Conflict resolution for business, team, and personal relationships
The articles in this section discuss general conflict resolution skills and strategies for executives, HR professionals, mediators, and coaches. They also include occasional announcements about my upcoming public workshops and online conflict resolution courses.
We use tools to do something more effectively and efficiently. But just like physical tools, ill-chosen conflict resolution tools will not yield the results we need. Here are three questions to help choose and use the right conflict resolution tools for the moment.
© 2020 Tammy Lenski
There’s a space that changes form and scale as we navigate our personal and business relationships. It’s the space between us, narrowing and softening when things are going well, widening and hardening in times of tension. The quality of our relationships, the degree of our happiness, and the success of our solutions are all influenced by The Space Between.
When there’s tension in the air, the space between us seems to widen.
When we face a messy problem, the space between where we are and where we want to be can feel cavernous.
When we’re dissatisfied with our reaction, the space between how we acted and how we want to act can feel full of potholes, waiting to trip us as we stumble along.
We all know this space. We talk about it with words and phrases like “lack of trust,” “chronic conflict,” “relationship problem,” and “impasse.”
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has some insights about the space between:
Happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you; Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.
Jonathan haidt
We’ve got to get the conditions right:
In mediation we use the phrase, “holding the space.” It means not filling the space with our own judgments, discomfort or desires, but holding the space open so that the important work can be done and done well by the people we’re serving.
Getting the conditions right is also about more than the transactional nature of any conflict resolution process. We think of conflict resolution as an action or an interaction. True enough, but not thorough enough. Sometimes the solution is in the conditions we set up around us; sometimes it’s in the work we do with ourselves.
It is worth the effort:
When the space between is widening, it feels increasingly uncomfortable to traverse. It’s full of unknowns. A misstep feels like it can cause catastrophe. We try to navigate around it, to avoid the discomfort, hurrying to solutions like we hurry through the woods at dusk, hoping to get safely home before the wolves come out.
But as Frost taught us, the best way out is always through.
And so it is with The Space Between. The best way to the other side — to them, to where you hope to get, to who you hope to be — is through The Space Between, slowing down, taking a breath, raising up for consideration and conversation those things that have been widening the space.
Maybe you’ll say, “Things have felt tense between us lately. I really want it to be different.”
Maybe you’ll say, “I’m embarrassed by my strong reaction to what you said. I think my strong reaction was telling me something important that it would be helpful to discuss, but I don’t condone the way I said it.”
Maybe you’ll say, “It feels like we’re growing apart. I want to see if we can find some ways to narrow the space between us again.”
Image courtesy Tanja Heffner
I’ve had repeated requests for the language I use to describe and define common conflict resolution terms like dispute, conflict, mediation, and facilitation. Here’s the language I use and a PDF download suitable for printing.
Some definitions are contextual. That’s true for terms related to intangibles like conflict and conflict resolution as well.
In a handout I prepared years ago for graduate students in my theory of conflict resolution and negotiation course, proposed definitions of conflict showed the influence of world events, the academic discipline of the writer, and the rise and fall of popular terms.
Example: During the Cold War, sociologist Lewis Coser wrote that social conflict “is a struggle between opponents over values and claims to scarce status, power and resources.” Today, in a post-Cold War world, Folger, Poole and Stutman’s commonly-referenced definition of conflict is “the interaction of interdependent people who perceive incompatible goals and interference from each other in achieving those goals.”
The language I used will be contextual, too, though mine is deliberately less academic. I have a preference for simple, straightforward language and my definitions most likely reflect that much of my conflict resolution work centers on helping people in states of conflict and who must be or want to be in continued personal or professional relationship.
These are the definitions I find myself teasing out most frequently:
Dispute: A disagreement, often short-term.
Conflict: A state of disharmony, perhaps long-term.
Negotiation: Discussion aimed at finding common ground or mutual agreement.
Mediation: A process for resolving disputes and conflict in which another person, substantively impartial, helps the parties negotiate a solution.
Facilitation: A process for helping a group reflect on and discuss a matter, solve problems, and/or make decisions; there may or may not be conflict.
ADR: Alternative dispute resolution is a collection of processes available for resolving conflict and disputes. “Alternative” signifies that these processes (mediation, coaching, arbitration, etc.) are different from traditional resolution processes like grievances or court. Some ADR providers prefer “appropriate dispute resolution” to signal that these processes should no longer stand in the shadow of traditional processes and that the best process should be determined by the circumstances of the conflict or dispute.
Here are a few resources that have informed my thinking about this over the years:
Whakawhanaungatanga is a Māori process for establishing relationships. In the following interview I explore the tradition, identity, trust-building, and conflict resolution with New Zealanders Hilary Unwin and Pereri Hathaway.
A few weeks ago I published a post about the value of shared experience for increasing empathy during conflict situations. After I published that post, New Zealand Human Rights Commission mediator Hilary Unwin wrote me about a Māori tradition called whakawhanaungatanga, which is a process for establishing relationships.
Whakawhanaungatanga is a way for Māori to discover connections between themselves and the people they’re talking to. Hilary told me that she uses it in some of her mediation work to establish a mood of trust and openness at the start of a mediation.
The result of that email exchange was a conversation with Hilary and Pereri Hathaway, senior administrator with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission. Pereri, who is Māori, helps the Commission work with indigenous peoples in New Zealand and provides support for indigenous peoples there and around the world.
They were kind enough to let me record the interview to share with you.
My friend, there are some things I want to say about mediation with me, things I hope you’ll ponder before we gather, things I hope will guide you as we talk. I may mention them a time or two during our time together.
Mediation is about learning. It’s about learning something you didn’t understand before, something that may have been hidden by the frustration between you. It’s about learning what matters so deeply to the other person that unless you address it, you will remain stuck. It’s about learning what’s hooked you so deeply, too, revealing itself to you gradually until there it is, staring you in the face and begging to be acknowledged. Please understand that if you only talk about what you already think you know, nothing new will happen in mediation. That would be a shame.
To learn best, you must do some of the same things you do anytime you want to learn: You must listen with curiosity and wonderment, turning off your certainty for a time. You must not talk all the time, because it is impossible to absorb new information when you’re focused on output. You must pause and chew and digest. I will help hold the space for this.
Mediation is about the future. It is tempting, so tempting, to spend your energy on what happened and didn’t happen and was said and was not said and what was wrong and not wrong. Your frustration will want to keep you there. Mediation won’t ignore the past, but neither will it dwell there, for mediation is about what will happen from this moment forward, from today on, that addresses what’s between you. You cannot change what happened but you still have dominion over today and some of tomorrow.
To look to the future, you must face forward more often than you look over your shoulder because you will fall down if you walk while looking behind you. You will hear me nudge you toward the future and help you figure out what to do with the past so that it informs you without constricting you. I will help create the space and the circumstance for this.
Mediation is about what matters. If you’re working with me, then you’re no doubt mediating something between you and a person with whom you’ll be in ongoing relationship. Perhaps a partner, perhaps a co-worker, perhaps a sibling or parent or friend. Relationships are nurtured by attending to what really matters and figuring out how not to trap yourself in the minutiae of small annoyances. You must talk about what matters. Everything else — the same argument you keep having, the lawsuit you’ve threatened, the problem you notice daily — they hint at what matters but they are not what matters.
To focus on what matters, you must dig a bit, be willing to look beneath. Sometimes you must step back and look at the broader picture. Sometimes you also have to look at what is working and figure out how to do more of that (as you learned when you first sat behind the wheel, when you focus only on potholes, you end up steering right into them). I will help create space to figure out and talk about what really matters. They may be different things for each of you. That is ok.
Mediation may make you laugh, may make you cry, may make you want to yell, may make you want to jitterbug with joy. It is wrong to think of the mediation table as a place of pain. It can be that, yes, but it can also be the place of delight and solace and freedom. Sometimes we appreciate joy more when it shines in contrast to the discomfort that preceded it.
We’ll sit down together soon. I’ll be there to learn, to look to the future, to focus on what matters. Please take my outstretched hand and join me.
Even after a dispute has been resolved, distrust and tension can linger. Even when you’ve made every effort to resolve a conflict, the other person may seem stuck in it still. Is there anything you can do when someone you live, work with, or serve doesn’t seem to be moving on after conflict? There is, but first, you need to understand why.
What prevents someone from letting go and moving on after conflict? Here are some of the most common reasons I come across in my mediation and coaching work:
Something is unfinished for them. There’s something in the conflict that hasn’t been attended to sufficiently and continues to nag at them. Even if you feel it’s all done, that may not be their experience at all. Consider asking, Is there something we haven’t discussed that’s still lingering for you?
They fear a stone has been left unturned. They may think there’s something else that can still be done. Or that all the options weren’t thoroughly discovered and considered. Or that you all haven’t given it your best shot. Consider asking, Is there something we haven’t tried that you wish we had?
They have a stuck story. Like a movie trailer, a stuck story is a montage of the most interesting moments in a conflict, with certain scenes magnified and others omitted. It’s not the story of the conflict; it’s their story of the conflict (you have one too). I wrote a whole book on this; it’s an easy read and people tell me it’s helped them find their freedom again.
The conflict has become a habit. When states of conflict and tension go on long enough, they can become habits of mind (like stuck stories) and body (in the ways we interact). Even when a conflict has been attended to and there’s sufficient satisfaction with a resolution or agreement, the old habits may take longer to change. They may be waiting to see if the solution will really work. They may not even be aware that the old habits are still in play. Consider observing, I’m noticing you still do X when I do Y, like when we were angry with each other. Have you noticed that too?
There’s something they haven’t yet said or heard. Maybe there’s something on their mind and they haven’t drummed up the courage to say it out loud yet. Maybe there’s something they’re waiting to hear from you. Consider asking, Is there anything you’ve been waiting to say or hear?
It isn’t really over. Sometimes, hurrying to resolution can leave something undone or not understood. Maybe they felt compelled to agree to something they still have reservations about. Maybe the resolution served you more than it served them. Maybe the resolution didn’t really end up working for them after all. The list of possibilities here is quite long. Consider asking, Is there something about the problem between us that’s still unresolved for you?
You’re reading into it. Maybe you’re the one with the stuck story, the habit of mind or body. Maybe you suspect something wasn’t fully addressed. Maybe something’s eating at you. Consider asking yourself, Is the signal coming from them…or am I sending it to myself?
There’s an old mediator technique that can be useful for getting at why someone isn’t letting go and moving on from conflict: Transparency + curiosity. The technique is to observe out loud what you’re noticing and ask a curiosity-based question about it. Be kind, don’t judge, don’t accuse, just notice and wonder with them.
It might sound something like this: I find myself thinking that you’re not letting go of what happened, but I realize I don’t really know if that’s true at all. Am I off the mark?
Or like this, Things still feel tense between us. Why do you think that is?
If you ask these questions, you must be prepared that their answer may have much to do with what you’re doing or not doing as it does with them. These are questions that invite honesty in the name of real resolution. Try to resist pushing back if you don’t like their answer or if they have something difficult to say to or about you.
If you ask these questions, you must also be prepared that they may not want to answer them. Or that the answers they give leave you unsatisfied. These questions are an invitation and I have found them to be very powerful, but readiness to answer does matter. You cannot know when they will be ready. You can only ask them in a way that signals you care, are interested, and are open to whatever they’re willing to say.
Of course, some conflict will not get tied up with a bow and put cleanly away. Effects linger. With bigger conflict and with longer-term conflict, the effects linger longer. It will take time. Trust, like Rome, doesn’t get built (and rebuilt) in a day. Conflict resolution is a long game.
Conflict and suffering are confederates working in painful alliance, each feeding the other as if to ensure its own continued existence. If I turn away from the suffering in conflict, I deny a part of my clients’ experience. If I try to fix suffering, I assume a task that is not really mine to shoulder. Here’s one way I’ve found it helpful to think about, respond to, and help ease suffering.
There are days that the suffering I see in my work weighs heavily:
I recall resting my head on my car’s steering wheel and sobbing for minutes on end after a termination of parental rights mediation years ago, a case where there had been so much suffering in the mediation room that my shoulder was still damp from a mother’s tears.
I recall the suffering of a woman in a workplace mediation as she revealed to her office mates about the ways domestic violence at home had made it difficult to do the physical parts of her job sometimes.
I recall the crushed and horrified expressions of a teenage son and daughter when their aunt pointed across the table to them and said, less than three minutes into a mediation related to their deceased mother’s estate, “If ever there was a case for abortion, those two are it.”
And there are days the suffering I see is less intense, less raw, but no less important: The suffering of shame for having acted badly for a few minutes. The suffering of ongoing tension and ugliness that greets a couple as they return home from work each day. The suffering from an insult that cuts like a knife’s edge during an argument.
It is not possible to mediate, either informally or professionally, without being in the presence of suffering. I don’t want suffering to overwhelm me, nor do I want to fight it or ignore it, as though only certain portions of my clients’ conflict matter.
But I do want to ease suffering to the degree any mediator can; it is part of what calls me to this work. I want to give suffering my loving attention, even when I don’t really have a way to make it dissolve. To do this, I have to turn toward it.
I am very drawn to a phrase used by physicians Ronald Epstein and Anthony Back in their article, A Piece of My Mind: Responding to Suffering: Small caring actions.
Like mediators, physicians can address only a portion of human suffering through diagnosis and treatment alone. Epstein and Back ask physicians not to withdraw from big or persistent suffering when they feel helpless to assuage it. Rather, they say, physicians should turn toward the suffering:
Turning toward means recognizing suffering, becoming curious about the patient’s experience, and intentionally becoming more present and engaged. Recognizing suffering may not be straightforward; suffering often manifests as indirect emotional expressions, inconsistencies in patients’ narratives, or discomfort within clinicians themselves — a momentary awareness that something is not quite right even before they can characterize why. Turning toward requires us to cultivate a permeability to the patient’s experience and to pay attention to our own experience as we enter the patient’s world.
I like this notion of permeability to another’s experience; it narrows the divide between them and me. “Turning toward,” Epstein and Back tell us, is about being emotionally available and intentionally attending to another’s experience:
Here, loyalty, honesty, shared humanness, non-abandonment — and even love — are expressed through small caring actions: The extra minute at the bedside, the call to a worried relative, the choice of words and gestures.
The idea of “small caring actions” feels right to me. Small caring actions are human-scale instead of hero-scale, focusing me on small gestures instead of grandiose acts of rescue. Small gestures put the other person at the center of my attention, while grandiose acts of rescue distract me from them and put me at the center of attention.
Small caring actions help me circumvent helplessness because I can always muster a kind word, a few more minutes of undiluted attention, a gentle beckoning to go on, say more. Instead of feeling powerless because I cannot fix the suffering, I feel the power that comes from caring and doing something simple in response.
It’s tempting to feel triumphant when we successfully back our nemesis into a figurative corner. But it’s ill-advised triumph. Cornering triggers our evolutionary baggage, leads to outcomes unlikely to stand the test of time, and leaves all sorts of debris in the personal or working relationship. Here are ways to address and prevent cornering in your own and others’ conflicts.
“If you can,” said Kay, “try to get an office that has more than one door.”
It was the last day in my assistant dean job and I was meeting with my vice president, Kay, one last time to say good-bye. The next day, I’d be heading across town to take my new job as dean at another college.
I’d asked Kay what advice she had for me. She added the door comment almost as an afterthought. But it has resonated for years.
Initially, I understood Kay’s advice to mean I should have a literal second escape path. Not long before, we’d watched an unfortunate scene unfold at another university in town. When student protestors had taken over the new president’s outer offices, he had no other way to get out. Except the window. Photos of his derrière as he climbed down a ladder were the beginning of the end for his very brief presidency.
Over time, though, I began to understand Kay’s advice in less literal terms. As I did more and more conflict resolution work, I could see how important it was not to let people get backed into (or back themselves into) corners. Decisions made from conflict corners tend to have short shelf lives (click to tweet this).
As I mediated and noticed cornering, I’d hear Kay’s voice in my head: “More than one door.”
The baggage of evolution causes cornering to produce bad results. In evolutionary terms, backed into a cave or teetering on the edge of a cliff meant likely death. The closer we got, the harder we had to fight to survive or find an escape.
Millenia later, getting backed into a figurative corner during an argument doesn’t require such drastic reaction. But react we do when that evolutionary baggage kicks in, perhaps well below our consciousness. We resist, we defend, we outright fight.
Just like Kay taught me all those years ago, I like to leave myself a figurative spare door or two. It keeps me from feeling cornered and it allows me to save face if I decide to change my tune later.
One way I do this is with the request, “Convince me.”
When I feel quite certain about something, I try to say, “Well, convince me I’m wrong about this.” Maybe they will. It has happened. With some frequency.
When they do, I am able to say, “You did a good job of convincing me.” They feel good about it and I feel less bad, in face-saving terms, than I otherwise might.
“Convince me” isn’t just a powerful tool we can use to get ourselves out of tight corners. We can use it to help our sparring partner stay out of the corner, too. It’s tempting to think of the corner as exactly the place we want them, but we’d be deluding ourselves.
I might say, “Will you allow me to try convincing you, even for just a few minutes?” I may not succeed, but I will have postponed the self-cornering and maybe they’ll hear something that opens up new doors neither of us noticed.
When I’m mediating and notice someone who seems to be backing themselves into a corner, I like to take them aside privately and raise the challenges we face when we get ourselves stuck in a corner. I’ll say something like, “I don’t want to see you get stuck in a corner because corners are hard to get back out of later. What can I do to help that not happen for you?”
When I notice someone maneuvering someone else into a corner, I may take them aside privately to discuss the ways cornering is likely to make things worse. I tell them about evolutionary baggage. I talk about loss of face and the bad feelings it leaves. I tell them about short shelf lives.
I muse, “Instead of backing them into a corner, I wonder what could happen if you leave them an escape for now?”
What do you use to keep yourself out of corners? If you mediate, how do you help your clients have more than one door? Hit me up on twitter or drop me a note.
