Conflict Resolution 1

Dealing with conflict
Managing conflict is one of the core skills you need to lead a team.
You have to be aware of how the different ways in which team members think and the value systems they adopt can impact on the way they relate to each other (and to you!) when difficulties arise.
This knowledge has to be played against the different strategies that can be used to deal with a conflict of interest. Sometimes it's your role as a leader to minimise these in the interests of harmony while at other times you need to almost insist on a conflict as part of your role in raising the game as you maintain the tension between what could be and what is.
Essentially there are 5 strategies that can be followed to resolve a conflict.
• Get Out• Give In• Trade-off• Take Over• Breakthrough - going for Win-Win
Small business owners often use a combination of Give-In if it's not important and breakthrough if is. Breakthrough is the most powerful strategy but it's too time consuming to use for trivial issues.
Sometimes of course you just have to take charge if things are going badly wrong and it's necessary to use the take-over strategy which is really powerful for delivering short term results but over time it tends to have a debilitating effect on the group field.
Trade-off is conventional bargaining which leads to a result that everyone can live with but nobody likes. It is quite effective but if used repeatedly it tends to dull the group environment.
So those are the strategies that you might use - how do you deal with what's going on amongst the others and what kind of behaviour are you likely to have to deal with.
For most of us there is a tension between results and relationships, between self and the group.
In "The Strategy of the Dolphin" Dudley Lynch explains the range of behaviours that individuals adopt. These are shown in the following diagram which illustrates some of the emotional drivers that keep people attached to these world views or which propel them forth to the next.

In essence we lurch from self focus to group focus, from results to relationships.
Basically the odd numbered systems on the left are self orientated, the even numbered ones on the right are group and team orientated.
Your task as a leader is to create a synthesis between the needs of the group, the need to implement the vision in the specific objective circumstances that you find yourself in and the value systems that the individuals are using.
Tomorrow we'll look at how these map to the conflict resolution strategies and on Friday we'll look at how these mindsets tend to surface in different types of organisations

alan