With the New Year, there often comes an opportunity to approach processes in a new and fresh way, especially within organisations. However this change and the excessive workload that stems from this change, can result in an increased number of ‘conflict bushfires’.
The VM Group is regularly invited into organisations where these conflict bushfires are raging or are just about to spark. Consequently, we thought we would share with you some of the basic insights and strategies an organisation can put in place in order to transform their conflict into cooperation.
As we all know, prevention is always better than a cure and we encourage developing preventative strategies rather than reactive ones, so that organizations can divert resources away from firefighting and focus their time and energy on more important business goals.
Our main message is that, while conflict is a fact of life, it need not be a way of life. Conflict is inevitable in the context of diversity. We all have our own goals, values, approaches, and personalities which can often be completely at odds with our colleague’s values, approaches, personalities or even perceptions of ‘the facts’. It is these differences that inevitably lead to conflict. Subsequently we need to know how to deal with conflict and use it constructively.
Conflict tends to follow a downward spiral through five stages:
Stage 1 Accusations and Threats
Stage 2 Expansion
Stage 3 Generalisation to the entire relationship
Stage 4 Plan and plot
Stage 5 Spread
During the downward spiral of conflict, psychological changes happen. We start to use selective perception—we see only the `bad’ in the other person and are blind to the ‘good’. We generate a self-fulfilling prophecy; we are usually not treating the other person very well (e.g. we might be approaching […]
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