Donald Trump is in the middle of navigating a challenge posed by North Korea — especially dealing with the mercurial Kim Jong-Un (some would say Kim Jong-Un has the same challenge). The stakes of this exchange are high — the possibility of an all-out nuclear war cannot be ruled out.
In business boardrooms, client conference calls, salary negotiations, cross-functional or cross-geographical teams working together, negotiations and disagreements take place quite often. And while the stakes may be relatively lower than the outbreak of a global war, the heat in these situations is often as high.
Handling conflicts
At a prominent IT company, the Board and the CEO are caught in the crosshairs of the original founding team, who accuse the current team of straying from the path they set and the ideals they upheld. A start-up founder recently ended up spending time in jail because of a conflict with a vendor. The Indian domestic cricket body is at loggerheads with its international counterpart.
Business and life are often filled with conflicts such as these — some minor, some major. A leader often finds herself in the eye of this storm. Her response to the conflict can either calm it or spur it into a raging hurricane. Bitterness and acrimony mark most conflicts, but it need not always be so.
Can we learn to handle conflicts better? Let’s look at three mindsets that can help us navigate conflict-situations constructively.
Don’t let it get personal
Perhaps the biggest barrier to constructive resolution of conflicts is our ego. The more of ‘I’ present in the conflict, the less there is a chance of arriving at a good solution. We get defensive, then angry, become aggressive, and soon let small issues spiral out of control. We need to be able to detach ourselves sufficiently from the situation, so we are more objective, and can discuss the issue without emotion hijacking reason.
Most mergers and acquisitions end up being detrimental to the value of both firms. Often, talks collapse and synergies are not realised because people at the table get too personal. Instead, if they were to insulate the issues and opportunities from their personal egos, a winning outcome might just be possible.
Don’t avoid conflicts
Such a mindset also helps leaders realise that conflicts should not always be avoided. They are often necessary to raise critical issues, highlight an important disagreement, or halt a misguided strategy. When leaders harness conflict without the baggage of personal ego, they move the organisation ahead and out of the tangle.
Think back to the last conflict you were in. How emotional did you get? How angry did you get? What did your body-language and tone communicate? All these clues point to whether you were letting it get too personal.
Now try and play it back, but with more detachment. Don’t the words change? Don’t new ideas, previously stifled, come free? Don’t both parties feel more at ease and more focused on a solution? It’s good preparation for bigger and tougher conflicts that lie ahead.
Look for win-win
Most conflicts spiral out of control because each side refuses to even entertain the thought of a gain for the other. Conflicts often require negotiation, and unfortunately, most negotiations begin with a win-lose mindset. This is because we often tend to frame situations as zero-sum games. But in life or in business, they rarely are. It only requires creative leadership to suss out angles and viewpoints that can reveal a win-win result.
Re-framing and asking win-win questions can help the two sides discover ways for both to win. This calls for the ability to honestly listen and see things from the other side.
Start a practice
Here’s a simple practice you can start on today to build this attitude. Take a controversial topic — Does the death penalty make sense? Should drug-use be legalized? Should the internet be banned for children below the age of 18? — and debate it with your classmates or colleagues forming two teams.
Let one side speak for the motion and the other, against it. After you’ve had 15 minutes of going at it hammer and tongs, switch roles . The team that was speaking for, will now speak against, and the team that was against, will now speak for. Immediately, you will start seeing things from the other side, going so far as to even appreciating their points of view.
Once we start doing this, we will be on the way to finding win-win solutions.
Focus on Interests Not Positions
In Getting Past No , the negotiation handbook written by William Ury, one of the major mindset switches is his advice to re-frame the problem from ‘positions’ to ‘interests’. This approach smooths the path to successful resolution.
I have a personal example that demonstrated the power of this paradigm shift. I remember my two children, Marcus and Marcela, then around eight and four respectively, engaged in their version of world war 3, over who gets to play first with a new toy car. I was stuck — I couldn’t say Marcus plays first without Marcela crying, “But that’s not fair” or say that Marcela gets to play first, without Marcus left feeling unjustly treated.
And both were pretty firmly attached to their positions — “I have to play first”. It was time to introduce the changed paradigm. I began by asking them how they intended to play with the car. It was an extremely basic push-and-pull toy. Marcus demonstrated that he would push the car across the room. “And then what?” I asked him. “Then I’ll run over to the other side and push the car again to this side of the room,” he replied.
“Ok, what if you sat on this side and pushed the car to Marcela, and she pushed the car to you and then you pushed it back to her. It would save you both the effort of running across the room to pick up the car for the next push, and you get to play at the same time”. Their eyes lit up and world war 3 was successfully averted.
Resolving deadlocks
It seems like a small incident, but is a big lesson on how shifting from your outlook from positions to interests can resolve a deadlock, making a seemingly unsolvable conflict, solvable.
One of the best movies to watch as a guide to successful negotiation and its power, is Bridge of Spies . Tom Hanks plays lawyer James B Donavan, who was tasked by the US Government to negotiate the swap of alleged spies from both sides. Do yourself a favour and watch the film. Its credits highlight one of Donavan’s later achievements:
“Following the successful conclusion of the Powers-Abel exchange, James Donovan was asked by President Kennedy to undertake further negotiations on behalf of the US. In the summer of 1962, he was sent to Cuba to discuss with Fidel Castro the terms of the release of 1,113 prisoners held after the Bay of Pigs invasion. When Donovan finished negotiations, he had secured the release of 9,703 men, women, and children.”
An example to imitate and emulate.