Conflict Management Strategy #7 of 10
Labelling your opponents’ personalities as defective gives you permission to permanently dismiss them. It more likely that you will label the person as the problem when you do not know what to do to resolve the conflict.
Often when people behave in a manner that is regarded as difficult, they are simply – but unskillfully – using what they see as survival strategiesto get by in what they experience as a hostile and dysfunctional organisational culture.
Managing conflict from this perspective offers many more options for moving forward.
One definition of organisational culture is what everyone knows but no one talks about. You cannot change a culture that you are not allowed to talk about.
A powerful way for initiating cultural change in avoidant or resistant cultures is to encourage open discussion of unspoken rules.
For team meetings invite someone to act as an observer, and to report on how they saw team communicating, making decisions, and addressing problems. At the end of the meeting invite everyone to suggest one way the next meeting might go better.
When considering the difficult behaviour of others it is useful to know your own buttons. What pushes your button is usually something that you recognise in yourself that you reject, something that you would secretly like to do as well or something that elicits an emotion in you that you do not (yet) have the skill to handle.
Every difficult behaviour you experience represents a skill you can learn. By rejecting people who engage in difficult behaviour you risk losing a valuable opportunity to learn from them.
Conflict management strategy #1 Decode the culture
Conflict management strategy #2 Listen Empathetically
Conflict management strategy #3 Search for Hidden Meanings
Conflict management strategy #4 Reframe Emotions
Conflict management strategy #5 Separate Wheat from Chaff
Conflict management strategy #6 Embrace Paradox
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