Decoding Conflcit

DECODING CONFLICT
By
Bill Cottringer nnnn
Organizations today are faced with inevitable conflicts in team-building that will require creative resolutions that may be just slightly outside the leader’s toolbox. Even the most experienced leaders have to approach each new conflict with renewed understanding, because conflicts are all slightly different in ingredients and flavors. Sure you can have a general strategy, but it has to be adopted locally to get results and this requires perpetual learning.

Organizational conflicts can involve many noisy, annoying symptoms from value and thinking differences to failure to adapt to needed change to poor customer relations. Or they can be classical turf struggles between operations, sales and accounting or petty personality squabbles. Throw in things like remote or virtual supervision, company restructuring and unions and the situation becomes even noisier and more annoying.

It is certainly easier to get annoyed and complain about these bothersome symptoms than to do anything about the one core problem that causes most other problems—poor communication. But the real culprit that drives the poor communication that spoils team building is actually lack of understanding. What is needed to resolve today’s workplace conflicts is some smart decoding to unlock mountain-top, insightful understanding.

A common fault we all have is that we tend to settle for superficial understanding of things. That is because our brains want quick, easy and simple certainty and will settle for artificial, incomplete truth just for the sake of closure. Take the usual level of understanding of something like communication for example. How often do we go past the words we hear, trying to understand how and why the other person is using them, what they mean to the other person, whether they accurately represent the original ideas and intentions, and the relevance of the living context in which all this occurs. n n We often just listen to a conversation in order to respond, rather than to really understand, which not an easy thing to do. It often takes aggressive two-eared listening to catch what is being said below how it is being said, or to pick up what isn’t being said from what is said. And that doesn’t account for all the normal distractions like impatience, personal agendas, or bad timing.

Perhaps the one mistake that is responsible for the lion’s share of unresolved conflict is in not taking enough time to understand the positive purpose of the conflict itself. After all, conflict often provides the motivation for a person to step up to the plate and hit a home run or to go down swinging. No organization can grow professionally and financially without resolving its conflicts; organization success is often coded in conflict.

Most leaders have had enough success themselves to know what seems to enable and disable resolution of conflicts, well enough to give sound advice. But why doesn’t this sound “telling” advice seem to work in most cases? Simply because the real core problem is not being addressed, just its symptoms. The real job of leaders is to teach people how to understand core problems, not to offer quick fixes to surface symptoms. The only way this can be done is to demonstrate the level of understanding that is needed, firsthand. And because each new conflict is different, this means some perpetual learning on the part of the leader.

Work can be one huge story book to read and understand. There are many “tests” in work, but trying to build a team is the one ultimate essay examination to see if you can apply everything you’ve previously learned. In a sense, teambuilding can be a test of everyone’s character and to see how creative the team can be in resolving the conflict. And conflicts can never be solved without all stakeholders’ accurate and complete understanding of each other, or at least a very strong commitment in that direction.

What needs to be understood?

1. Every conflict has a unique purpose—to teach us something we need to learn to get to our next stage of development and increase our level of awareness and productivity. Finding this purpose is not easy because there are too many alluring, tempting distractions getting in the way. Besides, such basic knowledge is often so close to us that it is difficult to see, let alone understand. Sometimes it is the skin we are wearing. Regardless, purpose always needs to be decoded to get successful results in resolving a conflict.

2. People need to feel truly understood—and that takes considerable unselfish time and effort to accomplish on the team’s part. We all have probably reversed the right order in seeking to be understood ourselves first, before we are willing to try and understand the other person. But that really never gets us anywhere, especially when we are trying to build a team. The result is, “I’ll take the time to try and understand you when you do it first.” By then there are two strikes and two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.

3. Certain conditions create problem behavior—and it is these conditions that need to be understood rather than the person’s motivation and behavior. People are not inherently bad, mean, cruel, detached or otherwise unhealthy. Certain conditions work together to incubate such difficult behavior, and these conditions are even more difficult to understand. Oddly though, we readily blame such exte
al causes for our own shortcomings and faults, but are not willing to extend that courtesy to others. When we learn to do this, we get a whole new perspective about the person and the conflict we are part of.

So what can a leader do in the meantime, who is in the middle of a conflict? The simple answer is to encourage all stakeholders in the conflict to stop doing everything else and shift their energies and focus to understanding three areas of their team relationship by asking and answering these three critical questions:

1. What am I failing to learn from this conflict?
2. What can I do to understand the other team members better?
3. What are the conditions that are creating the problem behavior we are all involved in? nnn Understanding the real problem apart from its symptoms is a tried and true problem-solving strategy. This is because understanding any problem is three-quarters of its solution. Fixing symptoms in team conflict isn’t the help that is needed because that approach doesn’t work. The only thing that does work is to take the time and make the commitment to truly understand the conflict and the people who are in it. That process always starts with understanding the difference between what you think you want to get out of the resolution and what the conflict can teach you. First things first.

Of course, the bottom line to all this is that understanding leads to acceptance and acceptance opens the door to seeing a creative win-win compromise to end the deadlock. Sometimes we make this simple equation too complicated. The book of work may be easier to read than we want to imagine; but maybe that is because we don’t want to know the ending too soon, for fear of not having enough to do. nnnnnnn