Conflict Creates Collaboration
SUMMARY
Do you find that your interpersonal relationships are damaged by conflict? Do you like to avoid conflict altogether and just run away or are you in there, boots and all?
This week, I want to continue our conversation around Interpersonal Effectiveness by helping you to understand that conflict creates collaboration and giving you these 5 steps on how to approach conflict and then navigate it with another person.
1. Set the scene.
2. Gather information.
3. Agree on the problem.
4. Brainstorm possible solutions to the problem.
5. Negotiate calmly around the solution.
Conflict is something that can strengthen a relationship. It's healthy. It's like making mistakes: they're great and you can learn from them.
By working on those things together with respect, agreeing that it's okay for you both to have an opinion, you are going to be able to have a much better relationship with that person.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you find that your interpersonal relationships are damaged by conflict? Do you like to avoid conflict altogether and just run away or are you in there, boots and all?
Well, stick with me because in this week's episode, I'm going to show you how to use the conflicts in your relationships to strengthen them.
I want to continue our conversation around Interpersonal Effectiveness by helping you to understand that conflict creates collaboration.
Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about Interpersonal Effectiveness.
We started the month by talking about “It All Starts with You” – the relationship that you have with yourself. That needs to be restated, as we go into this final part of the topic today, because it’s what you make things mean when people speak about you that can really send things off the rails or propel you into great relationships.
I talked to you about the things that were harmful - those roadblocks that would stop you from having great interpersonal effectiveness. Last week, I talked to you about the topic: “It is okay for everyone to have an opinion.” In this topic, you learned that just because someone has an opinion that is different to you, it doesn't make you wrong.
Conflict comes when you fail to work on the things we've already gone through this month.
What I want to do now is just wrap it up with a five-step process that you can go through to help you to be able to navigate conflict in a healthy way so it actually becomes something that's positive in your relationships rather than negative.
As I talked to you about a couple of weeks ago, conflict itself is an opportunity for conversation. It's an opportunity for you to learn new things and go beneath the surface in any relationship.
When you look at conflict as having some benefit, when it's navigated in a healthy way, then you can go through what I'm going to teach you this week and use it to your advantage.
Let me talk about what you’re going to do here in these 5 steps. You are now going to look at how to approach conflict and how to then navigate it with another person.
When you follow this process (I love the word process because it's a logical thing that you're going to do) then you will be able to have many different results than what you might be having now.
1. Set the scene.
This is all about setting boundaries and ground rules, where both you and the other person talk about how you're going to work through your disagreement.
So, setting those boundaries as to what's acceptable and what's not acceptable behaviour is really important.
2. Gather information
Once again, because it's information, you're using a logical process in your brain, rather than going down into the emotion of it, which has the tendency if you are low in your personal power to take things personally.
You’re just gathering information, “What do you think?” “What do I think?” Getting it down; it's all a logical process.
You’re not talking about whether it's right or wrong or different. You're just gathering information.
To do this, it's all about asking questions. In fact, more questions than making statements.
Last week, I talked to you how sometimes what people do is state their opinions as facts. However, when you do that, it creates a barrier.
So, in gathering information, what you want to do is do it in a casual way that says, “Hey, I want to understand more around what you feel in this situation. Tell me more.”
Just by being curious, says that you want to work together. It's not you standing over and dictating what it is that you believe.
3. Agree on the problem.
What you're doing here incrementally is getting points of agreement.
You agreed that there is an issue, now you're going to go deeper and agree on what the actual problem is. You're not going to solve it just yet. You're going to agree that there is a problem that you and the other person believe exists.
By getting this incremental agreement, it's moving forward together.
4. Brainstorm possible solutions to the problem.
By working together and collaborating on what you could do to solve your problem (the one that you and the person agree exists) then that working together is where you're going to be strengthening the relationship because you agree on something and you are working towards a common goal.
At this point, you're just throwing in scenarios:
“What do you think we could do?”
“Here's what I think we could do.”
Putting those altogether and laying them out on the table.
5. Negotiate calmly around the solution.
After you've brainstormed, you've got a number of solutions there, and you negotiate which is the actual solution that you're going to use here.
By going through that process, rather than just hitting point five straight up, you’ve worked together – you’ve collaborated.
Now, you don't live in a perfect world, as I say all the time, you're not always going to get the exact outcome you want. However, when you go through and navigate conflict with somebody in this way, you've got a much better chance of eliminating the roadblocks and the problems that you had before.
Conflict is something that can strengthen a relationship. It's healthy. It's like making mistakes: they're great and you can learn from them.
Conflict goes beneath the surface and allows you to find out more about each other: What you value and what it is that is important to you.
By working on those things together with respect, agreeing that it's okay for you both to have an opinion, you are going to be able to have a much better relationship with that person.
So, there you have it, the five steps that you can go through to incrementally build trust and to get an agreement so that you can turn conflict into collaboration.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue our conversation where I'm going to start a whole new series that will help you to empower yourself, to be able to get the results that you want.
I'll see you then.
