Category Archives: Conflict Style Training

Info, ideas, and resources for conflict style trainers.

Trump and Conflict Styles

We can Learn a Lot from Trump about Conflict Styles

The weekend brought a textbook example of under-use of conflict avoidance and its costs.

It started on Friday when Rep. John Lewis picked a quarrel with Trump. “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate president,” he announced in a press statement. Saturday Trump fired back with tweets.

In the context of the long holiday weekend honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday, the exchange echoed thunderously in the media.

Result? Lewis’ book sales skyrocketed. By Sunday leading newspapers were carrying reports that his books were in the top 20 list of booksales and Amazon had sold out all copies of his best known work.

For his part, Trump took a hail of criticism, including critical tweets by some fellow Republicans, for dissing one of America’s most respected civil rights leaders.

Let’s be clear – Lewis started it. Never mind that Trump himself spearheaded a preposterous “birther” challenge to Barack Obama’s legitimacy for eight years, against all evidence. What matters here is that this time someone else threw the first punch.

But conflict management is about more than who started things. What matters is how to respond in a way most likely to bring a good outcome.

I cannot imagine a prudent advisor saying, “Donald Trump, you need to go after that revered civil rights leader. You’ll gain a lot by firing right back with a big put-down.” On a weekend when everyone remembers white domination of blacks, it’s a good idea to smack down a guy honored for leading demonstrations alongside MLK? With lines a 7th grader could write?

Trump chose the conflict response that I call Directing in my conflict style inventory (aka Competing in the TKI, for those who use that instrument). Directing pays no attention to relationships, feelings, or cooperation. You focus solely on taking charge. You win.

Don’t Diss Directing as a Response to Conflict

Don’t diss that style. I agree it sounds vicious, and it can be. But every human being needs it in certain forms from time to time. A parent who doesn’t grab his three year-old dashing towards the street and take charge of the situation is a bad parent. No matter how the child feels about it.

How about the captain of a sinking ship, a surgeon in charge of a dicey operation, a youth leader on a field trip with teenagers? Sometimes goals and responsibilities are more important than relationships and feelings.

So, respect Trump for a generous dose of Directing in his conflict style repertoire. But is Directing the only style he’s capable of? That’s a question fundamental to all leadership.

Mark Twain wrote, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” Conflict management is about flexibility, using the right style for the situation. When we’re skilled in only one or two styles, we set ourselves up for failure.

Although Lewis started the fight, in the circumstances, conflict avoidance would seem to have served Trump, his party, and the nation far better.

When is Avoiding the Right Response to Conflict?

Avoidance is the perfect response:

when there’s no goal or purpose beyond ego satisfaction that you can accomplish by pushing your cause, or
when the the costs of a battle outweigh the costs of silence or withdrawal.

On both counts, this was a slam-dunk for avoiding. Why not starve the alligators with presidential inattention? Just let the annoying words of the outspoken Representative fade into the news cycle.

People with a high Directing conflict style and low Avoiding response look and are intimidating. But they are also easy to maneuver and tie in knots. All it takes is low-grade insult to trigger them into reactions that waste time, energy, and good will over trivialities. They can’t stop themselves from reacting.

In the world of politics and diplomacy, over-reaction can be hugely damaging. Years ago I talked with an activist close to a group waging political insurrection in a country in Asia. “We consider carefully,” he said, “which police stations to attack. We hope they retaliate. Our goal is to hit those stations most likely to strike back wildly in ways that really anger the public. That’s one of the best ways to win support for our cause.”

I have no idea if provoking a self-damaging outburst from Trump was the intention of Lewis. But it appears that the outcome of the exchange was indeed an expansion of the already record-breaking gap dividing Trump from many voters.

One thing we can count on: Recognition of the thin skin of the incoming president is not lost on adversaries of America. Trump is already being targeted in the international arena in ways calculated to work against all Americans. On the long run, the slender repertoire of conflict styles he has so far demonstrated will benefit neither the politician nor the nation.

Trainers Guide to Conflict Styles

Just re-released: my Trainers Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Workshop. Now 38 pages in the 2017 edition, it’s still free.

Like earlier versions, this one gives step-by-step guidance for trainers. My aim is to make it easy for anyone with basic group leadership skills to lead successful conflict styles learning.

New in this edition are sections on training supported by online tools. With a third or more of the US workforce working from home, multi-platform environments and extensive online interaction are the norm for many. Trainers tooled only for live classrooms are obsolescing.

If you’re in a hurry, just hit download and abscond with the goods!If you have a few minutes for some history, read on.

Kudos to TKI

I’ll always be grateful to Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann, creators of the venerable Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, for turning me on to the conflict style inventory. Though their inventory was proceeded by Jay Hall’s and others, with the TKI I discovered the power of conflict styles for training. To me, if not Adam and Eve, they’re the Abraham and Isaac of conflict style inventories.

I saw how engaged users became from my very first workshop. No persuasion needed to hold attention. This reinforced a conviction I’ve carried across my career, that “Conflict management starts with self-management.”

Priority: Psychometrics or Training?

I was hooked on the tool, but I sweated teaching it. For years I fretted over notes before every workshop, tweaking how to present, how to ask questions that got people talking, how to set up reflection exercises that yield teachable moments.

I also got regular complaints about the TKI. None of the choices is right for me, I kept hearing. The TKI uses a forced choice arrangement for questions that is intended to prevent “social desirability bias”, with users trying look good rather than be candid.

The complaint came in all settings but most loudly when groups were culturally diverse. Some users were put off about the whole exercise. This raised questions for me about the tool itself.

My purposes were training, where the focus is equipping for the future. For this, trust in the learning tool is essential. Gradually I came to see that key choices in design of the TKI had been made to optimize psychometrics, where accurate measurement of behavior is holy grail. In ways that worried me, the priority for psychometrics was damaging my training environment.

Trainers aren’t mandated and most are not trained for psychometrics. Our mission is to facilitate learning, to help people prepare for living and performing well.

This happens best in a relaxed environment where people feel connected in a positive way to their potential. Regardless to the alleged psychometric authority of the instrument, I think trainers should model and encourage “taking the numbers with a grain of salt”.

A relaxed view of the numbers is important for several reasons. One is that nobody is written in stone. Recent research about the brain and emotional functioning underscores the reality of human “plasticity”.

The ability to adapt and change over time is deeply embedded in us. We have preferences, habits, and tendencies, but we are capable of new responses at all phases of life. This points away from a heavy focus on scores in a self-assessment test.

To change, we need to trust ourselves, and this points to a second reason for a light touch on the metrics. We want learners to value their own self-evaluations more than those based on scores in a written instrument testing somebody else’s norms. Again, that means trainers should take a light attitude towards the numbers.

Third, we want to teach dialogue with others as an authoritative source of data for feedback and change, more so than an external instrument. One of the biggest payoffs of conflict styles training is it gets people talking with others around them. Trainers know this is when workshops really come to life.

Having numbers to compare and reflect on is a potent resource to get started in such a conversation. But authority for evaluating what happens in conflict obviously goes to live human beings reflecting on their experiences. Honoring this authority requires care with metrics. Start off with the numbers, but treat them as entertaining clues. Give weight to the observations of those involved.

I’m sure circumstances arise, perhaps in personal counseling or performance evaluation, where an attitude of greater reverence for the numbers is called for. But I’m rarely presented with those as a trainer, certainly not in the short workshops in which I lead conflict styles training.

As my work expanded to include people of greater cultural diversity, a new concern arose, the tone-deafness of virtually all conflict style tools, including the TKI, on issues of culture.

Cultures that are less individualistic than North America give less freedom to individuals to respond as they see fit when conflict arises. “High context” cultures expect individuals to be guided by things like age and social status. Maybe you can be assertive or even bossy to a younger person, but you should defer to an older person.

For people steeped in such a culture, the question, “Would you do X in conflict or Y in conflict?”, if stated that simply, is peculiar. Imagine someone asking you, “When you need to do a repair on your house, do you hammer it or saw it?” “Well, it depends,” you’d probably say. “Tell me more – what’s the fix needed?”

Precisely. We know instinctively that some responses are made only in the context of details. For people accustomed to high context cultures, this includes responses to conflict. The details of context that matter typically include age, social status, education, roles, etc., of all involved. I found a significant number of people from such cultures confounded by the experience of trying to answer twenty questions about conflict in the absence of details.

Of course, you can always coax people to fill in answers to questions; you can tally data and create norms. But if users of a conflict style inventory have been compelled to answer questions void of information they consider to be essential in answering, obviously the data has questionable value. Indeed, if responses for many people are truly context specific, the whole enterprise of establishing norms and interpreting scores from them is at best highly complicated, and quite possibly irrelevant.

Ideally, an instrument balances the requirements of psychometrics with the requirements of optimal training. Increasingly I came to doubt that the TKI had achieved this balance. I felt that the intrusiveness of the forced choice questions and the questionable cultural assumptions of the instrument came at too high a cost to the requirements of training.

My work required a low-cost conflict style inventory optimized for training rather than psychometrics. I wanted to use it as a learning tool to engage people deeply about their options in conflict. It wasn’t crucial that the scores people got correspond exactly to what they did in real life, a standard which very few assessment instruments achieve anyway. The metric I cared about was how much did participants learn about conflict resolution, how much did their effectiveness improve as a result of using the tool?

I developed an early draft in 1985 for my work as head of a national network of mediators and facilitators sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee and this evolved through several phases to eventual psychometric validation in 2007. See details of that story here.

All the above were factors in my work already in the 1980s. To me it seems apparent that the astonishing expansion of training contexts and platforms that has unfolded since then, along with the diversification and globalization of teams and working environments, has only strengthened the case for a conflict style inventory optimized for training rather than psychometrics, and with issues of culture and stress built into its very structure.

Goodbye to Single Context Training

In 2007 I wrote the first edition of “Trainers Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Training” to enable others to benefit from the years of experimentation I’d gone through. Other versions followed.

But in recent years I’ve increasingly seen that the Trainers Guide had a gap. It assumed one training context only: a live, face-to-face classroom where users take the inventory on paper and participate in an old-style lecture/discussion learning experience.

We all know that life’s most important learnings rarely happen in classrooms. And that some very wise people do not spend much time in classrooms; never have, never will.

Perhaps even more important, more and more teams and groups do their work online. A lot of managing and learning that once required face-to-face meetings now takes place online.

This means that trainers equipped only to work in classrooms are increasingly out of touch. The live connection of face-to-face learning can’t be beat, but that’s no reason not to diversify. We’ll never get to the conversations and learning processes required to build strong conflict resolution practices if trainers don’t diversify our teaching methods.

Hello to Mixed Platforms

Technology makes diversification of teaching methods easy and results can be good. In “Facetime is Limited, Distance is Far” I point out that a remote digital learning experience that sustains the learning across time is probably better than a one-off face-to-face event.

So the just released revision of my Trainers Guide now fits all circumstances. Whether you are working with lone individuals on the other side of the world, traditional groups gathered face-to-face, or a blend of the two, the new guide now charts out a workshop design to ease your prep time.

In 38 pages, the guide:

reviews a spectrum of four workshop designs: Solo, Solo plus Discussion, Solo plus Workshop, and Workshop only, and lays out a step-by-step outline for each;
provides guidance in interpreting scores;
reviews the cultural reflection aspect of my Style Matters inventory, why this matters, and how to use it if desired;
provides lists of discussion questions useful for various moments in a conflict styles workshop
provides a directory to free resources on the Riverhouse ePress site for leading conflict styles workshops

All yours, for free, in a 38 page PDF you can download in a few second on the Riverhouse website. Our world needs conflict resolution skills like never before – prepare yourself now!

Don’t Resolve Conflict, Utilize It

If you like the conflict styles framework and want compatible tools to build the capacity of your organization or team, check out the trove of short videos by Dr. John Scherer.

Don’t Resolve or Manage Conflict, Utilize It

For example, in a 6 minute video clip on “Conflict Utilization“, Scherer explains why you shouldn’t be too quick to “resolve” or “manage” conflict. Odds are you will end the conflict prematurely and thus lose an opportunity to talk deeply, think carefully and make necessary changes.

In the last two minutes Scherer lists 4 concepts and tools valuable for helping groups and team use conflict well: The Pinch Theory, Three Worlds, The Four Languages, and Polarity Thinking. He dedicates a short video to each of those concepts on the same site.

I especially recommend the video on polarity management. That’s a powerful tool that I’ve found dramatically effective in certain conflicts. It should be in the toolkit of all who resource organizations and their leaders.

John Scherer is an esteemed elder in the field of organizational management and change who brings wonderful clarity and humanity to everything he does. He has posted 100+ free short videos over the last two years on organizational management and change management, many with valuable tools for making conflict a positive experience.

Scherer reads widely and faithfully credits the many practitioners and authors from whom he draws his rich insights. I have no stake in promoting John’s work – I simply think he’s a very wise man, who gives generously to others. He deserves wide exposure; you deserve the benefit of his wisdom.

Conflict Styles Training at Distance

[Written three years before the pandemic, this post is more relevant than ever now that most training is online.]

A challenge conflict styles trainers often face is limited time in workshops or little face-to-face access to people needing training. What then?

Here are options that can still bring good results, sometimes even better than a relaxed face-to-face workshop:

1. Use the online version. The online version of the Style Matters inventory is optimized for remote users and has an onsite tutorial that supports self-study.
2. Have them start at home. Have people take the inventory at home before they arrive at a training event. Both online and print versions of Style Matters are self-explanatory, so you can instruct your users to come to the workshop with the inventory already taken and a score report in hand. Bingo, you just saved at least 15 minutes of precious workshop time! In your workshop, start with the Intro to Conflict Style slideshow (see Free Resources in top menu on the front page of www.RiverhouseEpress.com) and continue with input on topics covered in the Trainers Guide.
3. Maybe you’re working remotely with people and can’t even gather them into a workshop. Have them take the online version and review the score report on their own. Then schedule a Zoom call and discuss results, using one of the exercises described on the webpage, Ideas for Discussing Conflict Styles with Others.
4. Do a series, not a one-off event. In all circumstances, you will have the greatest effect on relationships and the culture of an organization or group if you interact with participants repeatedly across time rather than in a one-off event. An online series will probably have more impact than a single face-to-fact event.
5. Assign independent work. Can’t even do a web conference? You could have an individual, a team, or a whole group take the inventory and work through the inventory on their own as individuals. Then assign them to have a series of conversations based on assignments/topics you create for them drawing on the above resources. If you want to be really thorough, you could ask them to send you a written summary of key insights they learned from the experience. In that case, make it a conversation by replying to their summary.
6. Journaling. With any of the above, you could have people do journal entries, just for themselves, or to share with you as trainer. Ideas for topics:

– “Key Insights about my conflict styles that I learned from taking Style Matters”
– “Three things I want to try to do differently with others in my group (and why) as a result of learnings from Style Matters”
– “Reflections on a week/month of effort to apply insights from Style Matters in relationships to others”
– “My strengths and weaknesses in conflict styles – reflections following taking the Style Matters inventory”.
– “Two successes and two challenges I faced this week in applying insights from the Style Matters inventory.”
– “A personal response to Principles of Wise Response to Conflict

In all cases where you are working with reports or reflections sent to you, if your purpose is to facilitate learning, make at least some reply to journals, even if only a few sentences. If you fail to do this, the writers are more likely to experience your presence as that of an authority figure to whom they are reporting rather than as a coach. The coaching role, of course, is generally more likely to facilitate reflection and learning role than an authority figure role.

A percentage of people view a conflict style inventory as a test. When taking a test, the concern is to pass, be certified, demonstrate competency, etc. Then forget about it!

But we’re not interested in getting people to prove their competence. We want to help them get started on a lifelong journey of careful thought about how to best manage differences with others. So we encourage people to “take the numbers with a grain of salt”, to view them as an opener in a conversation with self and others about how to grow through conflict.

We all know, of course, that a one-off, face-to-face workshop is immediate and direct in ways that remote learning is not. But that experience often ends when the workshop ends.

Remote work, strangely enough, has some advantages when it comes to continuity. It’s often easier to do followup by email, phone, or video than to set up a face-to-face meeting. If you’re diligent about this, you can facilitate a reflection and learning process that surpasses what people would get in a typical once-and-done event.

Conflict as Spiritual Path

Conflict style awareness is truly useful in day-to-day management of differences. It’s easy to learn.

But not so easy to do!

Easy: Learning the basics of conflict styles. Do this in a few minutes with this free “Intro to Conflict Styles”. You can figure out your own conflict style almost as quickly by taking a conflict style quiz (such as my Style Matters; the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, or even a cross-cultural one).

Challenging: remembering, in the heat of conflict, to use those great conflict resolution strategies. We are hardwired by nature with a tiny set of responses when we are frightened or angry: flight, fight, or freeze. Those three simple responses enabled survival in the jungle and you can witness them any time you want in the animal world. But they have limited use for human beings today.

To build partnerships and solve problems in a complex world we need additional options for responding, and the ability to choose rather than merely react. We acquire these capacities, not by relying on instinct, but by thought, practice, and reflection.

Conflict as Spiritual Path

When we are angry or frustrated, brain functions change. The instinctual flight/fight/freeze brain takes over; the rational brain steps back. Emotion blots out thought. We react rather than choose. Instinct and habit rule, not judgement and skill.

But all is not lost. In the words of Victor Frankl, the holocaust survivor whose writings have inspired generations: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I sometimes speak of conflict resolution as a spiritual path and Frankl nails why: What we do in moments of difficulty with others has enduring consequences. In the seconds between provocation and response we make choices that shape us and our legacy as human beings.

Here enduring and timeless aspects of our being come concretely within our influence. Here, over time, in the patterns of repeated choices, we make manifest that which we consider of greatest value. Here we shape the essence of the soul.

(Similarly, here too, in times of crisis, we witness laid bare for the world to see the true character of nations and communities and their institutions of governance and law. Ignore political rhetoric if you want to evaluate leaders and nations; just study what they actually do in times of provocation.)

You are not a helpless victim of your past. You already possess ability to choose wisely. Perhaps in lesser measure than you wish, but you can enlarge it. In the heat of conflict arise opportunities to do this.

By recognizing you have choices and taking responsibility to reflect on and grow in choosing well, in ways that reflect the essence of your life and being, you make conflict a spiritual path.

Four Choice Expanders for the Journey

1. Take the initiative when there is conflict brewing. Planning is your best ally in responding well in conflict. If you don’t plan, you put yourself at the mercy of your emotions and someone else’s timetable.

Planning doesn’t mean you must always engage. Avoiding is sometimes the best solution – click on the Avoiding tab in this tutorial to see a summary of when and why silence or walking away is sometimes the best solution. But if you avoid, do it by choice, not from habit.

When a difficult issue is brewing and you recognize conversation is required, take charge of yourself by pondering when, where, and how discussion will take place. Think through what you hope to achieve in the situation, and what your opponent probably hopes for. Make a list of your options and possible consequences of each. Then prepare a strategy to approach the other person. Tammy Lenski and other web authors provide good ideas here.

Preparing and taking the initiative doesn’t guarantee easy solutions. But it greatly increases your ability to choose and manage the responses you want to make in conflict.

2. Work on listening skills. Do a web search on “conflict resolution skills” and you can quickly find quite a list of skills that are truly useful in conflict resolution. Listening skills deserves to top that list – it is a “force multiplier” that amplifies effectiveness of every other skill.

Do not make the common mistake of confusing listening with agreeing or accepting. Understand listening at its barest minimum, as information gathering. Whether you decide in the end to smile and be agreeable, or stiffen your back and confront, a foundation of good listening provides valuable information and makes you more effective.

And of course, whether you employ active listening or its more demanding cousin, reflective listening, listening keeps your rationale brain active, thereby expanding your ability to choose.

3. Practice your lines. I wish I had a more compelling way to say it. But conflict resolution unfolds in the realm of words and the best way I know to prepare for a difficult conversation is to practice what you’re going to say.

Let’s say you’re inspired by that concept from Ury and Fisher’s famous Getting to Yes, about separating interests and positions. What exactly are you going to say to move the conversation in that direction?

Or maybe you can see room to make concessions, but you’re so angry about the attitude of your opponent that there’s no way you’ll even hint at compromise until he gets off his self-righteousness? How will you communicate this complex truth in a way most likely to bring progress?

I like journalling as a tool to think through what I want to say. I often write out, word for word, phrases, sentences, and questions I might to use in an upcoming difficult conversation. Sometime it takes many minutes to figure out the wording of phrase that can be said in seconds.

Maybe my first try at an opening line is: “I can’t believe how childish you are!” Honest, but not so helpful. Second try is “I’m outraged about the things you’re saying about me in staff meeting!” Third Try: “You said things in staff meeting Monday that really got my blood boiling. Eventually I calmed down, but I really don’t understand where this is coming from. Could you fill me in on the history here?”

Obviously the third try invites a different dynamic than the first. When I put the notes aside, it’s surprising how much remains in my head, not only words and phrases but also attitude, ready for deployment in moments of heated choice.

The ultimate way to practice lines, of course, is in role play. From time to time I call on a friend or family member to take the role for a few minutes of someone whom I need to confront. Here I try out words, phrases, and strategies from my notes. Even if I disagree with the advice of my allies, rehearsal increases self-control and choice in the real life conversation that follows.

4. Try calming techniques. We’ve all heard of people who instill in themselves a habit of counting silently to 10 before igniting. Conflict resolution consultant Tammy Lenski suggests additional techniques for mental detachment based on research:

– physically leaning back, which has been shown to help achieve mental detachment

– imaging that you are viewing yourself from a distance, like a fly on the wall

– moving away from the person you are upset with and if this is not possible, imaging that you are moving away and they are getting smaller.

Can We Market Peace?

Conflict resolution and human development people could learn a lot from business marketers. We have a message and tools that address critical challenges for human beings.

We should learn from the best practices of those who are successfully using modern tools of communication to influence others. At this time, those are online business marketers.

True, online marketing is often shallow and manipulative. Yet, for better or for worse, its success in influencing people means we have to understand it. Amidst all the hype, we can learn valuable insights about how to communicate.

I follow a small number of online marketers who meet all of the following criteria:
1) They have a track record of success in reaching others in their business efforts;
2) They are in the school of marketing thought and practice known as inbound marketing, which says that the best way to be a successful marketer is to truly meet genuine needs of your clients. If you do this, and use effective strategies to become visible and interact with them, clients will come, say the inbound marketers.
3) They demonstrate a commitment not just to making money but also to actively doing what they can to make the world a better place. I especially respect those personally involved in philanthropic efforts.

Among these is Neil Patel, who blogs at www.quicksprout.com. He’s wonderfully strategic, pays great attention to detail, and he works hard at communication. His writing is simple, clear, and accessible, with that odd blend of humility and self-confidence that characterizes many successful agents of change. I have no relationship to him, financial or otherwise.

Here’s a recent blog post:

Be a Better Teacher and Writer: 6 Teaching Techniques You Should Know

If you are involved in any kind of effort to educate or bring change to human beings, read it! It’s one of the better summaries I’ve seen on communicating for impact. I immediately changed the title of a recent blog post after reading his second point.

If you are thinking of using the web to reach people, you might sign up for Patel’s site and pay attention to the stuff he sends. He has studied every step of the journey of interaction with people and refined what he does to increase the odds that in the end you will decide that he’s got what you need and will buy from him. You can learn a lot by observing how he seeks to win your trust.

OK, he’s selling services, to income-generating businesses. His strategies are designed to reach people deeply motivated by desire. That’s different than communicating for social change or peace.

Peace, we know, is not a commodity. It can’t be marketed. It’s a gift that follows good choices and habits of mindful living.

But. Desire is certainly at the heart of most human choices, and that is not all bad. And there is no denying that misdirected desire is a great enemy of peace. So we better learn how to work in the presence of this powerful drive and, when we can, harness its energy for good.

I get useful ideas every time I read Patel or other web marketers like Perry Marshall, Michael Stelzner, and Pat Flynn and I think change agents everywhere can learn from people like them. But there is an overwhelming amount of stuff out there. We need to help each other separate the wheat from the chaff.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about:

To what extent can we adapt highly refined strategies from people like Patel across into efforts for peace, justice, human development and care for the environment?
What strategies and resources from the marketing world have you found useful?
Where have you been disappointed by things you’ve tried to apply from marketers?

Use This Powerful Force for Change

By adopting practices of interaction largely stripped of symbols and moments to engage Depth, we cut ourselves off from the most powerful source of energy for creativity, connection, and change available to us.

Are you exploring the power of symbols in your work in conflict resolution and human development?

I am moved by an email I recently received from Samaritan Inns, which serves homeless people. “At Samaritan Inns, during every counseling session, we sit out one empty chair. Every client knows that this chair represents the person who isn’t here yet. This is the next client that walks through our doors and onto the road to recovery.”

That empty chair is a potent symbol of hope. It doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to place it, or to explain the meaning of its presence. It will be forgotten during most of an intense counseling session.

Yet it serves as a tangible, here-and-now reminder of things every person in counseling benefits from remembering. He or she is not the only one who suffers. The journey of recovery awaits, for all, whenever they choose to begin it. There is hope for things to get better.

As a symbol, the empty chair invokes these things without preaching, without words. It speaks silently, by its mere presence, to the depths that reside in all human beings but often remain untouched.

The Call to the Deep is often abused. All of us have been subjected to people who shout the Call or try to impose their interpretation of it on others.

As modern people we’ve rightly reacted to such manipulation. But we’ve also thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In adopting practices of interaction stripped of symbols and moments to engage Depth, we cut ourselves off from the most powerful source of energy for creativity, connection, and change available to us.

The Deep that resides within each human being (or “beyond”, if you prefer) offers its power only to those who seek it through hopeful choice. Loud proclamations, angry condemnations, and invocations of guilt obstruct access to this place.

In today’s world of competing narratives we’ve exhausted the power of words to call upon that place of deep knowing where we hear and remember Depth. I’m quickly bored and rarely moved by verbal strategies to take us there. I’m refreshed, intrigued, and inspired by non-verbal ones.

Movement, symbol, sound, smell, silence.

If you were to place an empty chair in your classroom, workshop, session, or meeting, what would you want it to symbolize?

With what symbols do you or might you remind the people you work with that they are not alone in their pain, that “this too shall pass”, that warmth and love still exist even if we don’t feel them right now, that moments of “better” will come, that forgiveness is possible?

What strategies and practices have you experimented with, or better, built into the routines of your work or life that invite all present to the River, that place of the Deep where human beings meet hope, light, and possibility for fresh beginnings?

Two Step for Conflict Avoiders

When voices rise and conflict escalates, do you step forward and engage? Or step back and assess? This post is for people who favor the latter, and for those who live and work with them. I’ll give you another two-step for conflict resolution, a practical strategy when engagement is difficult.

Conflict Avoidance is Good

Let’s start by honoring “step back and assess” as a response to conflict. Life brings endless friction. We are confronted, goaded, and obstructed from every corner. It’s hard to get through even a day without someone or something in our face.

In chronically contested space, engaging all challengers is impossible. When someone gives you the finger for your unexpected shift of lanes while driving, do you pull over to talk things through? Hardly. What would be the point? You shrug, mutter to yourself, ignore the jackal, and drive on.

So the arts of skillful avoidance are essential to survival: Silence, distance, non-involvement, non-responsiveness, impassiveness, circumspection, studied neutrality, inaccessibility, biding your time. All have a place as strategies to avoid battles not worth the cost of fighting or for which we are poorly prepared.

Choose your battles. Manage carefully how you use the energies you direct to conflict. If you’re not good at conflict avoiding, get to work on it!

When Avoiding Conflict Makes Things Worse

But. If shrugging, ignoring and moving on is our primary response to all conflict, we pay a high price. Early in my career I was puzzled to discover that the conflicted organizations I worked with seemed to be full of the nicest of people. In one-on-one interaction I was often touched by their kindness and good intentions. Why were these places where people tried so hard to maintain pleasantness and decency the sites of such vicious battles?

People avoided conflict for years, but seethed inside. Eventually feelings grew too strong to hold back, and things exploded, sometimes triggered by issues of little consequence. “Long periods of cottony silence punctuated by periodic explosions” was how one person described her experience in a conflict-avoiding group.

When relationships are ongoing, over-use of conflict avoidance is a setup for big trouble. When issues are allowed to fester unresolved, feelings grow. Then, when they do finally burst into the open, they are harder to manage than ever.

Conflict resolution ability is like a muscle that requires regular use to maintain. If you don’t challenge and constructively confront on small issues and practice there the skills of calm self-assertiveness and thoughtful engagement required for resolving conflicts, you’ll be helpless to function well in big ones.

A Two Step Strategy for Conflict Avoiders

If overuse of conflict avoidance is an issue in your life, you can do something about it, either as an avoider or as someone trying to engage an avoider.

Start by understanding how avoiding benefits the avoider. Conflict avoidance gives opportunity to: 1) Manage emotions and reduce stress and tension; 2) Gather information about the issues, options, and people involved before taking a stand or making a decision; 3) Withdraw, review, and prepare for engagement.

You can achieve those without staying stuck in avoidance by using a two-step approach that provides space to think things through and prepare for conversation:

1) Step One: Have a short “tabling” conversation to acknowledge or inform your counterpart that there are issues requiring discussion. Take care not to let this initial exchange go deep or long as this would defeat the purpose of the whole strategy. Aim for a short, light initial indication that discussion is needed and seek agreement on a time for extended conversation later.

2) Step Two: Have the discussion at a mutually agreed time and place, after those involved have had a chance to think through their views, expectations, hopes, etc.

I learned this version of the two-step from Dr. Barbara Date of Eugene, Oregon, who learned it from Professor Susan Gilmore at University of Oregon. Barbara tells of a friend whose young son loved to go to the beach. Her friend would sometimes wake up on Saturday morning, notice a beautiful day dawning, and at breakfast say, “Let’s go to the beach!” His son would then get upset and start crying!

The concept of two-step mental processing helps make sense of the puzzle. The boy was a person who needs time to think things through and prepare himself internally. Whether delightful or difficult made no difference. Unexpected change with no time to process it was disturbing.

People wired with a deep need to do an internal review before committing to anything will instinctively say no if presented with a request or proposal that requires an immediate answer. For them, Barbara says, “If you want an answer now, it’s usually no. If you can wait, the answer is often maybe”.

In conflict resolution, a two step approach allows conflict avoidance to function as a true strength and sets the stage for the use of other conflict styles. The key is to accept and work with avoidance but add planning and structure to it.

Get a detailed report 6 page report on your conflict styles with the Style Matters Conflict Style Inventory. Use the free 24 page “Trainers Guide to Successful Conflict Styles Workshops” to design a workshop that will energize your team. Download it now!

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Intro to Conflict Styles Podcast

Organizational psychologist and podcaster Meisha Rouser has posted an interview, “Exploring Conflict Styles with Ron Kraybill”. In a 25 minute conversation you get an overview of key concepts of conflict styles and why it’s important to pay attention to them.

Simple Conflict Style 2 Step

A good way to expand your conflict style awareness is to begin using the two step discussion process. This is a strategy so simple that you might say, “Isn’t it obvious?” No, it’s actually not, including to me in certain moments. Give it some thought and make sure you’re using this little game changer.

In a large institution where I worked for many years, I heard stories about the facilities manager. Kathy was an annoying and inflexible nitpicker, I was told. Everyone had a story – we all had to work with her to arrange space and technical support for our meetings and workshops.

Soon after I arrived, I too had my moment with Kathy. I needed access to meeting rooms at unusual hours. This required a special key – one she tightly controlled. I also needed permission to bring in special equipment.

How to Use the Two Step

In a situation like this, the two step approach is one of the first to consider. It is easy to adapt to a variety of dynamics. Given what I had heard I decided to use its simplest form:
Step One: Take steps to establish or affirm the relationship.
Step Two: Engage in problem-solving or task activity.

That’s not the way I would naturally approach someone. When I have a lot of work to do I am pretty task-focused. It would have been easy for me to dash into Kathy’s office, say a hasty good morning, and plunge straight into my list of requirements.

Even if I managed to do it in a cordial way, that would not be conflict style aware. I probably would have walked out a few minutes later muttering the same things everyone else said about inflexible Kathy.

When I arrived at Kathy’s office I had prepared a different strategy: I opened by mentioning our recent email exchange. I said I was happy to put a face to the name. Then I said that she had a reputation for keeping the facilities well-organized and knowing where to find things.

My colleagues, of course, thought she was a control freak, the kind of person that in an earlier blog post I jokingly referred to as a high power donkey. But walking to her office, I’d been searching for something positive I could say. It occurred to me that there really was a good side to this annoying style of managing things and that I could sincerely complement her for it.

It worked. She smiled and said it drove her crazy keeping track of everything. I commiserated and said we’re all lucky I didn’t have her job because I’d lose everything in a week. She smiled about that too.

Now it was easy to get down to serious business. She listened carefully to my needs, booked the off-hour rooms without hesitation, reviewed the policy on off-hour facilities, and told me when to come and get the key.

The fabled Kathy, my ally! Cost to me? Caring enough to try, a few minutes of forethought, and three minutes of chit-chat. In the years that followed, every request I made of her sailed across her desk. I simply made a point, whenever we talked, to start with chit-chat for the first couple of minutes.

It’s probable that, like Kathy, a significant percentage of the people with whom you live and work are wired with a strong inner sense that relationships come first, then tasks. There are cultures, of course, where it would be rude not to begin nearly every conversation with small talk. But even there, some individuals are wired with a stronger expectation than others to connect before turning to tasks.

Connection to Style Matters and Thomas Kilmann Inventories

Almost everyone who scores high in the Harmonizing style of my Style Matters conflict style inventory (in the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Inventory, the Accommodating style) is in this group. Those who score high in Cooperating also have strong needs to connect to the human beings with whom they work. For more details on how task and relationship relate to conflict styles, view my “Intro to Conflict Styles” slideshow.

Don’t Make a Big Deal Out of It

You don’t to make have to make a big deal out of it to attend to the relationship. Just make sure to start with something that clearly acknowledges or affirms the human being in front of you before turning to serious work. Bring a cup of coffee or donut as a gift, inquire about a family member, chit-chat about sports or local gossip, notice a new hairdo, appreciate a picture or souvenir on the wall. A couple of minutes is all it takes, at the beginning of every work session and occasionally perhaps, during them.

When to Lead with Task and Not Relationship

People who are highly task focused, including most of those who score high in the Directing (Forcing in the Thomas Kilmann) style of my inventory, mostly prefer the opposite sequence. For them, the work at hand is ever beckoning and takes priority. They value a process that keeps social pleasantries perfunctory and moves promptly to tasks. But after the work of the moment is done or well underway, even many task oriented people appreciate relaxing for a few minutes for personal exchanges that deepen relationships.

Conflict Style Awareness Opens Space for Creative Responses

Like other conflict style strategies, the two step still requires you to figure out solutions. But it opens space for people to be more flexible than they would be without it. If you work with relationship-focused conflict style Harmonizers in ways that first take care of their concern for relationships, they often turn out to be highly effective and committed problem-solvers. Task-focused conflict style Directors, for their part, often show themselves to care deeply about relationships, after they see there exists an intention and plan for getting tasks done.

The two-step belongs in everyone’s personal toolkit. The story above highlights its value for individuals, but it is essential also in group decision making or conflict resolution. Things go better when discussion process honor the diversities of preferences present in every gathering regarding the mix and sequence of task and relationship. Facilitators can and must plan to address both.

In a later post I will review other versions of the two-step, in particular a two-step approach that has nearly magical impact on people who favor Avoiding as a response to conflict.