Chapter 17: Conflict
17.5 What Helps to Resolve Conflict
If conflict can end up providing benefits, and can be done in healthy ways, you may still be wondering: how do you get there? Here are a few strategies that can help:
1. Listening. If Chapter 4 sounds like a pitch for listening being a magical cure-all, that’s not too far from the mark. I do believe that listening is the single best technique for resolving conflict, and much of that chapter could be put to good use in conflict situations. The reason people raise their voices in conflict is because they want to be heard, so letting others know that you do hear them can go a long way. Of course, Chapter 4 also explains why listening is hard work, and listening can be particularly challenging when you’re upset with the person who wants you to listen to them, and you think what they’re saying is ridiculous — but do it anyway.
2. Turn-taking. One reason listening can be very difficult in conflict situations is because you are so eager to say your side of the story. If you give the other person a chance to speak their mind, will they also give you that chance? It’s not guaranteed, but if you do both feel like you have the opportunity to say whatever you want to say, that is tremendously helpful. This is something professional mediators, judges, and couples counselors enforce, but even without an outside referee, if you can get your opponent to agree to the ground rule of equal time, you can make progress. Of course, the important thing isn’t to time the length of the speaking turns down to the second, but to make sure that each person is uninterrupted until they have finished what they have to say. Without a referee, that may be hard to enforce, but the best way to establish the rule is not to keep injecting “Let me finish, let me finish” but to wait your turn and let them finish without jumping in yourself. Model the good behavior, and hopefully it will be contagious.
3. Pick the right time and place. Implied in the technology discussion above is the principle that being able to speak face to face is optimal, especially in an environment without distractions and outside interruptions. The turn-taking principle also implies that you will have adequate time for both parties to say everything on their mind.
Do you want there to be others present? Having other people along for moral support and/or to serve as witnesses can be helpful, or it may be better to speak in private. Sometimes the best way to deal with unhealthy group dynamics, for instance, is to speak to a group member individually instead of trying to work things out on a group level. People generally don’t like to feel trapped, so creating a “set-up” or misleading people about how the discussion will go can be disastrous (for example, if you bring a team along for your side, but the other person didn’t know you would and feels outnumbered, they’re likely to get defensive).
It’s also worth thinking about energy level and exhaustion. If a group is worn out from an all-day project, adding an extra hour at the end to work on interpersonal conflicts might not be wise. There are many variables to ponder, but it’s generally better to make conscious choices than to forget that factors in the physical environment can make a difference.
4. I-statements. In conflict situations, keep in mind that the T in the TARES model stands for Truthfulness, which requires you to avoid saying things you don’t really know (listed as one of the 10 forms of lying in Chapter 3). One thing you can’t assume you know is what’s going on in other people’s minds — what they are thinking, feeling, or intending — so you shouldn’t talk about that. Stick to the things you do know: what you yourself are thinking, feeling, or intending, collectively known as “I-Statements.”
This may seem risky, since it means making yourself vulnerable by exposing your inner mind, but paradoxically, it’s also safe, since you’re talking about things no one else can deny. If you say “You’re trying to undermine this group by pushing your own agenda,” that’s likely to lead to a lot of denial and counterarguments: “No, you’re wrong, I’m not….” But I-statements are impervious to “No, you’re wrong” responses. (Imagine telling someone your favorite color is orange, and they respond with “No, you’re wrong, your favorite color is blue.”)
Granted, it may take a lot of skill to figure out how to express your thoughts in I-statements, and just beginning the sentence with “I feel” is not always enough. (“I feel you’re being selfish and stubborn” is not an I-statement, since it’s talking about the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions). So how could you rephrase “You’re trying to undermine this group by pushing your own agenda”? If tacking on “I feel” at the beginning won’t make it a true I-statement, how about saying “I get angry when you don’t listen to other people’s ideas” or “I’m concerned that there are other agendas going on that we don’t know about”? If the other person can’t legitimately respond with “No, you’re not angry” or “No, you’re not concerned,” then you’ve used a valid I-statement and you’re safe.
5. Avoid dirty fighting techniques. This includes “gaslighting” (making the other person question their own sanity or perceptions of reality — SEE BOX 17.1), name-calling, bringing in unrelated issues as a diversion, and deliberating employing the fallacies listed in Chapter 7.
6. Respecting difference. One of the main take-aways from the “Conflict Animals” exercise described above is that the world would not function well if everyone was an owl, or a lion. In the Thomas-Kilmann grid, if everyone employed the “competing” style, there would be a lot of dead bodies, but if everyone just agreed to go along with other people’s ideas (accommodating style), there would be nothing to agree to. Different types of people may get irritated with each other’s conflict styles, but it helps to step back and appreciate what others bring to the table talents that you don’t.
7. Focus on the common goal or potential benefit. Sometimes people get engrossed in the us vs. them mentality and need reminding that there are common goals you are all striving for. Also, since working through conflict can be draining or sometimes feel hopeless, it’s helpful to remind people of the light at the end of the tunnel: “If we get through this, think of what we can achieve.”
Finally, think about what happens if you win. In a win-lose scenario, people sometimes respond to achieving their goals by gloating, saying to the opposing side “You lost; get over it.” It feels good to take a victory lap, but it’s also wise to think about how that makes the other side feel.
First, it reinforces the whole idea of “sides” instead of the alternative view that we’re all in this together and all benefit from growth. Second, it puts them in the “loser mentality,” licking their wounds and plotting revenge in the next round. Some conflict scholars talk about a “latency” period, when there doesn’t appear to be any conflict, but it has just gone underground and will rear its head again when the opportunity arises. Think of two well-known fantasy series villains, Voldemort in the Harry Potter universe, and Sauron in the Lord of the Rings series. What do they have in common? They both used to have earthly bodies until they were “defeated,” but lurked in disembodied form for a long time before they rose again. Why is this such a common trope in fantasy series? Perhaps because it resembles patterns in human history?
To get away from that seemingly endless cycle, an important step is one that is sometimes forgotten in the conflict process: the “patching up” phase. If you handle that stage well, no one feels like a “loser,” and everyone instead feels like a mutually beneficial resolution has been found. There won’t be a revenge match, and you can get on with the business of being a well-functioning team.
17.1: GASLIGHTING
Imagine making a movie that does moderately well at the box office, and then seven decades later the title becomes an extremely common term — but no one remembers the movie it came from. That’s what happened with George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight, a thriller about a schemer who manipulates his wife into thinking she’s going insane. (Cukor was the director; the original author was a playwright named Patrick Hamilton; John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John Balderston turned it into a movie screenplay). It’s set in pre-electricity era England, where the houses are lit by lamps that burn gas supplied by the city.
If you’ve ever used the word “gaslighting” but didn’t know its origin or what the psychological technique has to do with Victorian era illumination, read on — or better yet, watch the classic movie: it’s really well-written. The plot is complex, but the basic version is this: Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is wooed by Gregory (Charles Boyer), who, it turns out, only married her because he heard about some jewels her mother used to own, and he wants to find them.
Gregory needs time to scour the attic for those jewels, so he tells Paula he’s going out, then sneaks into the sealed-off attic and pokes around. When he fires up the light in the attic, it makes the lights in the rest of the house flicker, which Paula notices. When he returns, she tells him about the flickering and the footsteps she heard, and Gregory’s response is to accuse her of hallucinating. He proceeds to launch a campaign to convince her she is losing her mind (doing things like buying her a brooch, stealing it, then asking her to wear it to an event, and scowling with concern when she can’t find it). The best reason to find the original film is to watch the sneaky techniques he uses to make her question her sanity, which are so successful that eventually she wants to check herself into an asylum.
Decades later, marriage counselors started using the term gaslighting to refer to any manipulation technique that makes your partner question their perception of reality. These techniques include double-bind messages, in which the source sends one message (“I’m not angry”) at the same time they send a contradictory message (an angry tone in their voice), and makes the receiver struggle to determine which is the “real” message. If the receiver points out the angry tone, the sender just denies it, leaving the receiver to question their ability to interpret nonverbal signals.
Another variant is the “I’m just joking” ploy, where the source sends a disturbing message, followed by an explanation that they were just kidding (even though there were no indications that the message was funny), often adding an accusation that the receiver has no sense of humor. Around 2010, the term gaslighting entered the general lexicon when public figures started denying saying things that were captured on tape, and it was the audience who scoured through the recordings and wondered if they could have possibly misinterpreted anything, rather than the source owning up to what they said. The term was also applied to politicians who asked their constituents to deny their own direct experience and accept the politician’s version of reality instead. This led some modern comedians to slightly update a line from the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup: “Who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes?”
The reason the term became so popular seems to be due in part to how many different kinds of people can use it in various contexts (such as companies who describe employees as “their most valuable asset” while at the same time exposing them to hazardous conditions). It’s also due to a fundamental vulnerability of communication: yes, sometimes perceptions can’t be trusted, memories get distorted, and it’s hard to know how to interpret meaning.
