These situations caused me to reflect on what happens in conflict:

• How it gets started,
• How it escalates, and
• What you can do to de-escalate it.

I was also wondering if these situations happen in your life. Here’s what I mean, you know what you should do in a given situation, the situation occurs, and then you do exactly the opposite of what you knew to do.

Since I’m guessing that I’m not alone in this struggle, I thought I would interrupt my series of posts on Frequently Asked Questions About the DISC Model by mixing in a few posts on understanding the dynamics of conflict escalation.

Using this post as a starting point, we can then look at how to avoid or minimize this problem in our lives.

In this post, I will quickly show a model of what often happens during conflict escalation. By understanding the model, we can plan positive steps to back conflicts down after they start. I’m drawing some of this post content from a video course I am developing on resolving personal workplace conflicts. I’ll share more on that later.

The escalation cycle generally starts with one person (I’ll call them Person A) doing or saying something that the other person (Person B) perceives as a threat. Notice the key word: perceives. It doesn’t really matter if Person A meant their words or actions as a threat. It only matters if Person B sees the words or actions as a threat.

This perception of threat can take many forms, and it is likely linked to the anger process I wrote about previously.

Once Person B perceives a threat, they will probably move to anger and then behave in a self-protective way out of that anger.

Person A now perceives Person B’s behavior as a threat.

Person A follows the same perception-anger-behavior pattern and further contributes to the conflict escalation as shown in the video above and the image below. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
I plan to revisit the specific things we can do to reverse this cycle in future posts. For now, I’ll leave you with this observation: either person can take steps to de-escalate the conflict.

They can either:

Recognize the problem and change their behavior so that the other person no longer perceives a threat.

— or —

Question their perception in order to get their own anger under control.

In practice, the person taking responsibility would likely do both.

In an ideal world, both parties would take responsibility, stop blaming, and move to resolution. Even in our less than perfect world, either party can take the right actions and move to resolve the conflict with or without the other person’s cooperation.

Related posts:

1. Why Your Natural Response to Conflict is Probably Wrong & What You Can Do About It
2. Conflict Resolution Techniques: Question Your Assumptions
3. The 7 Deadly Sins of Conflict Resolution

Guy Shares Two Questions to Help
You Control Your Anger

A question that often comes up in my conversations and training sessions regarding conflict resolution is this:

How do I control my anger?

Great question. Sadly, it’s often the wrong question.

Anger is not really a primary emotion. It does not come first. It may come quickly. It just doesn’t come first. Anger is generally the result of something else.

If you imagine at your emotional container like a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage and sealed with a stopper, you can develop a simple model for understanding what happens when you get angry so that you can attack the anger at it’s source rather than trying to control it after it happens.

So, we have our emotional container represented by a bottle filled with a carbonated beverage. Now, we shake it up, and we get an explosion of foam. The foam represents anger.

Have you ever had a sink full of foam when you were trying to wash your dishes? If you have, you realize just how difficult it is to get rid of the foam. Well, anger is the same way. Once it blows out of us, it is really difficult to reign in and clean-up.  It would be better to stop the foam (anger) before the explosion.

One tactic for controlling anger at its source is to recognize that by removing what came before the foam, we never have to deal with it at all. Since anger is a secondary emotion, we can dig past it to the primary emotion behind it and deal with that rather than trying to deal with the anger.

In many cases, the primary emotion triggered by an event in our lives will be one of two things:

1. Fear, or
2. Hurt/Pain (either physical or emotional)

If we can learn to identify which of these is at work in us when we start to feel “angry,” we can deal with the primary emotion in a way that can remove or reduce it. When we do that effectively, we get our anger under control by never letting it get ramped-up in the first place.

Several months ago, I read the results of a study that said a key predictor of domestic violence was the inability to clearly articulate emotions. The strategy I am proposing here aims at improving your skills in the area of expressing what is really inside rather than letting it build to the point of explosion. When we back-up the chain of emotional responses to the key, underlying, primary emotion, we can often express our fear or hurt more clearly so that it never escalates to full-blown anger.

How do you apply this approach?

When you feel anger welling up inside you, stop and ask yourself these questions:

1. What do I fear?, and
2. What is causing my pain?

If you can find an answer to these questions and then express the emotion in a healthy way, you just might avoid the need to clean-up the foam of your anger.

(I don’t mean to suggest that getting angry is always a bad thing. It’s just often a bad thing, if you want to preserve relationships. I’m also not suggesting that this is the only way to get your anger under control. It’s just one way to do it. If you have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section below.)

Related posts:

1. Effective Communication Skills: You Don’t Know Until You Ask
2. Conflict Resolution Insights: Why Conflicts Escalate
3. Resolving Conflict Lesson: Watch Your Step

When we passed each other, he looked at me sheepishly and waved. Clearly, he did not see my car. I’m guessing that he did not intend to create a heart stress moment for me. It just happened. He’s human.

After I waved to him to let him know that I undestood, I thought of the times I have seen other people react totally differently. In fact, I thought of times when I have reacted totally differently. I thought of people yelling, honking the horn, and offering a one-finger salute rather than a friendly wave.

At that moment, I saw a connection to workplace conflict. The anger and escalation of road rage often begins by misinterpreting another person’s actions.

When someone pulls out in front of you, cuts you off, or stops short; they either did it for the purpose of annoying you or they didn’t. If they didn’t do it to annoy you, they probably just reacted to what they thought they saw as they decided to pull out, change lanes, or stop.

Since I have pulled out, changed lanes, and stopped in ways that frustrated others without meaning to do it. I think it’s fair to say that not everyone who does something to cause you stress in traffic intended to do so. In fact, I don’t recall ever intentionally driving my car in a way that annoyed another person. I’m guessing that most people don’t intentionally annoy others either.

What, you might ask, has this got to do with workplace conflict?

Everything.

It’s all about the interpretations we place on other people’s words and actions. In the situation I mentioned at the start of this post, I assumed that the other person did not see me. I assumed that he had good intent and just made a mistake. As a result, I didn’t get angry with him.

In other situations (when I have been less under control), I have thought that the other person saw me and pulled out despite the fact that they saw me coming. I assumed negative intent, and I got angry.

The same thing happens in the workplace. Someone does or says the wrong thing. Or, they don’t do or don’t say the right thing. Whatever the situation, it happens, and we assume that they “meant to do that.” With that assumption about their intention, we get angry, and conflict begins to grow.

I have noticed that the vast majority of people seldom do things for the purpose of causing other people frustration and aggravation. It usually happens unintentionally.

When things go wrong in our interactions with others, we have a choice. We can choose to assume that they meant to frustrate us, or we can assume that they made an innocent mistake.

I suggest starting with the later assumption.

I’m not talking about naive, polyanna type assumptions. I realize that some people actually do enjoy frustrating others. I’m just saying that most people don’t.

Why not start with the assumption that applies to most people, and minimize the risk of conflict even beginning? You can always adjust if necessary rather than starting with the negative assumption and escalating a conflict without reason.

Image by wherisat on Flickr.

Related posts:

1. Seven Workplace Conflict Resolution Tips
2. Conflict Resolution Techniques: Question Your Assumptions
3. Intentions – A Poem That Came to Me While Cleaning