will have different opinions and different views.
Only by passionately defending your views and exchanging views with others
will your views develop and will you get to deeper insights in the issue at hand.

Life is full of contradictions, Hot and Cold, Big and Small, Yin and Yen, War
and Peace, Go and Stop, Forward and Backward. You will not live your life to
the fullest if you avoid exploring both and either stay on one side or try to
balance safely in the middle.

Now this does not necessarily mean that you should go out and create conflicts
or seek conflicts to develop your skills, but it does mean that you should not
avoid conflict when it crosses your path but instead prepare yourself to deal
with conflict in a constructive manner.

Many good books have been written about conflicts, conflict resolution and
conflict handling and I won't repeat the content of those here but a few pointers
to get you started may be helpful.

Conflict management

We need to first go over some background of conflict management. The
literature on conflict suggests the following terminology and classification:

Typically we respond to conflict by using one of
five modes:
Competing
Avoiding
Accommodating
Compromising
Collaborating

These modes can be categorized by plotting them on a scale of cooperation and
assertiveness. All modes have differing forms of those two elements.
As you may already guess, Competing has little or no cooperation and lots of
assertiveness. Avoiding has little of either and collaboration is listed as having
lots of cooperation but also lots of assertiveness. This is when you truly work a
conflict to get ahead with the issue at hand.

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Clearly the collaboration is to be favored in most conflicts but also takes a lot of
skill and time to work well. You need to be an expert in listening, analyzing,
finding issues and pushing back without messing the relationship up.


Choose your battles wisely.

There are many things in everyday life that get said or done that are, when you
are really paying attention, wrong, inaccurate, not entirely true, unjust or
without good cause.
You can live your life arguing with each and every inhabitant of our planet
about everything that strikes you as unjust or wrong but be prepared to have
an uphill struggle and ask yourself from time to time what you have
accomplished in the greater scheme of things by battling your way through life.
It starts by the first encounter every morning when someone asks you how are
you doing and you respond great and you? and they respond great thanks.
OK this is just a polite exchange and most likely an inaccurate reflection on the
real status of things, but we dont worry about it and move on with our lives.
You dont start a cross examination of your conversation partner to find out if
they indeed are doing great.

You can probably come up with lots more of these small examples of things
people say or do, that dont really matter and might be not totally accurate but
hey! Who is worried about it.

In management youll have situations where you see or find out or strongly
assume that someone is doing something they really shouldnt or didnt do
something they really should have. Well when are you going to battle over this,
when are you going to draw the line and get to the bottom of the issue?

A often used phrase is that youll only battle if it is a matter of principle. Thats
probably ok but how many times are things really so important that they rise
to the level of principles?
The other side of that argument is that if you only want to do battle when your
principles are violated, you may leave a lot unsaid or unaddressed that really
should have been corrected.

Here are some suggestions that may help you find the right level of battle
preparedness while maintaining good working relationships with your
environment.
If battles happen everyday, you need to ask yourself if you are in the right
environment or if you need to adjust either your perception or change the place
or people you work with.
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If no battles occur at all during a year, you may ask yourself if you let things
happen that you are actually unhappy with. Are you really ok with everything
that happens there?
So now that we have set the boundaries, lets fine-tune it. What level of battle is
feeling ok in your environment. A non profit may have less room for battle than
a competitive Wall Street investment house.
There is the story of the Oak and the grass. The wind blew and the Oak was
determined not to bow to the wind. The grass didnt worry about it too much
and bent with the wind only to come back up after the wind blew over. The
story does not end well for our Oak, it eventually breaks during a really hard
storm, but the grass recovers and happily continues to wave in the wind.
Be most of the time as the grass, only sometimes showing Oak strength. Learn
to see that most battles are not worth fighting because issue will be corrected
or changed later anyway. But learn to be clear about your operating principles
and do not give in to pressure when your principles are at stake or things end
up less than legal. Remember the famous Enron story, where good meaning
businessmen started to use some loopholes in tax and trade laws, only to glide
into a pool of substandard business practices that landed some of them in jail
and destroyed a great company and the value of benefits for a huge number of
people.

In a situation where you find yourself in conflict with a co- worker, and the
conflict is unmanaged and unhealthy you need to find a way to work this
situation and stop the counter productivity. Many people avoid conflicts and
they do that by avoiding the person that is the alleged cause of their conflict.
This has as an advantage that if you dont see each other you wont have the
nasty conversations, barring email, sms and other social media harassment.
The disadvantage of avoiding someone however is that you wont get to know
this person and by not interacting you start to create a picture of the person in
your mind that increasingly will deviate from reality. It is a process close to the
Horn effect, discussed in Communication. You start to think that this person
will only be plotting against you and you will see every next interaction with
this person as the product of them scheming against you.
A very simple strategy to deal with this is to spend time together. This may not
come easy but try this. If you need to forward a physical piece of paper or
folder, try swinging by the office of the other person and hand deliver it, just
hand it over and say hello. Force yourself to join a group where the other
person is too. Go to the after work hang out where this person will be.
Remember the advice to keep your enemies closer than your friends, well this
is a piece of it.
Just by seeing the person and having some non-conflict related interactions
you may find out that there is more to the person than the business conflict
you have. Over time it may change your side of the interaction which may also
improve the other side of the interaction.


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Understand the benefits of working conflicts instead of
leaving it lingering.

A conflict that gets avoided will cause unnatural behavior and reactions of the
participants and those will in turn lead to more misunderstandings and
conflicts.
It is very useful to ensure you work the conflicts to get them clear. It is less
important to totally solve the conflict. Some situations are such that there is
not one solution or path forward and you may very well continue to disagree
with someone about the right path to be chosen.
That in itself is not a problem, as long as both of you understand fully the
arguments back and forth and can appreciate that the other party has a
different view on things. If you can not eventually see eye to eye and agree on a
path forward, either the hierarchy will determine what will happen or you need
to move to a different situation/environment/organization because this will
never work out to the satisfaction of both you and the other party.
If you approach it well, you will get to a better solution then each of you
individually would have reached.

A conflict may have its root cause in many very different circumstances.
Ranging from conflicts stemming from philosophical differences to differences
based on personality clashes. Some people just have difficulty getting along
with certain other people. Still it is useful to get the conflicts clear so everyone
knows what is going on and why work does not progress the way it should.

Not all conflicts can be solved. Think about it, one mans terrorist is another
mans freedom fighter. With strong views, sometimes created by centuries of
cultural development, you may never come to a solution. If possible you can
agree that this conflict will continue to exist and move on. Of all topics in your
interaction with the other party, this conflict may only represent a minor point
and so you can still work together very positively and constructively, knowing
you need to avoid this topic or agree a path to deal with it.


Yes you do have conflict resolutions with two sides
winning

If you know where I'm coming from, you'll know where I am and most likely will
understand where I want to go to.
Conflict resolution is often a matter of some creativity and the willingness to
learn about each others side of the story. Many conflicts linger over time to
such an extent that eventually no one really still knows what the original
conflict was about but folks just react in a tit for tat kind of way on statements
and things done by the other side.
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Someone is unhappy about being passed over for a promotion and starts to
criticize everything the other person, who got the promotion, is doing. Not for
any good reasons but out of unhappiness with being passed over. Now the
newly promoted person will start to become either defensive or start
scrutinizing the actions of the partner in the conflict and soon arguments fly
back and forth and whole virtual wars get fought over nothing other than being
unhappy about not being promoted.
It is not productive, it is not helpful, and it leads to nothing.
Working on the conflict would involve eventually talking about the
unhappiness of not being promoted. Well the reason for being passed over lies
in the skills and knowledge, the experience and perceived potential and
realistically also in the attitudes and personal likes and dislikes.
Although you may not like the reason why you were passed over for promotion,
it is a good thing to understand fully why it happened. The conflict you think
you have with the promoted individual may not be the actual conflict and you
may actually have more issues with his or her boss.

Again, I do not want to replicate the whole literature on conflicts, their causes
and resolutions here but it suffices to draw your attention to the fact that
conflicts can be healthy and working on the resolution of conflicts has usually
lots of benefits so you should not shy away from it.

It is the aforementioned collaboration that we are seeking as the mode of
conflict resolution.
In a department it will work best if there is a level of dynamic tension just
enough to keep the team members sharp and on their best game.
The teams that I have participated in that yielded the best results were indeed
the ones where the team members were in healthy competition with each other
to find solutions to the challenges of the business. Team members should not
be at each others throat but just in healthy competition.

Team work is about building consensus. While the success of the company
does depend on building a great team, lets not get confused. Steve Jobs always
said that consensus is not the same thing as collaboration. The leader sets the
direction and the team needs to be able to effectively work together to
accomplish that objective.


Competition

In business, as in life in general, conflicts will occur. You will encounter people
you like to work with and those you do not like to work with. The age old
lesson, which even comes from the bible, is that you need to accept the
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conflicts and keep the enemies in high regard and close to you, as they provide
you with excellent opportunities.

Let me explain. Enemies, like competitors, ultimately make you better.
You will sense the competition and go the extra mile to improve and show
them!
Also, your business competition will help shape the market in which you both
operate and ensure the customers feel they will get a good deal as there is
competition. No one likes to buy from the only store in town as it will give you
the feeling that you have no leverage. Some solid competition also will grow the
market for your products as more customers will hear about your products.

Competing colleagues are very useful to keep you awake and on your toes.
Healthy conflict, dynamic tension, needs to be encouraged. Now having said
that, there is a point where conflict becomes counterproductive and hurts the
company's business, once you reach that state it is obvious that a meeting of
the minds is in order and senior management needs to get involved.
Not accepting conflict as a regular part of your career or your business is
denying yourself improvement opportunities and also, by avoiding conflict or
competition you will not behave naturally and be seen as not functioning at
your best.
So instead of spending your time avoiding the conflicts, learn to see the healthy
side of it and accept that it is the natural way the world progresses. Warm and
cold, High and Low, Nice and Naughty, the world is full of conflicts and
opposing views accept it, use it to your advantage.