Conflict happens. It is inevitable. It is going to happen whenever you have people with different expectations. This makes conflict management critical, whether avoiding arguments, disputes, lasting conflict or ultimately, litigation.
Conflict can be avoided if steps are taken early in a discussion to diffuse anger and facilitate communication, and it can be resolved by applying a series of thoughtfully applied steps.
Conflict in a work setting can be costly because some can lead to litigation. So it is quite useful if companies could resolve these disputes before each side spent hundreds of thousands in litigation costs.
Here are some tools for avoiding and resolving disputes in the early stages, before they become full-blown conflicts:
1. Stay calm
Thomas Jefferson said: “Nothing gives one so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”
The thing that leads to conflict is escalation. What starts people escalating is their anger. Most of us stop listening to understand as we get angry.
Instead, we start listening in order to argue back. Remaining calm is essential for performing these tools.
Remaining calm helps people involved to look at the big picture. If you think about it, most dispute gets resolved eventually.
So when conflict inevitably happens, it is helpful to stop and think that, chances are, it is going to be resolved eventually.
As such, why not begin problem solving now?
Finally, it is a fact that in our busy lives with rush hour traffic, cell phones, PDAs, overfilled e-mail boxes, too many clients and not enough support, that we are all a little more stressed than we would like to be.
When a conflict arises, one of the most beneficial things you can do is to ask yourself, “What might I be bringing to the dispute?”
We can usually look at another person and figure that maybe he/she had a conflict at home or that he/she has been under tremendous pressure.
However, we are not usually self-aware enough to ask ourselves what we might have going on.
It is important in avoiding later embarrassment by checking in with our own personal boiling point before responding.
2. Listen to understand
Now, picture a dispute in which you were recently involved. Maybe it was this morning leaving the house, with a co-worker or client or even with a family member.
As you replay that experience, ask yourself how much listening was going on. My bet is that any listening was only being done to formulate an argument back to prove your point. When most of us get into a dispute, the first thing we do is stop listening.
The only way to settle a dispute or solve any kind of a problem is to listen carefully to what the other person is saying.
Perhaps they will surprise you with reason, or their point is actually true. In the mediations that I do, I often learn what people’s underlying interests are by letting them go on and on telling their perspective of an issue until they give me the one thing that is standing in the way of them resolving it.
They may start out by degrading the product and personalising it by saying those of us who delivered it are all incompetent, but I find that this is little more than their anger speaking. What they really want is their product fixed, not to insult us personally.
Psychologists tell us that anger is a secondary emotion and that it is usually triggered as a defence mechanism to cover up hurt or fear.
When someone is angry, there is usually some hurt or fear that he/she is embarrassed about, or perhaps even unaware of because the anger is so all consuming. In order to diffuse people’s anger, you must listen to them.
Hear them out. Let them go until they have run out of gas. Let them vent as long as they can until they begin to calm down.
You then will see a person start to slow down some, and begin to feel safe enough to finally tell you that what frustrated him or her so much was that the salesperson never returned any phone calls, and/or the customer service person kept trying to place blame elsewhere, rather than taking responsibility and apologising for the product being unacceptable.
The best thing you can do to get people to the point where they are willing to show some vulnerability and trust you with some of the real reasons why they are upset is to engage in “Active Listening”.
Active listening means giving them active physical and verbal signs that you are with them and understand what they are saying. Simple things like nodding and saying, “Uh huh” or “OK, go on” can make the speaker feel as if his/her story is welcomed by you and that you want to continue.
On the phone, people hear dead silence and cannot read your reaction to their complaints and thoughts.
Given that we all sometimes fear the worst, people tend to shut down and stop feeling it is safe to continue telling their story.
Accentuate the positive
It is important to find some commonalities, or create them, between you and the person on the other end. It is helpful and empathetic to say: “Oh boy, I know what you are going through. I’ve had a similar situation just recently. Let me see what I can do about this.” This serves to normalise the situation.
It tells someone that he/she is not the only one who has gone through this and that his or her reaction to it is normal. That calms people right away.
State your case tactfully
The key here is to help people understand your perspective on things without making them defensive.
To the extent you can disarm them, they will be more able to hear what you are really saying.
A couple of tips are to own what is yours — apologise for what you or your team did wrong and do it first.
This enables them to hear what you have to say next. Also, try not to state issues of difference as fact.
Leave a little benefit of the doubt. Rather than insisting something arrived on schedule, it is better to acknowledge any room for doubt by acknowledging: “My information shows them arriving on schedule. I’ll have to take a closer look into this.”
While you may still be right, clearly you have to gather more information to convince them of that, and if you are not right, then you do not have to apologise for misstating things.
It also is helpful to state your position along with your interests. What that means is that instead of maintaining that there is nothing wrong with your product, which is purely argumentative and does not offer any support for your position, it is better to offer something helpful, such as providing another perspective by sending someone over to inspect the product in person.
That way, the customer can show and describe exactly why the product is not working as it should.
Attack the problem, not the person
Your points will be heard more clearly if you can depersonalize your comments and point only at the issue.
Rather than accusing people of “always messing things up”, it is better to say, “We’ll have to take a closer look at why this keeps happening”.
In most statements that we make in a dispute, we are fighting with our own anger and are tempted to put a zinger into the point we are trying to get across.
You will be heard better and improve your chances of resolving the issue the way you want if you can catch yourself and take the zinger out.
Obviously, this is easier with e-mail and requires great concentration when in a face-to-face disagreement.
Avoid the blame game
Assigning blame is only helpful in one instance in problem solving – if you assign it to yourself.
Generally speaking, figuring out whose fault something is does not do any good if the goal is to fix a problem.
It is a diversion and sometimes a costly one because if a person feels blamed, he/she often checks out of a conversation.
The trick to resolving clashes is to focus on problem solving, rather than pointing fingers. Focus on what you and the others can do to solve a problem and make it better, and it will be behind you before you know it.
Focus on the future, not the past
In the past tense, we have the purchase order, the contract, the agreement and the deal as it was understood by all involved.
The present and future tenses are where the solution ends. Rather than focusing on what went wrong or who should have done what, the secret to dispute resolution is to treat it like problem solving and focus on what can be done to resolve the problem.
Once that is done, companies can look to the past tense to analyse what went wrong and how to improve quality control and efficiency.
However, when there is a problem that has an angry customer or a disgruntled employee, the solution is all that anyone is interested in.
Ask the right kind of questions
Questions such as “Why is that?” or “What did you think it would be?” make a person who you are talking to defensive.
They inherently question the person’s judgment or opinion, as well as coming off as curt. More often that not, people ask these short, direct questions, the type that can sound like a police officer’s interrogation or a lawyer’s cross-examination.
These questions are designed to get just what you want from someone, rather than to permit them to tell you what they want you to know about something.
If you want someone to answer you with real information, rather than just arguing back, it is best to give them a little information first.
For example: “Since I don’t have a copy of the P.O. in front of me, it would help me to investigate this if you could tell me more about how the colours on your order are described.”
Telling them why you are asking, puts your intent first, so they don’t have to guess it. This questioning style tells a person that you are trying to do your job and to figure out some facts to get to reach a solution.
By delivering your request in a poised and attentive tone, it makes the person you are asking less defensive and gets you more of what you want.
The other type of question that is especially helpful when you are trying to gather information is an open-ended question.
These are the opposite of directive questions, and they invite the other person to tell you what he or she thinks is important about the situation.
“Can you tell me what happened from the beginning?” or “Sounds as if this was really frustrating for you” can give you information that you might later use to problem solve.
Pick your battles
It is also important when asking questions to remember to Pick Your Battles. Human nature makes us want to be right, even to the point of being defensive or arguing points that do not matter in the big picture.
It is even fair game to ask the other person, “On a scale of one-to-10, how important is this issue to you?”
If an issue is a five to you and a nine to the person you are talking to, it is best to give that point up and use the same scale when an item is really important to you.
After all, business relations are, like my brother’s future father-in-law once told him about marriage, a “60-60 proposition.”
Most people think it is supposed to be 50-50, but the truth is, when adjusted for each person’s perspective on how much they give versus how much they receive, it really is a 60-60 proposition.
Link offer
Car salesmen do this all the time. They ask you what you want your monthly payment to be and then set the price of the car and the interest rate on the loan or lease so that they can match your monthly payment.
Essentially, it’s a way of saying, “I can either do this or that, which would be better for you?”
It really is just sales skills – giving people the choice between two positives, so that they feel as if you are trying to help.
Be creative
Brainstorm. Remember that everything is negotiable. Feel free to think outside of the box in order to expand the pie.
Make it so that no idea is too far-fetched. Being creative with resolutions takes longer, but can yield a true win-win solution.
The best solution to a dispute is to get more business out of it. As such, one common problem-solving technique is to propose that instead of a cash refund, giving clients a deep discount on future orders in order to show what a good job you are capable of doing for them. — -mediate.com.