Managing Covid Conflict

Bring Your Best Game Home

I don’t need to tell you that flattening the curve by isolating ourselves from most people other than our families has stirred up epic levels of conflict not just at home but in the United States as well. We’re a rambuctious lot, descendents of immigrants, enslaved peoples, and the native Americans who came to regret welcoming pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Protected by two oceans from foreign invasions, we mostly cause our own troubles - the dust bowl comes to mind as the last environmental cataclysm and the ‘29 stock market crash as the last apocalyptic economic misadventure.

Since we’re culturally and politically warring with one another, I thought it was a good time to dust off a few conflict resolution skills.

Conflict Isn’t the Problem; The Way We Handle It Is

As I say in The Grownups’ ABCs of Conflict Resolution

Conflict is neither good nor bad. It simply is. If we avoid and suppress conflict we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to grow. If we learn how to effectively resolve it, we become not only more sociable, but more content and productive.

If we use it to transform our experience of the world and our value in it, conflict can open new vistas and provide us with fuller lives. When we transcend conflict, we can move on to new experiences and new challenges that enliven and embolden us and our fellows.

Conflict Resolution Styles

Most people learn how to respond to conflict and resolve disputes in their families when they are children. Many people never stop to think that there might be a better, more effective way to deal with conflict and disputes than the way they’ve been doing since they were in elementary school.

There are five primary conflict resolution styles that most people use in responding to conflict – suppression, avoidance, resolution, transformation and transcendence.

Suppression

You’ll recognize the suppression resolution style whenever you think back to parents, teachers, siblings and workmates telling you not to talk about something in dispute or not to express a feeling, be it anger, sadness, irritation or frustration.

People who suppress conflict never get to the heart of the matter. They’re never clear about why they’re having a dispute in the first place or how they could possibly solve the problem because they’re so busy pretending that it doesn’t exist.

Avoidance

Avoidance isn’t as hard to break through as the active suppression of conflict but it still requires gentle probing to help everyone involved discuss the dispute in enough detail to problem-solve it.

Conflict avoiders, like conflict suppressors, are often afraid that airing the dispute will cause them or their opponent to lose control, shout, hurl insults at one another, or cause them shame and humiliation. They pretend not to hear, cut off relations, refuse to take phone calls, and leave the room when their perceived adversary attempts to make contact.

Not speaking to one another?

Try these three steps

The Keys to Successful Resolution

An unresolved conflict is like a missing limb. It continues to cramp and burn, itch and twitch. Because we’re pretending it doesn’t exist, there's no way to scratch or soothe it.

Resolution begins with the willingness to openly acknowledge a conflict exists, remembering that it can exist without being acknowledged.

Conflict most often exists in situations of scarce resources whether someone complains about it or not. A dispute erupts from a conflict when you, for instance, choose to call attention to your displeasure about unequal pay, the promotion of someone you deem less worthy than you or your partner always taking the bigger piece of the pie.

The potential for a happy resolution begins with the willingness to listen.

It’s easy to talk, to vent about the unequal distribution scarce resources but its risky to listen to the reasons they’ve been divided in the manner they have. Because you might possibly learn that you’re wrong.

But listen we must. Actively listen. As dispassionately as possible.

Like this:

I hear you saying that Joe’s sales for 2019 were 20% higher than mine. Right? And that’s why he was promoted and I wasn’t?

Followed up with questions to deepen both your and your dispute partner’s understanding.

Do you know why his sales were 20% higher?

Followed by the reason you still think the promotion was unfair to you.

Do you (or does HR) remember that I took three months maternity leave last year? And that my monthly sales were in fact 15% higher than Joe’s?

And then, key to resolution, focusing on the problem as a a mutual challenge that both parties are willing to find a solution for, sitting, as it were, on the same side of the table with the problem laid out before them.

There’s lots more, of course, to successfully resolving a dispute. But if everyone who is at odds with someone else took these initial three steps, the chances that the conflict would be resolved in a way to meets the interests of everyone is vastly increased.

I’ll be talking about some of the best ways to problem solve instead of fighting in the coming weeks, knowing that we’re all a little ragged on the edges and could use some help with our all too fallible human relations.