Blog Post – Getting Real, Your Conflict Style & Experience

Write an analysis of how your dominant and less dominant conflict styles affect your leadership abilities and outcomes.  How might using a different conflict style improve the outcomes?  How might using a different conflict style improve the outcomes? Provide specific examples to support your argument.

The online questionnaire labeled me as “Collaborating. You tend to express above average assertiveness and above average cooperation. Some of your associates may think of you as an owl because you believe that two people working together can come up with a better answer than either can produce individually.”

So then this affects my leadership and abilities as it means that I tend to try and have people work together which forces me to use my abilities to help folk collaborate. I believe this style suites me well since it tries to get everyone to work together in harmony which ultimately will yield the best results possible. So then both sides win. According to the text this is the ideal conflict style so I am not sure how to improve outcomes. I can imagine scenarios though where perhaps a party is too dug into their opinion and thus they refuse to collaborate no matter how much communication, time, and effort are invested. Therefore it might be better to employ competition or compromise.

Describe an actual conflict you had with a family member, roommate, or coworker (please use pseudonyms and/or feel free to make your post private and send me the password if you prefer).

I tend to avoid conflict, however one scenario in which conflict arose was between me and a family member. “Lisa” tried to take something from me behind my back and I had to find out about it from friends.

Describe the positions and interests of you and the other person in the conflict.  Describe how you could fractionate the conflict.

My position was that I was upset that she was trying to take things from me behind my back. My interest was in having an honest, open, relationship. Her position was that she felt that she wasn’t doing anything wrong and her interest was that she was just acquiring something that I had in the past given to her openly so it seemed ok for her to do it without my knowledge.

Using Fisher and Ury’s methods, describe how you could separate the person from the problem and how you could work together to address the conflict.

I could try to separate her from the problem by seeing her as a unique individual with who perceives the world differently than I do. We could try to work together to address the problem by having an honest talk with one another about our interests.

How could you have helped the other person in the conflict save face?  How could the other person help you save face?

I could help her save face by letting her know that I will still see her in a positive light as long as we work together towards a common solution. She could help me save face by letting me know that she was not taking things from me out of disrespect