Five Tips for More Productive Conflict

It's summer and we're all starting to relax - why not talk about conflict?

After a truly wonderful experience at the One Schoolhouse Association for Academic Leaders Forum in DC this week and then facilitating the Effective Communication in a Time of Polarization course online at OS this week, I really felt the need to write about dealing with conflict. 

Don’t archive this email; don’t turn away! 

People love a good “5 tips” post - so at least I used that format?

Conflict is, to use a very technical psychological term, icky, let’s not fool ourselves. It’s totally normal to want to avoid it. It takes a ton of energy to deal with conflict. It often doesn’t bring out the best in us. 

But it was pretty amazing to have open and honest conversations about conflict and difficult conversations. It felt meaningful. It did indeed feel, in the words of one participant last week, cathartic. We carry around this fear of conflict and then we don’t want to talk about it because it stirs up all these bad feelings, feelings of “ick” when we have a conflictual situation hanging out there, not well resolved - the kind of thing you find yourself turning over in your head weeks afterwards. 

I think there’s a lot of pressure in education to be upbeat and positive but all work (and life) just has really hard parts to it. And most of them don’t involve difficult situations with kids.

I do think just talking about it openly moves things forward. There aren’t really magic answers because context and school culture and the kind of support a head gives a senior admin or a senior admin gives a teacher varies across schools. But we are all struggling to better connect, to be heard, to feel valued and seen as well as to keep the important work at our schools moving forward and I think sharing that struggle is worth something.

We don’t need to all become conflict resolution experts. We certainly don’t have to seek out conflict because people who do really need anger management classes. But given how conflict averse we, as humans, are by default, if we can widen our tolerance for conflict just a little bit, it could make quite an impact.