Book review: Resolving Conflicts at Work
Resolving Conflicts at Work: Eight Strategies for Everyone on the Job, by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith (Jossey-Bass, 2005, 384 pages, $17.95)
Who would ever buy a book on resolving conflicts at work? Not you; you have no work-related conflicts, you say, or at least none that can’t be handled by normal means. Okay, let’s pretend. Imagine that a fight develops between you and your boss, or you and a co-worker, and it becomes so onerous, so damaging, that you find yourself at the end of your rope, ready to use it to hang either yourself or the other person. A good time to seek constructive advice—yet will you? You’ll have to be open to the idea that such conflicts are solvable, even when it feels like they aren’t: when you’ve already labeled your co-worker a “jerk” or the entire department “dysfunctional”; or when, as so often happens, you believe with a passion that verges on self-sabotage that the other person is absolutely, unqualifiedly 200 percent in the wrong and the only solution is for her to admit it.
And what if, like many of us, you don’t believe that the worst fights can be resolved—that destructive rather than constructive conflict is natural to both human psychology and organized competition, and that successful aggression on the one hand, or cowed but rebellious silence on the other, are the only options? Such is the challenge faced at the outset by “Resolving Conflicts at Work,” by Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith: a large chunk of the audience who might benefit from this book will never seek it out, or anything like it.
Conflict resolution (also known as conflict management, or conflict transformation) shares its premises and methods with two related fields: mediation, increasingly used since the 1970s to settle business disputes and divorces, and “interested-based” negotiation, as popularized by such experts as Roger Fisher, co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and co-author with William Ury of the perennial best-seller on negotiating, “Getting to Yes.” All three fields are hot subjects of study on college campuses, along with peace studies as a focus of international relations. Yet the relevant skills are seldom taught more generally, whether at school or at work. Perhaps this is because the essence runs so counter to mass culture. The idea is that we all possess not only the capacity, but the innate desire to reconcile; and that with a little coaching (or maybe a lot) we can learn to overcome defensiveness and denial and do so, with useful results. Unfortunately, the folk psychology that most of us defend as common sense goes pretty much in the opposite direction: most of us are rational but, alas, a few of us are kooks; and since personality is more or less fixed, there’s no point in trying to cure a kook. The folk view also applies to organizations: if a workplace is a mess, that’s just the way things are, and you’re better off leaving than trying to change things.
The authors of “Resolving Conflicts at Work” are sympathetic to our cultural indoctrination and out to change it. Cloke, a long-time specialist in mediation, is co-founder of the Santa Monica-based Center for Dispute Resolution; Goldsmith is an educator and trainer. The book avoids technical jargon in favor of readability, which fits with the intended audience of just about everyone in the private and public sectors: managers, executives, employees, school administrators, teachers, union representatives, and so on. The content is organized into eight chapters, progressively introducing tools and frameworks in more or less chronological order of application. For example, chapter 1 is titled “Change the Culture and Context of Conflict,” while chapter 7 is “Solve Problems Creatively, Plan Strategically, and Negotiate Collaboratively.” (In the original 2000 edition of the book, each chapter was named a “path,” reminiscent of Buddhism’s “eightfold path” to enlightenment. The parallel was all the more striking given the authors’ emphasis on compassion and empathy as not merely virtues but effective tools.)
Cloke and Goldsmith begin their assault on conventional assumptions by pointing out the enormous price of going along with the status quo: “litigation, strikes, reduced productivity, poor morale, wasted time and resources, lost customers, dysfunctional relationships with colleagues, destructive battles with competing departments, stifling rules and regulations, gossip and rumors, and reduced opportunities for teamwork, synergy, learning, and change.” Even the language we use can work against us: we often speak of “settling” a conflict, implying that one or both parties will have to “give in” and forego genuine satisfaction. This perpetuates the view that conflict is inherently damaging, even when a way is found to end it.
The authors, by contrast, ally themselves with Roger Fisher and others of the “win-win” school of negotiating: real resolutions, they insist, can lead to renewed vitality and growth for relationships, roles, and entire organizations. Good faith is of course key, and much of the book assumes the reader will be the first to initiate the kind of non-judgmental sharing and inquiry that can lead to others eventually joining in the same spirit. Among other things, this involves exploring your own attitudes and assumptions about conflict and the difficult emotions it generates. For example, is your default response avoidance, accommodation, aggression, compromise, or collaboration? This reader learned that he prefers to avoid conflict at nearly all costs—but if that fails, he escalates quickly to the kind of rabidly judgmental thinking that seemingly justifies severing relationships. By coincidence, at the time I was reading this chapter, a friend of mine got into a conflict with someone else we both know; I used the book to evaluate her preferred style as accommodation. Although this is a style I normally disdain, it proved highly effective in ending this particular blow-up: by giving the other person time to recover his dignity on his own, my friend allowed a damaged but valuable relationship to mend. Accommodation doesn’t always work, but it was eye-opening just the same.
What about dealing with persons who don’t want to play fair—who truly do seem irrational, even “crazy,” or who are shirking responsibilities, refusing to listen, and so on? The authors have a separate chapter on difficult persons which I judged both realistic and useful. They emphasize separating the behavior from the person, as well as investigating whether we’re inadvertently reinforcing the problem. They suggest both group and individual tactics for “surfacing” issues in a non-judgmental yet firm manner, so that learning can occur and alternatives be explored, possibly for the first time.
After building to the penultimate chapter on collaboration—the authors’ preferred style for really difficult conflicts—the book ends abruptly with a final chapter focusing mainly on seeking outside mediation if necessary. I would have liked a few pages of further resources for learning and practicing on your own—for example, a list of associations and programs which provide seminars and workshops. Reading straight through “Resolving Conflicts at Work” will give you lots of good ideas for questions to ask and tactics to try, but you’ll have no easy way of keeping track of so many bulleted lists; unless you’re a brilliant note-taker, when a real-life conflict arises, you’ll have to hastily reread each chapter to see what jumps out as useful. Even so, the book stands as a solid introduction to a vital subject. An open-handed, open-hearted approach won’t work every time, but it would seem worth trying, even for skeptics.
Note: My own suggestions for additional reading involve books not on conflict management but on interest-based negotiating, nearly identical in spirit and purpose. In addition to Getting to Yes, still in print with Bruce Patton as an additional author, I’d suggest the recent book by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate; the authors’ suggestions for building affiliations, respecting others’ autonomy, and redefining your role to include more of what you value can be extended beyond one-time situations and into the context of ongoing work relationships.
Add comment December 20th, 2007