Craig E. Runde is Director of New Program Development at the Leadership Development Institute of Eckerd College and Executive Director of the Center for Conflict Studies at Eckerd. He directs business development for the Conflict Dynamics Profile assessment and serves as lead instructor for the instrument. Previously, he served as Director of Wake Forest University International Center for Computer Enhanced Learning and as an adjunct professor in education in politics at Wake Forest University. He has also been an adjunct professor at University of Minnesota Law School.
Tim A. Flanagan is Director of Custom Programs at the Leadership Development Institute at Eckerd College. He has designed and delivered public and custom leadership and team development programs for many clients including Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Energy Northwest, and the US Department of Energy.
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KE: Let’s begin by having you tell us what prompted you two to write this book.
TF: There is so much conflict in the world and within organizations. Many individual leaders come to us with issues that revolve around conflict and they are looking for help. Four major studies have been done in the last 30 years, and it turns out that most managers believe they spend 20-30% of their time dealing with conflict. So it seemed like an important and natural topic on which to write a book.
CR: We have also looked at the great costs that are inflicted on organizations when they don’t handle conflict well. One of our colleagues, Dan Dana, suggested that the largest controllable cost within organizations is better conflict management. The kind of costs we are talking about include things like wasted management time, and lost employees resulting from conflict with their managers. Also, absenteeism is often caused by people not showing up as a way to avoid conflicts they are in, or because they are stressed out because of poorly handled conflict. And, there are larger cost issues like lawsuits and vandalism that can result from poorly managed conflict.
KE: What does it mean to be “competent” at conflict?
CR: In our book we suggest that competent conflict leaders need to do two different things. First of all, they need to be personally competent in dealing with conflict. Secondly, they need to be a champion within their organization for more widespread skill development around conflict. We think they need to start with themselves in order to be credible when they then issue the call to others to do the same.
The first step in becoming more competent is: knowing its importance and the value associated with it. That is why we almost always begin by talking about the costs associated with dealing with conflict, and in particular, the costs if you don’t deal with it effectively.
Second, we begin to look at how they personally respond to conflict. What kinds of things trigger them; get them angry in conflict situations? They begin to understand how they behave when they are faced with conflict, which leads to the development of better, more constructive conflict skills, which they will then use during conflict situations and model for others in their organization. Once they have done that, then they are in a position to become a more effective champion of conflict competence throughout their organization. That involves getting other people involved in skill development and, as we will see later, making sure that the organization's overall values are aligned with effective conflict management skills.
KE: You have a quote in your book that I liked very much, it says "conflict is inevitable for leaders and it exists at the root of some of their best ideas and at the core of many of their worst failures." In your experience, how well do organizations typically do in helping leaders develop the skills for the inevitable conflict that will arise?
TF: That is part of what makes us so passionate about this topic, that conflict is inevitable. So often, conflict is seen as a dirty word. We think there are some very positive consequences of conflict and one way to think about that is if there were no conflict, we would all share the same ideas, act the same, etc. At its root, we see conflict as inevitable because of the inevitable differences that exist. People have differences and those differences can be taken advantage of to get creative solutions and ideas or we can allow those differences to spiral out of control and lead to what most of us usually see as conflict.
Your question, Karen, was how well do organizations do in helping leaders develop the skills? We think they are getting better, but there is so much emphasis on getting the right answer. The way we look at it, there may be more than one right answer, and organizations who find more than one right answer are those organizations that get ahead. As we have more experience with organizations that are willing to allow conflict to not fester, but to ruminate with folks, they see it can be the source of some great creativity. It is a big leap to take from the old command and control type of organization to one where many different perspectives are embraced. That is what we are advocating; embrace conflict because there is a lot of creative juice there.
CR: Right now, an important topic for many organizations is innovation. And innovation can't exist without conflict and that whole arena means sometimes we have to be able to deal with and/or manage ambiguity. People will see it differently; think differently about ideas that might often be the source of consternation and misunderstanding. But at the very root where people see it differently, the response can be, “Wow! You see it another way. Tell me more about it. That is interesting, cool and thought-provoking,” rather than, “How can you not see it my way?” It’s a very limiting kind of viewpoint.
TF: I think the problem is often that people take criticism of their ideas as somehow criticism of them personally. That is one of the things that really seems to get in the way of being able to make the most out of conflict. There is a good book on the subject called Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For an Answer. It’s based on some of the same research underlying our work that essentially says that with most conflicts, if you handle them well, you can generate vigorous debate.
Vigorous debate leads to a situation where people can make decisions that are much more informed. The issues have been well vetted. But the problem often times is that people are scared to do that and they avoid conflict at all costs. In reality, the costs of conflict avoidance are very high.
KE: What are some signs that a conflict is getting out of control?
CR: We think the signs are mostly attached to the amount of emotional engagement one is experiencing if they have differences. We have what we call “Five Intensity Levels of Conflict.” At the lowest intensity level is what we would define as differences. An example I like to use is from a number of years ago, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played the Oakland Raiders in the Super Bowl. My brother-in-law is an avid Raiders fan, I was an avid Buccaneers fan and we had some pretty spirited debates leading up to the Super Bowl about which team would win. We had differences of opinion, but those differences never got emotional.
TF: If you can deal with conflict when the intensity level is at the differences level, that keeps emotion out of the debate and you can generate lots of creative energy. Another intensity level we define as misunderstanding and we think that happens a lot in organizations. If you and I have had a conversation and we leave that conversation without clarity, we might go do different things as a result of that conversation. That misunderstanding can be the root of conflict, if we don’t deal with why there was some misunderstanding.
The third level is actually kind of the fulcrum level; we call that disagreement. It’s the point at which we see things differently, or we have had a misunderstanding and negative emotion begins to leak in. There is some discomfort with the differences or the misunderstanding that we are having. Once our emotions are engaged, in some ways all bets are off because we can follow our emotions and begin doing destructive things to each other, or we can cool off our emotions and continue to deal with the topic. The disagreement level is where negative emotions first begin to leak in.
The two highest levels, and this is where conflict probably gets its bad name, are what we call discord and polarization. Discord is where our differences are not only severe, but the emotions begin to come into play where I would say angry things to you Karen or to you Craig and this anger gets involved such that the conflict begins to spiral out of control. Polarization, the most severe level of intensity, is where we view the conflict with the other person or parties and we can hardly imagine that there could be reconciliation. We are really at odds. In the newspapers today we read about wars and other examples of these levels of intense conflict. Once they get to polarization, it takes a lot of energy to move back down that intensity level. But that is where conflict probably gets its bad name. We typically associate conflict with discord or polarization, rather than differences or misunderstandings.
KE: Where would you recommend a person get started in becoming conflict competent?
TF: Although we would never advocate that anybody who has to deal with conflict needs to become an expert in the topic, it is helpful to have some basic understanding of how conflict unfolds. Beyond that we are big advocates of self awareness, self understanding. Knowing how you typically respond to conflict is really the first step in being able to be competent as a participant in conflict. Understand yourself. Begin to develop some self control, in other words be able to cool down what we call “hot buttons” so you don’t immediately fall back to that instinctual level of fight or flight.
Once we know how we respond, and can develop some self control, we then can choose to be constructive in our behaviors. The constructive behaviors include being able to perspective take, or to reach out to others, or create solutions. Next, once you have self control and are making some good decisions in managing conflict, using constructive behaviors, instead of destructive ones, then you can actually become a model and/or a champion of dealing with conflict effectively in the organization. And it often begins with one person, whom we hold up in our organization as someone that we would seek out for advice when we have conflict. The more positive role models we have, the better for the organization.
CR: Let me just add a couple of things on some of the elements of understanding the basic dynamics of conflict. The real issue is that conflict is all about differences. The amount of emotional tension that comes from it will affect whether or not it blows up. Being able to maintain some self-control early on is particularly important. Since it is about differences, conflict is inevitable. You are going to have to deal with it all the time so there is a real benefit in learning how to do it effectively. How people behave largely will affect whether or not conflict goes bad or good. Tim mentioned earlier about our instinctual fight or flight responses that long ago would have kept you alive. Even today, sometimes fight or flight types of responses will keep you alive and therefore are an important part of being human. However, when you work in organizations where you have interdependent ongoing relationships with people, those types of responses no longer work. It’s almost like we are finding ourselves in new circumstances where historically evolved responses to conflict no longer work well and we have to learn new ones, which are these constructive responses we will talk more about.
KE: You talked about the importance of self awareness as a first step. What would we be looking for within ourselves?
TF: In many of our workshops, one of the first steps we ask our participants to take is to literally take an assessment. We have a tool that we talk a lot about in our book called the Conflict Dynamics Profile that can be used to do just a self assessment, or can be used as a 360-assessment. It asks people to honestly evaluate themselves in terms of how they respond to conflict when it begins, during the conflict level, and after the conflict. How do they honestly believe that they interact with their conflict partner? When used as a 360 instrument, it’s really pretty interesting. You do a self-evaluation and then ask a number of other folks with whom you work to evaluate you on those same items. Sometimes that is a wakeup call because our own self-perception may not be accurately describing how we look to others.
This self-awareness component helps us understand what our behaviors look like to ourselves and what they look like to others. And we also get a pretty good idea of the kinds of things that might set us off in conflict and those are what we call “hot buttons.” The better able we are to discern certain kinds of situations in our own minds, certain kinds of people might set us off. We then can make a decision to be more prepared for those situations or people when we encounter them day in and day out. Knowing our behavioral, almost gut level response to conflict situations is really the first step in being able to monitor and/or change our behavioral responses.
KE: What are some examples of the hot buttons that you include in your assessment instrument - the Conflict Dynamics Profile?
CR: It’s these hot buttons that are exactly the thing that generate the emotional energy that can drive up those levels of intensity that Tim was talking about before. Hot buttons are essentially behaviors in other people that tend to get us angry. Examples are some of the ones that are measured deal with untrustworthy people, unreliable people, and hostile people. There is a number of them and again it would be worthwhile for people to take a moment and think about what kind of behaviors in other people really push your buttons because what this does is it gives you almost an early warning system. You can then work to stay centered, and not get thrown off balance. The worst thing is for somebody to push your button, you get angry and then say or do something you later wish you hadn’t. And so in some respects, the self awareness around hot buttons is to keep you from getting in trouble in the first place.
TF: Everybody has different ones. Often times they derive from your early experiences in life and the real key here is to know what set you off.
KE: I’ve often heard that it’s not so much a person’s behavior that we react to. It’s the story we tell ourselves about that behavior that gets us into trouble. When someone is late handing in a report, for instance, I may tell myself that they are irresponsible.
TF: Yes. Sometimes what happens is something we call “intention invention.” Someone is late with a report and we come up with a story in our own heads about why they were late. Most often, we will attribute worse motives to them then they may actually have. We will, of course, attribute better motives to ourselves. And it can very easily start to trigger emotional responses based on those stories. And if you have any history, any bad history with the person in question, the likelihood of being set off is even more hair trigger.
KE: So let’s take that as an example. Let’s say that you two had projects to get in to me and they didn’t arrive on time. What would be some ways I could handle this conflict with you to avoid it spiraling out of control?
CR: In the Conflict Dynamics Profile we essentially look at a variety of constructive behaviors, some of which are active. In other words, they involve an overt type of action. There are four of these active constructive behaviors we address. The one that we undoubtedly would recommend first is perspective taking, which essentially is trying to find out what is actually going on. Rather than assuming that we got the report in late because we have been negligent, you might ask us, “Can you give me a better understanding of why the report is in late?” So, trying to understand things from the other person's perspective, rather than assuming that we know the truth of the situation is a great first step and one of the most powerful of the active constructive behaviors available during conflict.
Creating solutions is another active constructive behavior we recommend; where you work together to find solutions that meet both of your needs. Rather than seeing this as an adversarial situation in which one person wins and the other loses, you reframe it so that both parties win.
Expressing emotions is a third way to be skillful in conflict. This involves telling the other person how you think and feel about a situation rather than suppressing it. The reason this is so important is because if you are having strong negative emotions and you try to suppress them, they will leak out in some fashion or other. Either you will blow up later on, or they may leak out as demeaning or retaliating types of behaviors. So, dealing with the emotions and not just trying to push them away is an important behavior.
Reaching out is effective when conflict is stuck. It is being willing to reach out to the other person to try to get things moving again; trying to get conversation going.
It should be said that, based on our research, these active constructive behaviors are the ones that are most strongly correlated with leadership effectiveness. We did a study where we had people take the instrument and their bosses, peers, and direct reports who also filled it out were asked about the level of leadership effectiveness that the individuals exhibited. These behaviors were the ones that were clearly most correlated with that. But there are other constructive behaviors, which are more passive in nature.
TF: The active constructive behaviors we just reviewed and the passive ways that I’ll talk about in a minute are really at the core of how to become more skillful in conflict.
Reflective thinking, delayed responding and adapting are three passive constructive behaviors that help with conflict. Reflective thinking and delay responding are pretty closely related because they both require taking a brief “time-out” from the conflict. A good example of reflective thinking would be, Karen if we got this report to you late, rather than you engaging us immediately, you might take a few minutes before you actually engage us in a conversation about why the reports were late. You could spend some time thinking through how you are feeling about it, doing a little internal perspective about what things might have gotten in our way. It’s a pause before you engage to give you time to reflect.
The delay responding behavior is most often used when two parties are having a conflict and either party senses that emotions are really rising quickly. This involves taking a brief “time-out” to move away from the conflict, very temporarily. We are not going to avoid it. Rather, the pause gives us a chance to cool off for even a few minutes and then come back and re-engage.
The final passive constructive behavior we call adapting. And it really has to do with attitude. Having an optimistic mindset that even though we see things very differently, we are going to find a way to work through it. It also involves bringing a willingness to be flexible about alternatives to resolve the conflict. Bringing an adaptable mindset to conflict is also very important.
KE: Are these passive constructive behaviors also linked to leadership effectiveness?
TF: They are. In the study that Craig mentions, they are linked to effectiveness, just not with as much significance, or as strongly. The reason we believe the four active constructive behaviors are more significant is that they are much more easily seen. We actually demonstrate those to other folks. Reflective thinking, delayed responding, and adapting happen inside your own head, so they are likely not as obvious.
KE: I love that in your active constructive behaviors you include expressing emotion and that if it doesn’t come out in an honest way while we are still at a relatively low level of intensity, it can seep out later. Perhaps this helps to explain the “passive aggressive” actions we sometimes see in people at work.
CR: Yes and when that happens, usually the length of time between the initial irritation and the time that the passive aggressive behavior takes place is long enough that the target of the passive aggressive behavior has no idea where it’s coming from and what it’s connected to.
KE: I also think there is something so valuable about a leader owning up. I am just thinking in our late project example, I could say to you after I took some time to think about it, “I feel frustrated because I am now forced to complete my end of the project in a very short amount of time.”
CR: Absolutely. We can go all the way back to the old Johari Window. The more we mask our true feelings, the less open that communication is and that is really what expressing emotions is about. So often in conflict, Karen, you and I, if I have that report late to you, we might have a discussion and I say, “I am sorry I got this in late, I hope it didn’t cause any problems,” and you may say, “Oh! No, no no, thanks, I appreciate your apology,” but you never own up to being frustrated, and it caused this domino effect. I might not really know how much I put you behind the 8 ball. So, there is a real value in expressing emotion in constructive ways.
KE: How might HR professionals help an individual learn to use these constructive responses effectively?
TF: There are a number of ways. Certainly training programs are a great first step, where one can become more self-aware, and learn techniques. We also know enough to say that training programs aren’t for everybody. You can’t just throw training programs at people and expect them to make changes. It really starts with the person. In order for people to become more self-aware, organizations can foster a climate of providing more feedback within the organization. That way, when you are frustrated about me getting my report in late, you can say to me you are frustrated, as part of an open culture that fosters appropriate disclosure of emotion. That level of feedback and communication would almost literally put people like Craig and me out of business. We wouldn’t have to go in and create training programs and 360 instruments if people would just communicate. One thing we know about human beings is it looks like we are always going to have difficulty communicating as openly and honestly as we would like.
CR: The real trick here is the behavioral change. There are probably thousands of books on how to do conflict right. And frankly, almost all of them say pretty much the same thing in terms of the kind of things you need to be able to do to be effective. The trick is for people to actually make the change. The assessment instrument that we have been talking about helps clarify where you are already strong and where you can use some strengthening. But the key then is to make the necessary behavioral changes. It will enable you to be more effective in dealing with the conflict.
And it’s not easy, it takes practice, it takes some reinforcement, coaching and mentoring. It takes about everything possible to help the person make the change, but the one nice thing about it is you don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to become the master of conflict for this stuff to benefit you. The return on investment is very quick and very strong because if you improve how you behave during conflict, it can make a tremendous difference.
KE: You talk about the importance of reducing or hopefully preventing destructive responses. Let’s just touch on those so that people are clear as to what those are.
TF: Most of these are really easy to imagine: winning at all costs, displaying anger, demeaning others and retaliating.
Winning at all costs has to do with believing that “I have the answer.” Displaying anger includes using harsh angry words, or swearing, those kinds of things. Demeaning others is when you say things to others during the conflict that actually belittles them. It can be as insignificant as an eye roll. So there are some nonverbals that come into play there. Retaliating is exactly what it sounds like. Even after the conflict I might find some way to get back at you, when you least expect it. Those are very very toxic behaviors. These are the “fight” responses.
There is also a set of passive destructive behaviors, which are the “flight” type of responses. Avoiding the other person, giving in or yielding to the other person, keeping your emotions in and being overly self critical — all of which sap your energy and do nothing to move the conflict towards resolution.
These are the destructive places where people normally go. What we are saying is you want to lessen the use of these behaviors and increase your use of the constructive behaviors.
KE: It makes sense that these destructive behaviors have a negative correlation with leadership effectiveness. So far we have been thinking about leaders’ direct involvement in conflict and how they could best handle it. What about when leaders are often called in to help others who are in conflict?
TF: We think the best-equipped leaders are those who are already conflict competent because it’s hard to model constructive behaviors if you are not using them yourself. Through modeling, coaching, mentoring and mediating, leaders can encourage others who are in conflict to use some of those active constructive behaviors we’ve talked about – such as perspective taking. Also, leaders can help others to understand that humans are going to make sense of things in different ways. These differences occur naturally and if we can approach them with a sense of curiosity and a desire to see it the other person's way, that eliminates a lot of the negative emotion that gets caught up in the conflict.
KE: The last part of your book is devoted to building a conflict competent organization. Talk to us just very briefly about what that would entail and why it's important.
CR: We talked about how the leader needs to model these skills to have credibility. But that is not enough in terms of turning the organization into one that deals with conflict competently. That requires more of a systemic approach to conflict. It certainly involves making sure that the other people in the organization are developing the same kinds of behavioral skills that the leader is doing. You want to make sure that the values of the organization, the policies and procedures, the performance measures and the rewards structures are in alignment with the way that you want people to behave when they face conflict. So it doesn’t do any good to espouse that we are all going to use constructive behaviors if people who use destructive ones get rewarded.
If you have enjoyed this discussion with guests Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan and would like to know more, we encourage you to pick up their new book. It’s called Becoming A Conflict Competent Leader, How You In Your Organization Can Manage Conflict Effectively. It's published jointly through Jossey-Bass and the Center for Creative Leadership.
