Conflict Zen

The answer to organizational conflict isn’t conflict resolution training. The answer isn’t team-building either. Both can be a form of organizational conflict avoidance.

Why you can’t train or team-build your way out of organizational conflict

• Training is about taking your team and helping it move to the next higher level of performance. If there’s enough conflict that you’ve sought out a trainer to help you, there’s other work you need to do first.
• Team and organizational conflict interferes with optimal learning. When troubling conflict is lurking in the training room, people are not at their best and the likelihood of their successfully deploying new approaches is rather dismal.
• Learning new conflict management approaches and skills doesn’t translate automatically into elegant use of them. Even top-notch training and the best circumstances can leave a gap between what people know and what people do (unless you and your trainer have a plan to address this … you should, you know).
• People central to organizational or team conflict know the training is really directed at them. They’re not fools. It puts them in an awkward position that doesn’t contribute to good learning.
• People uninvolved in the conflict suspect the training is really intended for others. That suspicion can be a real de-motivator and feel like a waste of their valuable time. Even if it’s true they could use the new approaches and skills, they may not see it that way because of the circumstances in which the training was initiated.
• Training doesn’t address the conflict. If conflict is complicated enough that you’ve sought out training to get some relief from it, it’s likely that what it will take to address the conflict is to…address the conflict.

Is organizational conflict resolution training ever useful?

Of course it is. When your organizational or department house is generally in order, conflict resolution training helps you and your team:

• Learn efficient, effective frameworks for problem-solving and conflict resolution.
• Understand the signals of healthy conflict and the warning signs of escalating conflict.
• Develop a common language for engaging conflict and solving problems.
• Make better business decisions by learning how to tap the opportunity conflict offers without the danger of conflict running amok.

What to do if you have organizational conflict and would also like your team to learn better approaches

Start by sorting out the conflict that’s getting in the way of business and work. Arrange for training after that. And arrange for support after the training to help your team put into practice what they’ve just learned.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConflictZen.com.

“The object of good mediation, good negotiation and good conflict management isn’t to get people to agreement. It’s to help people reach agreement they’ll want to act on once we all leave the table.”

I say this when I train advanced mediators and when I teach mediation and conflict management in organizations and groups. And I said it last night while meeting with a community group interested in getting “inside mediator” training for some of their members.

Why do solutions and agreements fall apart after the organizational conflict appears resolved? I see these eight reasons more frequently than any other:

• It wasn’t really agreement. This is the big kahuna of agreement failures and most of the others listed below are variations of this one. It may look like an agreement and sound like an agreement, but a well-trained organizational mediator knows what to look for to make sure it really is. Making nice, for instance, isn’t real resolution.
• Agreement-building was hurried. This happens because people are uncomfortable in the groan zone, hurry to solve before fully understanding, and feel organizational pressure to multi-task and handle conflict “efficiently.”
• They felt pressured by someone in higher authority. Leaders and managers sometimes describe “passive-aggressive” employees who pretend to agree but then never act on the “agreement.” Stop diagnosing the passive-aggressives (there are far fewer than you think) and start understanding that pushing creates resistance, even if that resistance doesn’t show up ’til later.
• The agreement failed to solve the real problem. Solve the wrong problem and – you guessed it – you get the wrong solutions.
• It didn’t really meet their most important interests. Interests are people’s underlying needs, the reasons they take the positions they do (common interests in organizational conflict include reputation, job security, career advancement, physical and psychological safety). The theory goes that an agreement is more likely to be sound if it meets one or more of each person’s important interests.
• The not-really-agreed-upon solution didn’t come from those directly involved in the conflict but it sure sounded good at the time. Too much organizational conflict is handled by giving advice liberally and persuading people to take it. It’s ego-building for the advice-giver but generally a lousy way to really address problems.
• There were stakeholders missing. Absent stakeholders can unravel an agreement faster than kudzu grows overnight.
• Something changed. It happens. That’s why no agreement can stand the test of time forever and it’s why you never want to brow-beat someone for failing to act on an agreement. You want them to be willing to return to the table and re-work the agreement.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConflictZen.com.

Organizational conflict may be increased and employee relations damaged by the way “psychologically entitled workers” act at work, a new study suggests. Such workers believe they are typically more deserving of particular rewards or benefits than their co-workers.

In Entitled Workers Are More Frustrated On the Job and More Likely to Abuse Co-Workers, New Research Finds, the University of New Hampshire reports,

The researchers found that individuals with strong entitlement-driven self-perceptions can feel more frustrated and dissatisfied with their work lives than employees with a more objective view of their relative worth and their contributions.

“Overall, the frustration experienced by entitled workers appears to stem from perceived inequities in the rewards received by co-workers to whom psychologically entitled employees feel superior,” Harvey said.

The entitled employees studied also engaged in abusive workplace behaviors such as insulting, breaking promises and spreading rumors about co-workers in response to job-related frustration. They also were more likely to engage in political behaviors such as ingratiation, self-promotion and doing favors. While such political behaviors often are considered acceptable to draw attention to employees who have earned such recognition, the researchers note that these behaviors also can be used to promote favoritism and influence an inequitable distribution of rewards.

And here’s where it gets particularly interesting for management and human resources: It’s tempting to think that increased communication from supervisors would reduce entitled workers’ frustration, reduce the team conflict that results from their behaviors, and improve organizational conflict management.

Yet the researchers concluded the opposite is the case. When supervisors increase communication with psychologically entitled employees, their frustration can increase. The same was not the case for employees who don’t generally have a sense of entitlement.

Lots of implications there for the ways and amounts that supervisors and managers interact with entitled workers.

The full article, Frustration-based Outcomes of Entitlement and the Influence of Supervisor Communication by Paul Harvey and Kenneth Harris, is available in the July 2010 issue of the journal Human Relations.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConflictZen.com.

Benign intentions don’t cancel bad impact.

A few years ago, while cooking and lost in thought, I opened an upper cabinet door right into my husband’s head. He yelped as the corner of the door dug sharply into his skull.

The first words out of my mouth were, “Sorry about that, I didn’t do it intentionally!”

Rubbing his skull, he replied, “That sure makes my head hurt less.”

We inadvertently create three problems when we wrap assurances of our benign intentions into conflict conversations:

1. We imply that because our intention was benign, the other person should miraculously suffer less. But they don’t. The impact we had on them still stands until we address that. In organizational conflict situations, addressing the impact usually means figuring out how to prevent similar impact in the future. How are you encouraging your people to focus more on impact than intention?
2. We distract ourselves from the more valuable conversation. When we make the conversation about our intentions instead of the impact we too often end up in a conversation about fault and blame. When we make the conversation about impact we end up in a conversation that can turn conflict into opportunity for change. How are you leveraging conversations about unintended impact to strengthen organizational systems and processes?
3. We make the conversation about us and our goodness instead of about the problem. Ego-soothing yes, but when we inadvertently hurt or have other negative impact on someone, our best energy is spent on them, not us. They want us to know we understand the impact and when we’re only talking about ourselves, that’s difficult to show. Are you modeling compassion instead of self-protectionism for your team?

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

Two shoe sales reps were dispatched to a remote area. A few days later, their supervisor received brief emails from each.

The first one read, “Please get me on the next flight home – no one here wears shoes.”

The second one read: “I’m going to need more inventory – no one here owns shoes!”

Mental models are the paradigms or lenses through which you view the world. If you know the work of Chris Argyris, Donald Schön or Peter Senge, then the concept of mental models will sound familiar.

Senge, in his seminal work The Fifth Discipline, described mental models as “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.” He further explained that differences in mental models help explain how two people can observe the same event and later describe it differently.

Because mental models often live below the level of awareness, their influence on behavior may be invisible and unexamined. An important part of the self-work of learning to respond differently in conflict and negotiate better for yourself and your team is to uncover and examine how your mental models influence the ways you act during such situations.

Senge and others have suggested that mental models are generative – you can learn and adopt new mental models that help you navigate negotiations, creative problem-solving, and conflict in more effective ways.

What does it take? In my experience, three key ingredients:

1. A willingness to be self-aware in ways you may not have been before.
2. The right kind of guidance to help you discern the mental models that help and hinder you.
3. Commitment – enough time and an effective approach for adopting a new mental habit.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

When you’re sorting out conflict, make sure you’re solving the right problem.

I tell my clients, “When you try to solve the wrong problem, you end up with solutions that won’t serve you well and you may not even know why the problem-solving meetings didn’t work. When you take time to name the right problem at the front end, you position yourself for far better negotiating and problem solving.”

The right problem is the important one that the stakeholders are willing to negotiate. The right problem is neither a pop-psych diagnosis, nor a restatement of your desired outcome. There may be more than one “right problem” in a conflict.

Like layers of an onion, there are surface problems and deeper problems. Surface problems tend to draw your attention, but they’re not really important and addressing them won’t change things much. The trick is to go deeper but only as deep as you need to address a meaningful problem. Go too deep and you start hanging out in the quicksand of pop-psych diagnosis, sure to grab and drown you.

These are not examples of the real, negotiable problem, though I hear versions of them all the time in my organizational conflict work:

• Get him to back down and admit he’s wrong (that’s just a statement of your desired outcome).
• Help the group feel more comfortable with change (your diagnosis of their problem with change is thinly disguised and is getting in the way of other ways to understand what’s holding them back).
• Decide whether to expand into that market or not (too many problems get stuck because they’re framed as either/or, leaving you with two options and blind to the many other possibilities).
• Change his passive-aggressive way of dealing with decisions he doesn’t really like but is too spineless to speak up about (pop-psych diagnoses’ will come around and bite you every time; they’re sidetrackers).

You’ll know you’ve got it right when the stakeholders can all say, yes, that’s an important problem we want to sort out.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

A conflict’s greatest opportunity for collaborative resolution is usually near the time it first occurred (if such a time can be known) or at least nearer the time it first entered your awareness.

Sometimes, the triggering event is clear and memorable. Sometimes it’s elusive, building under the radar over time, brick by brick, small frustration by small frustration.

Either way, the sooner you address it after the raw initial pain and anger have passed, the better. You want the rawness to have subsided enough that people can bring their better selves to the conversation, but not so much time to have passed that the ongoing tension creates an escalating conflict spiral.

The center of a conflict spiral is known as “schismogenesis,” a fancy word for “beginning of the rift.” The spiral grows outward the longer the conflict goes untended, widening the divide, increasing the emotional distance, and sometimes also increasing the number of people involved.

Conflict resolution specialists like me often get the call many months or even years after the schismogenesis. It’s reasonable and understandable that the individuals involved and management want a reasonable chance first to engage, untangle and resolve the conflict before seeking outside help.

The trick is to recognize a spiral early and develop hallmarks in your organizational conflict management system that will help you know when to keep working at it in-house and when it’s more resource-efficient and effective to seek outside help.

I’ve helped conflicts years in the making get untangled and those involved begin to rebuild the trust relationships they once had. But it’s harder by orders of magnitude when you wait a long time before getting the right help.

Hope just isn’t a good conflict resolution strategy.

© 2010 by Tammy Lenski. Work originally published at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

It’s frost heave season again in northern New England, that time of year when the freezing of snow-saturated soil causes the earth and and cracked sections of pavement on top of it to thrust upward. Cars bounce along old stretches of roadway as though on an amusement park ride and potholes appear in significant, axel-breaking numbers.

If you’ve ever driven in the north country, you know that you can navigate the heaves and potholes better if you watch the road instead of focusing at the potholes. I remember learning that the hard way when I first started mountain biking – when I focused on the rock I wanted to avoid in the path, my bicycle wheel seemed inevitably to roll right into it.

Apparently someone’s even coined a term for the failure to watch the wider road: Potholism.

Potholism can present a problem in workplace and interpersonal conflict as well, as MJ Ryan reminds us in Watch the Road, Not the Potholes:

Still, when change scares me, I find my mind going straight to all that I don’t want to happen, rather than what I do.

I was reminded once again about the danger of this behavior while reading The Unthinkable. In it, Ripley describes a phenomenon called “potholism”: “the more drivers stare at potholes, the more likely they are to drive into them.” Rather than concentrating on avoiding a pothole, says Ronn Langford of driving school MasterDrive, you should focus on the whole road so you can see where to drive.

What a message for us all! Focusing on the problems or anticipated problems of change will cause us to drive right toward them. Rather, we should expand our vision so that we are seeing the whole situation and focus on what we want out of the new situation, not what we don’t. One of the reasons this lesson is so important is that under fear, our senses narrow—we get tunnel vision, hearing, and feeling. It’s part of that old fight or flight mechanism. Our perceptions narrow so that we focus only on the danger. But as Langford’s driving research shows, this can be dangerous in and of itself, causing us to head toward the problem rather than away from it. When we widen our focus and expand our periphery, we tell that primitive part of our brains there’s no danger and it turns off, leaving us more able to think fully about the situation.

Potholes are an appealing metaphor for the challenges in workplace and interpersonal conflict, as well as in negotiation. I sometimes tell clients that my job as a conflict coach and mediator is to help people stay on the road to their future and get the damn potholes patched once and for all.

I like the pothole metaphor so much I’ve used it in other posts. If you missed them, here they are: Behavior Change and the Holes in Your Sidewalk and Negotiation Potholes of the Mind.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.

Note: I wrote this a couple years ago for a client interested in how they could minimize the emotional toll of and the potential for destructive conflict during the layoff process. I came across it again late last year and, while I hope widespread economic layoffs are slowing now, I’m putting it out there for leaders and managers who care about the how of layoffs as much as they care about the layoff decision itself.

One true test of an organization’s claim to greatness is how it takes care of its people in the toughest of times.

People have all sorts of interests that smart and caring organizations should try to meet – meeting those interests, after all, creates more motivated and committed employees. The interests of employees being laid off matter too, because how well you meet those interests them influences your image, your organization’s image, and the morale of employees still working for you. Which, in turn, influence your bottom line.

The following interests are usually of primary importance to employees during layoffs, along with ways to address them. I haven’t included the obvious interest in financial security because most organizations are already aware of this interest. Instead, I want to uncover the interests usually less attended to, most likely to create escalated emotion and conflict, and most threatened by the ways some organizations and consulting firms carry out the employee layoffs.

Key interests of laid off employees

1. Saving face. Layoffs temporarily sever a portion of an employee’s identity. When asked, what do you do? they can no longer say, I’m a __ at __. And worse, when high performers are laid off alongside poor performers, organizations inadvertently create a special agony for those high performers, who are saying to themselves, After all the work I’ve done, everyone’s going to think I’m as inept as So-and-So. Face loss is a prime contributor to escalated conflict and anger.
    
   What this means in practice: Help employees save face by creating mechanisms for graceful exits. If the layoffs include both high performers and those with less stellar contributions, say so in your communications: We’re deeply saddened that our financial state in this difficult economy means that some of our top performers are among those whose positions have been cut. You’ll help the top performers feel acknowledged for their contributions, as small nod of comfort in difficult times.
2. Maintaining a modicum of control over their own destiny. It’s part of the human condition to want control over one’s own destiny. Firings, position cuts and layoffs take a chunk of that away. People don’t mourn just the loss of their jobs; they mourn the loss of captaining their future for the duration of their joblessness. For some people, this loss of control will translate into high emotion and increased divisiveness.
    
   What this means in practice: Even small ways you can allow laid off employees to retain what little control is left will really matter. How they want to exit. On what date. What will be said in communication to the rest of their colleagues and staff. If you think you must implement a one-size-fits-all approach to exits, think again – are you doing that because it’s easier on you or better for them?
3. Having time to absorb the shock. Not endless time, but the chance to get their feet back under them and clarity around what’s next before news trickles out and they have to navigate the stricken stares of others (“Am I next?”) or the condolences that’ll begin rolling in. People want a chance to be ready to reply and talk about what the coming days/weeks/months will hold for them – because everyone and their brother will ask, “What are you going to do?”
    
   What this means in practice: Create space for just-notified employees to get their wits about them. For some this may mean speaking to their loved ones at home before they have to face the larger organization. For others it may mean getting your counsel on what they need to do next (no, not fill out exit interview forms — next as in, after they walk out the door the last time). For still others it may mean closing their office door and being left undisturbed while they gather their thoughts or emotions.
4. Understanding how it is that good performers will be cut while some/many under-performers won’t. It’s easier to cut good people in the wrong seats than it is under-performers in the right seats when an organization has a non-courageous performance evaluation culture that’s tolerated under-performance and done a poor job documenting the need for improvement. Organizations perpetuate unfairness by getting rid of under-valued positions instead of under-performing people.
    
   What this means in practice: Fix your performance appraisal system and teach managers how to confront and convey difficult news effectively during evaluation periods. When you get it right, you won’t have to worry about this interest during tough times.

© 2007 by Tammy Lenski. All rights reserved.