Conflict is Inevitable
The complex matrix of relationships in any organization means there are abundant opportunities for collision, differences, disagreements, misconnects, battles, contention. In a word, conflict.
Conflict is inevitable, and the engaged team learns to expect conflict to occur early and often. Its natural and automatic response to conflict is to convert it into opportunity, each time and beginning immediately.
It is important to understand conflict for several reasons. First, it is a major impediment to the engaged team. It is also a major opportunity. If you see it otherwise and don't exert direct leadership, conflicts will harden, become part of what your teams live with—and put you that much further from success.
Part of your job as meta-manager—that manager concerned with both the business and also with how your peoples' work habits impact the business—is to bring people together as much as possible. When you effectively guide your people through conflict to opportunity, when you've climbed that difficult mountain together, it creates positive bonding within your teams. By positive bonding the authors mean a feeling of connectedness based on winning together. Negative bonding, which we'll discuss in the next chapter, is based on agreeing about how tough things are, usually because of some other department of function. If your teams don't have positive bonding, they probably have some negative bonding.
With enough practice converting conflicts to opportunities together, your teams will become more and more independent of you in their ability to make these conversions by habit.
How do you create that all-important conversion to opportunity? You begin by distinguishing between the conflict and your emotional reaction to it. This useful distinction eludes many, including Mr. Webster, who defines conflict as A: "Clash, competition, or mutual interference of opposing or incompatible forces or qualities, and B: an emotional state characterized by indecision, restlessness, uncertainty, and tension resulting from incompatible inner needs or drives of comparable intensity."
To dissect the topic, we prefer a sharper scalpel, and will use only the former part of the definition, the one that deals only with the external phenomenon.
Based on this definition, we can say that conflict within an organization can be viewed mechanistically, much like a physics problem.
"Let see, given the data we face, I believe X, Joan believes Y, so that means Joan and I are in opposition to one another on this."
However, our experience of conflict is a different matter altogether. We feel it before we see it, and it doesn't feel good. Call it stress, confusion, frustration, worry, uncertainty, disagreement, distraction, suspicion, impatience, misunderstanding, isolation, or "getting emotional," it all boils down to muck.
Muck is the authors' term for the discomfort in working relationships that arises from conflict. Muck is emotion, and it can be untidy indeed.
Like fraternal twins somewhat different in appearance, conflict and muck are often seen hanging out together. They represent two sides of the same matter. You can look for the external conditions and forces creating conflict, or you can check into how the team feels.
If you catch sight of one twin, the other one is right around the corner. You can count on it. In the engaged team somebody is likely to squeal.
The external conditions and forces constituting conflict, and the way the team feels, constitute two separate but equally valuable portals of understanding.
Copyright July, 2004, Arky Ciancutti, M.D. and Thomas Steding, Ph.D., all rights reserved.
Dr. Arky Ciancutti is founder and CEO of Learning Center Inc. in Marin County, California; author of The View From The Gurney Up and co-author of Built On Trust.
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