Fourth of a series on five conflict styles, this post showcases the Harmonizing conflict style. With a focus on the relationship, setting aside your own wishes, Harmonizing is not always a good option. But in well-chosen situations, Harmonizing is a great gift to those you live and work with, and potentially you as well. I'll show you a handful of transition phrases to help you shift gracefully into this conflict response.
Harmonizing brings grace, kindness and flexibility into relationships. Longterm partnerships need generous amounts of this other-oriented conflict style to thrive. Without it, endless disputation will wear you out and leave little room for joy.
If you scored high in Harmonizing while taking Style Matters, you already know this stuff. If not, it's never too late to learn!
Everywhere I’ve lived and worked, I’ve met people who feel a deep inner echo to the idea of making peace. I’m a bit mystical about such things. The inner echo is one mark of a calling and I have a lot of time for people hearing it.But then it gets complicated. How to get from inner echo to outer action? Sustaining my own call over 37 years and observing others, I’ve learned a few things:
Conflict resolution and human development people could learn a lot from business marketers. We have a message and tools that address critical challenges for human beings.We should learn from the best practices of those who are successfully using modern tools of communication to influence others. At this time, those are online business marketers.True, online marketing is often shallow and manipulative. Yet, for better or for worse, its success in influencing people means we have to understand it. Amidst all the hype, we can learn valuable insights about how to communicate.I follow a small number of online marketers who meet all of the following criteria:1) They have a track record of success in reaching others in their business efforts;2) They are in the school of marketing thought and practice known as inbound marketing, which says that the best way to be a successful marketer is to truly meet genuine needs of your clients. If you do this, and use effective strategies to become visible and interact with them, clients will come, say the inbound marketers.3) They demonstrate a commitment not just to making money but also to actively doing what they can to make the world a better place. I especially respect those personally involved in philanthropic efforts.Among these is Neil Patel, who blogs at www.quicksprout.com. He's wonderfully strategic, pays great attention to detail, and he works hard at communication. His writing is simple, clear, and accessible, with that odd blend of humility and self-confidence that characterizes many successful agents of change. I have no relationship to him, financial or otherwise.Here's a recent blog post:https://www.quicksprout.com/2016/06/06/be-a-better-teacher-and-writer-6-teaching-techniques-you-should-know/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=emailIf you are involved in any kind of effort to educate or bring change to human beings, read it! It's one of the better summaries I've seen on communicating for impact. I immediately changed the title of a recent blog post after reading his second point.If you are thinking of using the web to reach people, you might sign up for Patel's site and pay attention to the stuff he sends. He has studied every step of the journey of interaction with people and refined what he does to increase the odds that in the end you will decide that he's got what you need and will buy from him. You can learn a lot by observing how he seeks to win your trust.OK, he's selling services, to income-generating businesses. His strategies are designed to reach people deeply motivated by desire. That's different than communicating for social change or peace.Peace, we know, is not a commodity. It can't be marketed. It's a gift that follows good choices and habits of mindful living.But. Desire is certainly at the heart of most human choices, and that is not all bad. And there is no denying that misdirected desire is a great enemy of peace. So we better learn how to work in the presence of this powerful drive and, when we can, harness its energy for good.I get useful ideas every time I read Patel or other web marketers like Perry Marshall, Michael Stelzner, and Pat Flynn and I think change agents everywhere can learn from people like them. But there is an overwhelming amount of stuff out there. We need to help each other separate the wheat from the chaff.I'd love to hear your thoughts about:
Injustice is a big problem. But it's always a symptom of a deeper cause.
You can't build lasting peace and you won't get justice if people feel excluded from decisions they care about. That works sometimes for a little while but in the end things fall apart.
Columbia's peace process includes a problem that recurs in many national peace processes: What to do with groups whose tactics or ideology makes them unacceptable? My life experience has taught me to move towards, not away from such groups.
In Columbia, an agreement was announced on September 26, 2016, between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), ending 52 years of fighting. Left out of this agreement is the National Liberation Army (ELN), a more radical and smaller insurgency whose practices have included kidnapping civilians. The ELN has refused to renounce this practice as a precondition to talks.
I have no knowledge of the details of the Columbian peace process, but I recognize this as an old problem. In South Africa, the Philippines, Israel/Palestine, and other large peace processes I've been close to, there is almost always at least one group like this.
Kristin Herbolzheimer of Conciliation Resources writes insightfully about how to respond in a recent post that I recommend. There are no simple answers to such situations and Herbolzheimer clearly recognizes that. But he explores reasons why ELN has been reluctant to enter fully into talks and offers useful ideas in response.
Personal experience in several big peace processes taught me that some of the most important insights essential to sustaining peace on the long-term can be had by studying the "fringe" groups. I recall here the Pan-Africanist groups at the fringes of the South African talks whose epithets were often blood-curling. Pondering their slogan "One settler, one bullet", it felt pretty weird to be going off for a 3 day workshop with regional leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress in a township of Port Elizabeth in 1990.
If you like the conflict styles framework and want compatible tools to build the capacity of your organization or team, check out the trove of short videos by Dr. John Scherer.
In the last two minutes Scherer lists 4 concepts and tools valuable for helping groups and team use conflict well: The Pinch Theory, Three Worlds, The Four Languages, and Polarity Thinking. He dedicates a short video to each of those concepts on the same site.
I especially recommend the video on polarity management. That's a powerful tool that I've found dramatically effective in certain conflicts. It should be in the toolkit of all who resource organizations and their leaders.
John Scherer is an esteemed elder in the field of organizational management and change who brings wonderful clarity and humanity to everything he does. He has posted 100+ free short videos over the last two years on organizational management and change management, many with valuable tools for making conflict a positive experience.
If you've already spent time with relatives this holiday season perhaps you've discovered things are not all fa-la-la at family gatherings. Getting together is great, but it can also bring conflict. All that cozy togetherness gives space for old issues to appear in new forms.
In a year when politics has polarized, more rancor than usual is likely to get served along with the turkey. Here’s what you can do about it.
Start with a resolution to be nimble at conflict avoidance. You can’t stop others from being pissants, but you can decline to be baited. Avoidance is a great conflict style for situations where you don't have any real goal other than staying out of difficulty.
You probably already know which people and circumstances can handle candor and which cannot. Prepare lines for conflict harmonizing and avoiding that you can easily pull out when needed. To that annoying relative who can’t resist a verbal poke about politics or some other dicey topic, come back with responses that re-direct or de-escalate.
- “You know, I promised myself I’d stay on safe topics this year. Tell me about your new job….”
This diagram contains important clues about an alternative to the widely held notion that religious extremism can be forcefully countered. It's from Ian White, a key strategist behind the scene in stabilizing the Northern Ireland peace process.
Religion is deeply embedded in human experience. The goal in responding to religious extremism must be to work with and constructively engage the powerful energies of religion rather than to remove or thwart them, what White calls "countering".
The latter rarely work out as expected. To the extent that strategies to counter extremism are violent, they share and strengthen the underlying assertion of extremism, that force is acceptable and effective in building a desirable future. Even when not violent, if such strategies fail to engage religious leaders, they are devoid of understanding of the world from which extremism emerges; and thus bereft of potency and sustainability.
The only option for responding to religious extremism without making things ultimately worse is a strategy of transformation.
Such a strategy works respectfully and knowledgeably in regard to the role religion holds in human functioning and it engages religious people where they are. It actively seeks out and finds common cause with those values, symbols, traditions, individuals and institutions that support non-violent responses to human diversity; responses that exist in virtually all religious milieu, even if not always apparent from a distance.
Because the only realistic goal is transformation, not transmission or domination, such an approach must be a dialogue, not a monologue.
The weekend brought a textbook example of under-use of conflict avoidance and its costs.
It started on Friday when Rep. John Lewis picked a quarrel with Trump. "I don't see this President-elect as a legitimate president," he announced in a press statement. Saturday Trump fired back with tweets.
In the context of the long holiday weekend honoring Martin Luther King’s birthday, the exchange echoed thunderously in the media.
Result? Lewis’ book sales skyrocketed. By Sunday leading newspapers were carrying reports that his books were in the top 20 list of booksales and Amazon had sold out all copies of his best known work.
These are scary times, and it's not just COVID19. Polarization is rooted now in ways not experienced in living memory. Groups live in separate worlds, with their own news, networks, rhetoric, and influencers. Violence, threats of violence, and disregard for democratic processes are commonplace. It is not exaggerating to say that the rule of law and democracy seem to be in danger.
What can we do about it? The causes are many; there will be no single solution. High on the list of essential responses, I believe, must be strategies to improve skills in resolving conflicts and building consensus. But how?
Author and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri points out that public institutions today are an inheritance of the 20th century, "the heyday of the top-down, I-talk-you-listen model of organizing humanity. They are too ponderous and too distant from ordinary people. Legitimacy depended on control over information: failure and scandal could be dealt with discreetly. Once the digital tsunami swept away the possibility of control, the system lapsed into crisis." (see his dialogue with Yuval Levin here)
Like it or not, there's no going back to the old ways of leading and managing. We must expand the skill set of leaders at all levels.
Insult has become a daily aspect of life. It's hard to read the newspaper or view screens without encountering it. This is bad, not just for us, but for our future and our children's future.
Public insult damages more than its target. It erodes community by implanting destructive messages in all who witness it, eg:
When insult is allowed to have the last word, when it succeeds in silencing or humiliating people, those messages are planted like seeds. Eventually the seeds become norms and people begin acting on them on a broad scale. Then violence is just a stone's throw away.
Among the many things we can do to prevent this is learning, modeling, and teaching the art of responding constructively to insult, without using insult ourselves.
Don't fight fire with fire. Fight fire with water.
Divided Democrats and Republicans found a way to talk this week, and actually listened to each other, using a talking stick!
The Washington Post on January 28, 2017 reports that Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the few remaining moderate Republicans, convened a bipartisan meeting in her office to explore ways to reopen the government during the recent shutdown. Having succeeded at that, they're now discussing a way forward on immigration issues. They used a Masai talking stick to structure their conversation.
A talking stick - this one borrowed from the renowned cattleherders of Kenya - is an object passed around as people talk, to provide a simple structure of respectful communication. There's one ground rule: You can't speak unless you're holding the talking stick.
The simplest of all tools for facilitating dialogue, the talking stick requires no great expertise or training. No special equipment required. Any simple object will do - a feather, a stone, a pencil, a paperweight.
Usually a talking stick is used with people sitting in a circle, and it's simply passed around the circle, from one person to the next. I've also had success with it in larger settings where people are not in a circle. In this case it can be simply passed back through the group to those wanting to speak, or the facilitator can move around the room and reclaim it after each speaker.
In conflict styles training, you have an option to use either a paper or online version. I used to be ambivalent on this, but no more.
I'm an old-school trainer. I love the simplicity of paper and face-to-face training. But after Style Matters had been out in paper for several years, demand for an online tool drove us to also develop a digital version. That was an eye-opener for me.
After dozens of hours honing our scoring algorithm, I couldn't deny that the score report our server spits out for each user mines the user data in ways I can't match in a workshop from a hand-tallied score summary. It would take quick thinking and 10-15 minutes dedicated to each participant for a trainer to come even close to the detailed insights contained in the 10 page score report generated by our server. That's just not realistic with 10-20 people in a workshop.
So I'm a reluctant convert to the digital version of Style Matters. We still sell the print version, but in my opinion the ideal approach in training is to have users take the online version before the workshop, print out the score report at home, and bring it to a live workshop. (Already, you've saved 20 minutes of group time that would otherwise be spent passing around paper forms, giving instructions, and waiting for everyone to finish!)
Then in a face to face setting take users through a learning experience (supported by this Powerpoint or your own sketch of it) that provides some input on conflict styles, reinforced by review and discussion of digital score reports in small and large group settings.
Do you use an angry voice to communicate or give instructions when a firm, even voice would do the job just as well? I witness this most commonly in sports settings, where it seems to be accepted that coaches and trainers shout angrily at those they are training. I'm not talking about raising the voice to be heard. I mean shouting with angry inflections and body language, to convey authority and motivate.
Sports isn't the only place this happens. Every parent and teacher - and I speak as a veteran of both roles - gets ticked off at the youngsters in our charge sometimes. So do team leaders, managers, and supervisors of all sorts, working with all ages. Frustration comes with the territory of leadership.
Anger is a powerful tool for many good purposes, when used sparingly. The volume and intensity of anger say "Listen up...!" and often people do. When it's exceptional, anger gets attention and underscores a message.
But used frequently, the positive effects of anger diminish. Anger stresses people. Eventually they tune out and turn inwards for relief from the bombardment. Then you have to shout louder for the same effect.
Worse, your emotional outbursts trigger similar responses in others. Drama and disrespect creep into many discussions and become normal. All communication suffers, frustration spirals, and morale goes down.
A great move for improving your effectiveness in conflict is mastering the two-step discussion process. This is a strategy so simple that you might say, “Isn’t it obvious?” No, it’s actually not, especially to task-oriented people like me. But in the right setting, it's a gamechanger.
In a large institution where I worked for many years, I heard stories about the facilities manager. Kathy was an annoying and inflexible nitpicker, I was told. Everyone had a story – we all had to work with her to arrange space and technical support for our meetings and workshops.
Months after I arrived, I too had my moment with Kathy. I needed access to meeting rooms at unusual hours. This required a special key – which she tightly controlled. I also needed permission to bring in special equipment.
In a situation like this, where there's an important problem requiring the cooperation of someone known for being difficult, the two step approach is one of the first strategies to consider. It comes in several forms but here I decided on: Step One: Take steps to establish or affirm the relationship. Step Two: Engage in problem-solving or task activity.
If like millions of other Americans, you will eat turkey on the holidays with family members on a different location on the political spectrum than you, take a look at this interactive New York Times essay with suggestions for how to manage.
For an idea of how many people struggle with this, read the Comments suggestion! For an idea of how many people struggle with this, read the Comments section following the essay!
Many commenters suggest avoidance, a response we recognize and respect in the Style Matters conflict style inventory. Some don’t even go to family gatherings anymore because they’re too contentious. Total avoidance is an extreme response I find hard to justify except for extreme situations. Others counsel diligent avoidance of certain topics, a wise response if the emotional maturity and skill required on at least one side for useful exchange are missing.
This author offers a series of practical suggestions for gentle engagement, set in the context of a bot that the reader interacts with, choosing recommended responses. Readers point out that the angry uncle turns soft too easily in the essay, a fair point. But the techniques are still worth knowing and exploring – you’ll use them with a partner or child or friend someday even if they aren’t right for quelling Uncle Bluster!
Trainers considering Style Matters as a conflict style inventory should be aware of two other options as well, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and the Hammer Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory. Style Matters has been optimized for the majority of conflict resolution trainers. But a percentage of trainers might benefit from a specialized tool.
Optimized for psychometrics. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, also known as the TKI, was developed in the 1970s with a priority on psychometric validation.
The Thomas-Kilmann is noted for its commitment to psychometrics, reflected in its commitment to the use of a question format that forces users to choose between only two possible options in responding. Although some users find this format annoying, authors Thomas and Kilmann retain it because it results, they say, in more accurate data. For a description of my own experience with the TKI, see my blog post on it.
If psychometrics is your over-riding concern, and issues such as user friendliness, cultural flexibility, and cost have little bearing for you, the Thomas-Kilmann is probably the right choice.
Cost is $19.50 per user. A trainer's guide is available for $250.
We're reading a lot these days about leaders who bully.
In "When the Boss is a Bully", a recent NY Times article points out that aggressive toughness has its rewards. Some people like the idea of a very task focused leader. Better to have a leader who gets the job done, albeit rudely, than one who nicely fails to deliver.
People tend to extend the benefit of any doubt to a leader who acts decisively, according to research cited in the Times article. One researcher calls this the "leader's rosy halo" effect, a tendency for others to fall back and follow someone who is bold, decisive, and confident. There is no evidence pushy leaders offer better solutions than anyone else, but others are attracted to decisiveness and tend to follow.
A key concept in the conflict styles framework is that every conflict style has strengths and weaknesses. We need all five styles. Don't write off toughness just because it's not nice.
I learned this the hard way in my twenties when I found myself regretting I had not been more firm with my dog in training. One day she ignored my call, as she often did. She ran onto a road, and died under a car.
Life spares no one from conflict. But unfortunately the word has not yet reached the schools that train professionals.
Name the profession - engineering, teaching, business, social work, lawyer, religion, medicine, whatever. Few professional schools in these professions offer students training in how to navigate the conflicts that come with practice of that profession.
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I would love to hear your ideas for effective learning experiences outside of the classroom! Please send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. With your permission, I'll publish the best ones here.
