|
Good conflict resolution skills don’t just make life a little smoother. They can also help advance your career by influencing others’ perception of your leadership potential. While we can all point to someone who has moved up the career ladder despite an abundance of bad behaviors, odds are you won’t be like them if you have more career-stalling conflict behaviors than career-enhancing ones.
Classic career-stalling behaviors include the drive to win at all costs, displaying anger ineffectively, retaliating and carrying grudges, and avoiding conflict. Here are five career-enhancing conflict behaviors that will help keep you upwardly mobile, improve all parts of your life and make you a superb communicator.
1. Stop smoothing over conflict in the name of a peaceable workplace.
While good conflict resolution isn’t about taking on every point of disagreement, if your default behavior is to smooth over disagreements or avoid confronting problems, you aren’t projecting leadership potential. Smoothing over and avoiding important matters makes problems go away temporarily, but also feeds gossip and contributes to tense workplace dynamics. Worse, there can be more damage to relationships in the long run from avoiding rather than confronting and dealing with the problem. Keep this in mind: Confrontation and kindness are not mutually exclusive, and top leaders exhibit both in tandem.
2. Make your peace with the groan zone.
The “groan zone,” a term coined by Sam Kaner, is the place where conflict is messy. It’s the point in a conflict where you feel stuck and uncomfortable. Because of this, most people make the mistake of hurrying out of the groan zone by pushing for the most readily available solution, just to get the conflict over with. Professional mediators know that the groan zone is where the most important work takes place because that’s where you gain a real understanding of the situation’s complexities. Here’s a groan zone tip: Next time you’re feeling uncomfortable in a conflict moment and are tempted to hurry the conversation, pause, take a breath and stay with it a bit longer. Effective managers and executives utilize this skill daily.
3. Take the time to do it right.
There’s an old story of a farmer heading down a bumpy, pothole-ridden dirt road with a cart full of fresh apples. He stops a passerby and asks, “How long will it take me to get to the market?” The other fellow looks at the cart full of apples, then down at the bumpy road and replies, “An hour if you go slowly, and all day if you go fast.” Effective conflict resolution is like carting apples down a bumpy road. In a multitasking, fast-moving workplace, it may seem efficient to hurry through a conflict conversation, but it rarely saves time over the long run.
4. Monitor your emotional state.
Emotional hijackings occur when conflict begins to escalate, and you experience a flood of emotion that distracts you from your conversational goals. Emotional hijackings don’t look or sound the same for everyone: Some people yell, some cry, some get an icy cold demeanor and some run away from the situation. The effective career-enhancing conflict behavior is to track your emotional state and take a break from the conversation before you’re hijacked by your emotions. There’s no rule that once you’re in a conversation you have to keep at it if it’s going downhill. Next time you find yourself getting hot under the collar in a difficult conversation, try saying this: “I realize I’m not bringing my best thinking to this conversation right now. I’d like to take a brief break to gather my thoughts, then come back to this so we can sort it out properly.” Be firm, kind and clear, and you’ll find it’s the rare person who will deny you.
5. Don’t stop communicating when you’re in conflict with another.
If you’re not talking to someone, it’s very hard to sort out a problem efficiently. Burning communication bridges is a toxic behavior for career advancement. Except in instances where you are completely unable to manage yourself, it is usually worth working to keep communication channels open. Avoid e-mail and text messages, which research suggests can exacerbate conflict, and pick up the phone or walk down the hall. When you talk, talk about more than just the thing that divides you because communicating the richness of your work and life keeps you both from seeing only the conflict.
Effective conflict behavior can be learned, and bad conflict habits can be changed with commitment, practice in low-stakes moments and motivation, such as connecting your behavior change with an important goal—like a promotion.
Tammy Lenski, Ph.D., teaches individuals and groups across the U.S. how to untangle disagreements and build dynamic personal and professional partnerships by engaging conflict, communication and organizational change effectively. She blogs about conflict and communication at ConflictZen. |
|
