Not all conflict is bad. In fact some conflict can actually be good.
The difference is whether the conflict is constructive or destructive.
The challenge is that the emotional energy, body language, and other external signs of the conflict can look the same to an outside observer.
So, how can you tell the difference between a constructive conflict and a destructive conflict?
Here are three tell-tale signs to help you distinguish between the two types.
Constructive conflict conversations focus on issues. Destructive conflict conversations focus on people.
Constructive conflict conversations focus on the future. Destructive conflict conversations focus on the past.
Constructive conflict conversations bring people together to solve a problem. Destructive conflict conversations create polarization and division within an organization.
If a conflict conversation is constructive, let it go to completion. It is likely to turn out well.
In a previous post on exercising your power of choice to get conflicts under control, I mentioned some specific actions to consider using to de-escalate conflicts.
In this post, I’m expanding on three of the actions with some additional thoughts on how to put them to work in your conflict resolution repertoire.
Here are three things you can do in virtually any conflict situation to improve the outcome.
1. Apologize
I seldom see conflict situations where all of the miscommunication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation of intentions rests entirely on one person. You might not be totally at fault for the challenge that led to the conflict. Odds are, there is something you contributed to the early stages that helped it to escalate. Whatever that behavior, word choice or tone was, apologize for it.
Don’t apologize for how the other person feels or how they interpreted your actions. You can apologize for the action itself.
Apology is a powerful way to de-escalate conflict. When you apologize, remember that apologizing for your contribution does not mean that you have to take all of the blame. Just own your contribution.
2. Forgive
Just as you should apologize for your contribution, be ready to accept their apology or ownership of responsibility. Resist the urge to take advantage of their show of vulnerability. Just forgive graciously.
In practice, you don’t even have to wait for an apology to forgive. You can forgive simply because you chose to do so. (And you can do it without holding it over the other person. Remember the gracious part.)
3. Listen
As a general rule, people feel less angry or frustrated when they feel understood. When you listen without interrupting, correcting, or debating, you can help the other person feel understood. When you help them feel understood, you improve the odds of de-escalating the conflict.
I don’t propose that these actions are necessarily easy to do when emotions are high and the conflict is escalating. While they might not be easy to do, they are possible to do. And they are powerful steps you can consciously apply to help conflicts move towards resolution.
On two recent occasions, I have been involved in interactions that started with a minor miscommunication and quickly elevated to full-blown conflict. In both situations, the other person and I pretty quickly recognized what was happening, and we managed to get our communications back under control.
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.
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:
Fear, or
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:
What do I fear?, and
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.)
I’ve written about the power of apology in the past, and today I was reminded of the power of the words “I’m sorry” by a short article I read in the November 23 edition of BusinessWeek magazine.
As part of a larger article titled 10 Ways to Cut Health-Care Costs Right Now, I found item number 10 under the heading: Aplogize to the Patient.
This short piece quickly describes the financial impact of a program initiated by the Sorry Works! Coalition. Sorry Works! suggests that hospitals immediately inform patients and their families of medical errors, investigate the cause, change procedures if necessary, and offer a settlement if the heath-care provider is at fault.
In effect, they promote saying: “I’m sorry.”
According to the article, the University of Michigan Health System and the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago both reported significant (in the range of 40-50%) reduction in malpractice claims by applying the Sorry Works! program.
So, what’s the implication to workplace conflict resolution?
Just say, “I’m sorry.”
Very rarely have I ever been involved in a dispute with another person when they were totally at fault. In most situations, I have contributed to the situation in one way or another.
Rather than debate the what I did or didn’t say, what you did or didn’t say, what I did or didn’t intend, or what you did or didn’t intend points of the conflict, just say “I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry for what I said or did. That’s it. No justification. No rehashing of the events. No blaming.
Will this always work? No.
Will it usually work? Yes – the reduction in malpractice suits proves it.
“I’m sorry” flies in the face of our natural need to protect ourselves. It’s often difficult to say, and it works.
