Each of us views every aspect of life from a unique perspective. Your perspective is shaped by the distinct combination of your experiences, cultural makeup, personality factors, and needs. Our conflicts are the inevitable and natural reflections of these constantly evolving differences.
Pause for just a moment and search your memory bank. Can you remember a time when a conflict at work resulted in greater understanding? When conflicts are managed well, they can provide a forum for a healthy voicing of concerns. Have you experienced a time when dialogue brought you or your co-workers towards a clarification of roles, a pathway to draw upon collective wisdom, a means to discover new options, or a plan for a better way to do things?
Hopefully, you have had one of these experiences. Sadly, however, you may be much more familiar with mismanaged conflicts. When conflicts are mismanaged, they can erupt into violence or slowly snowball, as egos and emotions aggrivate the original irritant beyond recognition. This book was written so you can have more positive conflict experiences and fewer negative ones.
Conflicts play out in our lives in two distinct ways. Sometimes, we are involved as a party in a dispute. Other times, we are drawn into a conflict as a third person who plays the role of advisor, comforter, or mediator to one or both of the people involved. Ultimately, at some point in your professional career, it is likely that you will find yourself in both of these roles. The latter is especially applicable if you supervise others and are aware of your staff members' quarrels.
This chapter will provide you with the knowledge you need to manage the conflicts you face as a party in conflict. You will also learn what you need to know about conflicts so that you can better manage the disputes that you encounter as an outsider or third person looking in.
Managing conflict is a cyclical process that requires constant practice. The more experience you gain in addressing conflict, the more adept you will become at untangling and decoding the conflicts you face. At the end of this section, you will view conflict through a different lens. You will understand the following:
- How inconsistent or divergent expectations cause conflict
- How the fight-or-flight survival response influences our conflict behaviors
- How to calm lower brain reactions and move towards reason and reasonableness
- How we perform the roles of victim, hero, and villain in our conflicts
- How to avoid escalating the conflicts you face
What is conflict? There is no clear consensus among the experts. We all know conflict when we see it, but it's not easy to define. Sometimes we hear talk of conflict being about limited resources. However, people who know how to work together can usually find ways to distribute their resources without engaging in destructive conflict. Fundamentalists (of any kind) would have us believe that conflict is the result (or symptom) of insurmountable differences in values and beliefs. This idea is misleading. In most cases, people can overcome significant differences when they are willing to engage in a mature dialogue.
Make a note
Conflict is best defined as "the by-product of inconsistent or incompatible perceptions and expectations regarding what is, what could be, or what should be."
Frequently, even the hint of inconsistent or incompatible expectations unconsciously translates to mean that the person on the other side is somehow being dismissive or disrespectful. Like a tinderbox, the sense of being dismissed, discounted, disrespected, or devalued, which is present in almost every human conflict, leaves us vulnerable to an emotional explosion. Knowing this will help you find and define the "dis" that points to a conflict's true germ or starting point, even when the people involved cover it up with anger or monetary claims.
Marvin told me this story of a conflict during a workplace training session:
"Our office recently experienced a significant coffee conflict. We have a coffee club. Staffers who want to participate and drink the coffee are asked to make a monthly $5 donation to cover the cost of supplies. When it became common knowledge that one of the workers, Dorothy, was drinking coffee but not contributing, another staff member, Kelly, turned on the elderly Dorothy like a rabid dog. Kelly's anger did not fit Dorothy's crime. As the supervisor, I offered to make the contribution for Dorothy so that everyone could put this behind them and get back to work. That only made things worse. The office became divided, polarized along generational lines. Ultimately, Kelly was able to move beyond the $5 distraction and present me with a long list of incidents where Dorothy's behavior had upset her. While each occurrence on the list had left Kelly feeling dismissed, discounted, or disrespected, she had said nothing until the coffee skirmish. This was the first time that Kelly could place an actual dollar amount on Dorothy's grumpy demeanor. The $5 became the symbol for all of the times Dorothy had behaved in a way that Kelly interpreted as Dorothy positioning herself above having to follow the rules."
Ultimately, when Dorothy's position was revealed, it became apparent that she had consistently interpreted her younger coworkers' attitudes as devaluing of her skill set and institutional memory. In this case, as in most cases of workplace conflict, there were two sides to the story. Until we know the rest of the story, we don't really have the full picture. When you are a third party—like Marvin in this case—avoid jumping to conclusions based on one person's side of the story.
Expectations are typically the outcome of one-sided secret deals we cook up in our own heads and hearts. These unspoken expectations almost always create disappointments. Kelly had expectations for how she wanted Dorothy to behave towards her. Dorothy did not share these expectations. She saw Kelly as a sassy know-it-all and responded to her accordingly. You may have already learned that "expectation is the root of all heartache. "(This quote is sometimes attributed to Shakespeare; the exact origin is actually unknown.) So, a key strategy for productive conflict management is moving expectations out of the shadows. When we are able to clarify the differences between our realities and our expectations, we can deal with disappointments before they sprout off into destructive conflict.
Each time we engage in conflict, three separate forces come into play. They are as follows:
- First, specific physiological changes happen within our brains and our bodies
- Next, each person in conflict takes actions (employs behaviors) to defend him or herself from some perceived threat
- Finally, the reactions and responses of the two people involved create the interactive dance of conflict that they engage in together
In the next three sections, we will look at each of these forces more closely.