Getting along at work

Conflict Matters: “Getting along at work”

Thanks to Kim I was lucky enough to spend a few hours at a workshop with Carol Scholes¹ not long ago. The others were almost all managers at various levels, mostly running not for profit organisations where they frequently have to deal with tensions between staff members. One of the first things Carol did was define conflict as a situation where both parties view the other’s behaviour as unreasonable. We discussed this a bit and it is actually quite profound: there is no conflict until that conviction (“the other person is so unreasonable!”) is present on both sides. To put it another way, until the second person reacts there is only bad behaviour.

So this provides an obvious and practical step for anyone dealing with a workplace dispute: rather than assuming the other’s objectionable behaviour is unreasonable, instead start with genuine curiosity: what is really driving the behaviour; what is going on underneath? Faced with genuine curiosity, the angry party meeting no resistance becomes more open to a discussion. If you can hold the view that there must be something you need to understand, and something that needs to change, there is only dialogue and no conflict simply because you have not prejudged the other’s behaviour as unreasonable.

Any parent of a toddler already has a good understanding of the principle here: when your child behaves in a way that others are quick to judge as intolerable, how easy is it to come to your child’s defence? All mothers in particular can see so clearly that the “unreasonable” behaviour is really just the result of the child being over stimulated / tired/ hungry/ frightened/ wet/ whatever. And once a parent understands the cause, they know what needs to change. That’s the key message: first understand where the other person is coming from, only then make a change.

Carol’s advice was simple: as soon as you observe an adverse reaction to something you do or say (especially if you consider the reaction “bad behaviour”), make it obvious. Take a deep breath, eradicate everything except genuine interest and ask a question like: “I thought I was being reasonable, help me understand what just happened from your side?” The longer you leave things, the more they escalate and the bigger the brave pill² you will need to take to deal with it.

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