I’ve just come back from a conference of the British Association for Psychological Type – an organisation whose remit is to promote the knowledge and use of Jungian type.
The theme of the conference was Unlocking Human Potential. What struck me was how many of the sessions were about conflict – whether between people or within yourself.
What is conflict?
Conflict in our work or home lives is usually a disagreement or incompatibility between the views and opinions of different people.
Conflict is not necessarily a bad thing.
“honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress” Mohandas K Ghandi
“for good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate” Margaret Heffernan
So avoiding conflict isn’t the answer. We need debate, discussion and argument to get to better solutions – solutions that we can agree on and work together to implement.
The problem with conflict is that we sometimes don’t get past the disagreement stage. What we need is better ways of managing conflict
How can we manage conflict better?
We tried out several approaches to dealing with conflict at the conference.
Polarity Mapping
I learned this technique from Jane Kise and I’ve used it with teams when there is conflict over the way forward on specific issues – it works well.
Polarity mapping, created by Barry Johnson, is based on the principle of taking a BOTH – AND rather than EITHER – OR approach to problems. This takes the emotion out of a situation and leads to collaborative solutions. At the conference we tried it out on the conflict between needing to make a living vs doing something meaningful, and we found ways of finding a balance.
There are lots of polarities in life, for example: rights and responsibilities, truth and harmony, centralization and decentralization, facts and imagination.
You can find a useful summary of the technique from Harvard here
Personal Conflict Styles
Being aware of your and your colleagues’ natural responses to conflict can help you manage your own responses, and react more appropriately to others.
The Thomas-Kilman conflict model, categorises styles according to how assertive or co-operative people tend to be, leading to five main conflict styles – Avoiding, Accommodating, Competing, Compromising, and Collaborating.
These conflict styles map directly to the personality styles in my book, How to Get On with Anyone: Even the Difficult Ones – Navigators tend to avoid, Synthesisers tend to accommodate, Mobilisers tend to compete, and Energisers tend to compromise.
Find out more about the typical responses to conflict of people with different styles of interaction in my book and here.
Interpersonal behaviour
At an individual level, there are lots of behavioural and attitudinal changes you can make to facilitate dealing with conflict and reaching a solution.
The image above illustrates a 3 step process to de-escalate conflict and bring people together to resolve the issue. (The upper case letters at each step refer to aspects of the CREDIT approach to conflict management).
I developed the CREDIT approach – giving credit to other people for their positive intention, even if their impact on us is negative. CREDIT is about Collaboration, Respect, Emotions, Drives, Intention, Impact and Influence, and Tomorrow. You can find out more in this blog.
At a more specific level, there are many small changes you can make to what you say and do during conflict to defuse it and move forward. Things as simple as using ‘and’ instead of ‘but’ when responding to someone, or avoiding asking ‘why’.
Take a look at my 7 top tips for disagreeing constructively here and tips on managing personality clashes here.
Intrapersonal conflict
This is the conflict within a person between different parts of their personality, and in my own keynote session I discussed how to surface and manage this. I adapted Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrants model to enable people to bring more balance into their personality.
Managing conflict better – between people and teams and within ourselves – is a foundation for Unlocking Human Potential.
I hope that amongst the ideas and links in this blog you find one that works for you!