Tough Talks: Five Tips for More Productive Conflict
It's summer and we're all relaxing - why not talk about 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.
Because the fear of conflict makes us swallow out words over issues that are important and the assumption that we know how another person will react to our words is just wrong. Fear of conflict helps the gulf between us persist. It plays into polarization’s hands. And we can all move it forward an inch.
Five Tips For More Productive Conflict
1. Get more comfortable just talking about the fact interpersonal conflict exists
I’m not talking about global armed conflict or the abstraction of political polarization. I’m talking about the fact that sometimes I’ll be talking to someone who has a difference with someone else and when I refer to it as a conflict, they will go out of their way to say, “Oh no, it’s not a conflict!” A conflict doesn’t have to be a huge enormous game changing thing. In fact, the definition used by Dr Morton Deutsch, “Father of Conflict Negotiation,” is pretty simple: opposition. You can face opposition trying to figure out what pizza toppings to order for a work lunch. We bring a lot of heightened emotions to the concept of “conflict” but the more we put it in perspective and think of it as more of a hassle than a drama, the better equipped we might be not to run the other way.
2. We are all terrible mind readers. Period.
You may have great intuition. You may be able to analyze an interpersonal situation to a point where there is not a gesture or word that has gone un-parsed. And here’s the thing - when you’re analyzing another person’s behavior without asking them what they meant or intended (which is, let’s face it, scary!), we are using attribution. We’re making our own meaning. We are absolutely lousy mind readers and even if your attribution is absolutely correct and the other person is a real do-dah - walking around secure in your belief the other person you’re having this hassle with is a real do-dah is not helping you resolve the conflict. It’s just keeping you in opposition. So put down the push pins, the photos, the yarn and the pointer and think about something you know for a fact is real - your thoughts and feelings. And think about how you might respectfully and with genuine curiosity, ask questions to get more information about how the other person is thinking and feeling.
3. People lead complicated lives.
It’s not more virtuous to be a little more conflict adept but it can be like a small superpower to make situations better. You never know what another person is carrying around on the inside. It’s likely a lot, one way or another. I once had an out of character, nasty email interaction with someone I supervised. It really bugged me and I kept thinking about it, while also being tempted to just let it go. It was just one interaction. When I passed the situation by one of my mentors, an organizational psychologist, his take on it was, “If you saw him walking around campus limping, you would ask him how he was.” I took that advice and when we had a follow up conversation, rather than starting laying down the law, I started with, “Can we talk about what’s going on?” And there was a lot going on. The conversations ended with an apology on his end and a low-key reiteration around professional tone and communication on mine. The conversation enhanced our professional partnership and increased the trust between us. We can talk a big game about compartmentalizing but everyone is human.
4. As hard as it can be, let go of the desire to win.
Get out of the desire to win and get into the mindset of finding how you can both walk away with something to show for it. Look for the OK/OK. Sometimes you get in a place where even if the stakes are kind of low, you just don’t want the other person to “win.” You have entered the Petty Cul de Sac. We’ve all spent time there. One loop around feels pleasantly validating but you don’t want to hang out there too long. Time to circle back, get out and reframe. And if you model being open to compromise or giving an inch, there is a very good chance the other person will follow suit.
5. Sometimes it’s a conflict to be resolved and sometimes it’s bad news to be delivered
Not every difficult or sensitive situation is a conflict where we can bring to bear conflict resolution skills. Sometimes in positions of authority, we have to give direct feedback we know may upset someone, or we may even have to fire someone. The prospect of these conversations brings out all our conflict fears and avoidance seems like a very appealing option. But how many times have you been involved in a situation at your school where you wish someone in authority would take care of a problem being caused by another person? More than once, I bet. Back when I did the Institute for New Heads, legendary HOS Reveta Bowers told us, “what you permit, you promote.” It is kind of inescapable. As someone in authority, you can’t chase down every less than desirable behavior all the time, but you can engage in difficult conversations where you are calm, clear and kind.
And maybe the biggest tip is to revisit #1 - managing a conflict doesn’t necessarily need a giant peace summit. Sometimes you can drop by someone’s classroom and in a low key way, convey the message you need to convey. Or maybe if you’ve had a weird interaction with someone and you’re left feeling a bit of ick that you keep revisiting, it’s worth circling back and having a check in. You’ll probably pick on the vibe of either “yeah, they were having a bad day” or “huh, something else is going on here and I’m not sure what it is.”
And the more you can feel your feelings - this feels yucky! Does this person not like me? - then let them go in order to climb into your more curious, “what’s going on here” self, the more you will gradually get more comfortable with a little bit of conflict. Because rest assured, despite how they may be behaving, chances are the other person dislikes conflict just as much as you do.
*****
So it’s been about two years of Talking Out of School!
It’s grown from about 75 subscribers who were friends, family and my immediate network to almost 700 subscribers. There’s almost a new subscriber every day so far in 2024.
Thank you to all subscribers and a very special thank you to paying subscribers for making this work possible.
We’ve maintained a 65% open rate despite the growth.
The tie for most viewed posts are Writing School Statements and The First Year of Headship: Five Guiding Principles.
Other very popular posts are Managing Complicated Parents and Building a Senior Team that Can Lead Change.
About ten percent of subscribers have upgraded to paying subscriptions, which is the top of the Substack metric of a 5-10% conversion.
I will be tweaking the paid subscription offerings for Fall, 2024 - that will be rolled out in July. Some stuff worked; some stuff didn’t. Other stuff I did not anticipate has taken off in ways I couldn’t have predicted.
All of it was made possible by your engagement with these essays and I am slightly amazed and deeply appreciative.
I’ll be posting every week although some may be from the archives as it’s summer and things slow down, as they should. I’ll post at least one Stony Creek Diary on my garden failure that may now not be a failure. I’m contemplating a post of what I’ve learned hanging out a consulting shingle. And look for at least three new posts on governance coming your way before Labor Day.
I keep thinking I will run out of things to say about school leadership but inevitably, I create a publication schedule and then I write about whatever is top of mind (which is a lot of stuff) and it all seems to work out! So the essays will keep coming and I already have my wish list for 24-25 People Talking interviews all drawn up. This work is fun and fulfilling and I’m so glad you’re all here! I earned my MFA in Creative Writing in 1996 and for a very long time, resigned myself that outside of a school publication, no one much cared to read what I had to say. And now you’re all here!
Life is complicated and hard and can be very wonderful.
Julie