The Last Slice of Pizza…
A client lamented that when there was a contentious issue, it usually went off the rails. It wasn’t unheard of for these conversations to dissolve into finger pointing and the occasional personal accusation. He asked why this was happening and what we could do about it. We’ll get to that. But first, you need to understand how people engage with conflict, which we’ll do over a slice of pizza.
Imagine it’s 3pm and you haven’t had lunch. You ravenously stumble into the break room to find a pizza box, and a coworker in a similar state of hunger. You both open the box to find there’s a single slice left. What do you say to your coworker? Problem one of these:
“You look so hungry, you take it”
Your hunger didn’t drive this statement. Deep down, the conflict drove it. More specifically, avoiding the conflict drove you to say this. The conflict is now averted, but you’re still hungry. Your original problem remains because you avoided engaging in conflict.
“This is mine. I’m the hungriest, I should have it.”
Your hunger drove this statement. But so did the conflict. What didn’t drive this statement is consideration for your coworker and what they’re also going through. This reaction may net you the slice of pizza, and the conflict will be over. But you’ll have a coworker whose problem remains.
“Let’s cut it in half so we each get some, that’ll be fair.”
Conflict averted! And without open resentment. But no one got enough to eat. You both started feeling hungry, and you finished that way too. The problem remains for both of you because you compromised, focusing on finding a fair solution, at the expense of solving either of your problems.
“This isn’t enough for us both, let’s check our pockets…”
You both pull out some cash. Your coworker has a $50 but you only have some loose change. Your coworker offers to pay for a pizza so you’ll both get enough to eat, which you accept, remembering to pay it forward another time. The conflict is resolved, AND you’ve each solved your original hunger problem. You collaborated on a solution that met both your needs, and didn’t let a sense of transactional fairness restrict your decision making.
Unpacking the (pizza) Box
There are four major styles of dealing with conflict:
Avoidance: Finding ways to avoid participating in or limiting the amount of conflict, almost always resulting in the individual “losing” or having their goal unmet.
Competing: Treating conflict as zero sum (eg - you either completely lose or completely win), and fighting to be the one coming out on top.
Compromising: Resolving conflict by finding a solution that is generally considered fair, often at the expense of solving the underlying problem.
Collaborating: Working together to achieve a good outcome, even if achieving it isn’t “fair”.
Anyone can exhibit any of these styles at any point, but we all have a style we tend to gravitate towards, for better or worse. Similarly, organizations develop a default conflict style as part of their culture. You may have heard Avoidant organizations referred to as “nice”, in a derogatory way, Competing organizations called “cut throat”, and Compromising organizations referred to as “political”.
On Compromise and Collaboration
While it’s important to understand Avoidant and Competing conflict styles, especially since they drive so much behavior, the biggest impact you can have with a team working towards a shared goal is moving from Compromise to Collaboration. Compromise is often the default when conflicts reach an impasse, but it upends shared goals in favor of fairness. While this feels good in the moment, especially since it mitigates the conflict, you’ve sacrificed your end goals to do so.
So What Was the Plan?
Conflict with this client followed a common pattern. After years of Competing, most folks showed up to interdepartment conflicts ready for a fight. This would play out via mostly professional, but always testy exchanges. Eventually the CEO would intervene and find a compromise solution, something that felt fair to everyone, but didn’t achieve any desired end goals. No one objected to these compromises because they were fair (and ended the conflict), but no one liked the outcomes.
We reset the dynamic by addressing the role the CEO had been playing. He’d been applying his own default style of compromising. Instead, I coached him to do the following instead:
Accept the existence of the conflict. In a way, compromise was like a drug. It made the problem (the conflict) go away quickly but with some undesirable long term consequences. He needed to kick this habit.
Grow the sense of agency his team leads had for each other. These folks didn’t engage much outside of these conflicts, and it was hard for them to fully see each other beyond them.
Push the responsibility for collaborating onto his team leads, rather than fixing things for them. They were closer to the work and better positioned to find creative solutions. We took him out of his mediator role and into more of a coach. The responsibility for collaborating now fell on the team leads who were no longer spoon fed compromise solutions.
Wrapping it Up
Knowing more about conflict styles will help you better manage a team through conflict. A great next step is to get a sense of what styles your reports’ tend towards, and how that might affect conflicts in your workplace. But I also encourage you to think about yourself, what style you default to, and how you can use that knowledge to better show up for your team.
And if you’d like help getting your team better at navigating tough decisions and other points of conflict, let’s set up some time together!
