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? Provide specific examples to support your argument.
The questionnaire results labeled my conflict style as collaborative. Which I agree with, when faced with a conflict I always try to get both parties to work things out, where they can come up with a solution that benefits them both and not just one. I feel that it makes a difference in the way I perform a leadership position when I use a collaborative form of conflict style. Mainly because through the use of this style I seek out to get everybody involved in the outcome of the situations, and I try to keep things from being one sided. If I were to use a different conflict style I think that the outcome of the situation would be completely different. For example, if I were to use my less dominant style which is avoiding, I wouldn’t seek out to get everybody in the same page. I would simply “avoid” the whole situation and hope that it plays and gets resolved on its own. My thoughts would probably be why put any time towards resolving the situation if eventually things will turn out the way they have to. However, if i were to use a different conflict style to help improve the outcomes aside from the one that I use, it would be maybe compromising and only in specific situations. For example when dealing with a small group of children. Everything would be a lot easier if we picked our own battles. Basically what this means is that its a lot easier to make the children think that you are giving them something in return for their participation when the reality is different rather than arguing with them or trying to make them see your way (we can all be stubborn in our own way) which can sometimes make things more difficult. In situations like this compromising would be a good way to resolve those types of conflicts.
Describe an actual conflict you had with a family member, roommate, or coworker
- Describe the positions and interests of you and the other person in the conflict. Describe how you could fractionate the conflict.
- 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.
- How could you have helped the other person in the conflict save face? How could the other person help you save face?
I few years ago I got into an argument with my roommate. The argument had to do with bills. We had just moved in together after living at the dorms on campus, so we were still figuring things out. The argument had to do with the division of the bills, basically what each of us had to pay. Her argument was that she didn’t have to pay have of the bill but less than that because she wasn’t going to be spending much time in the apartment that month. My argument was that the agreement was that we both had agreed on splitting all of the bills in half and it included the one that she was arguing that she didn’t have to. Things at one point ( don’t really remember how) escalated to the point that a friend had to step in. Now if I would to separate the person from the situation and save face for her and me I would probably put into practice the idea of active listening ,which is probably something that neither of us was using.I feel that by doing so we would have both seen where we coming from with our position and the situation wouldn’t have escalated.
