The ultimate purpose of managing interpersonal conflict is to grow us emotionally in self-awareness, storytelling, emotional management, and moral and ethical character.
There aren’t any apps, searches, or other fancy technological shortcuts for the development of those traits in us.
Making noise, making a point, and making a difference are different actions.
Where we run into trouble is when we conflate the results of all three and then use those results (and that conflation) to determine what our story will be to the market.
Telling a story to the market that resonates with certain individuals in the market requires three acts:
The first act is to be intentional. Just as we are intentional with our peacebuilding efforts, we should be intentional with our storytelling efforts.
The second act is to be incisive. Being incisive requires being self-aware enough about our own story to do some critical surgery and to cut out what doesn’t matter so that we can focus on what does matter—for the audience hearing the story.
The third act is to be persuasive for others rather than to be persuasive enough to convince ourselves that we’re right and the market is the thing that needs to change. Being persuasive is hard because it’s a skill that requires empathy (which is underrated), self-awareness, and intentionality to be operating all together at the same time.
There are more opportunities than ever for people to make noise.
There are fewer meaningful opportunities for people to make a point.
There are the same number of opportunities there always were for people to make a difference, though not always at scale.
We should be sure we what story we are telling, to whom and why.
The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.
If you want to find the resistance to changes that need to be made in your organization, it starts with you.
If you want to discover why other people aren’t resonating with your story, it starts with you.
If you want to know how to empathize with others and their plights, it starts with you.
If you want to understand how to manage conflicts and how to be satisfied when conflicts can’t (or won’t) be resolved, it starts with you.
If you want to advance in your career, social, financial, or even in your community life, it begins with you.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4BQ83oIyVM[/embedyt]
The trouble, of course, is that understanding begins with you. And you think that you already know who you are and that you don’t need to go any further. Or even worse, you think that other people need to conform to you because you’re the one that knows the answers to their toughest questions, not them.
Self-awareness is the most underrated leadership trait, and that’s because on top it looks easy, but when you go deep into yourself, it becomes more and more uncomfortable.
Gaining self-awareness means going into your family, your friends, and even the systems and organizations you work in, make money in, and/or recreate in, and asking them the critical questions that matter:
Self-awareness should not be confused with behaving selfishly. Selfishness comes about when we seek to deny someone else’s humanity and pretend that the interaction is a zero-sum transaction. Self-awareness is the quiet, mindful, anticipatory work we do by ourselves, internally that positions us for success in relationships where the opportunities and possibilities can be expanded rather than retracted.
The deepest dive you can do is into yourself.
Dive in.
It appears that the large conflict situations in life are the ones that matter the most.
Death
Divorce
Job loss
Personal and professional disappointments
But the reality is, the small moments that appear to matter the least, are the ones that create the grit and resilience to survive the crucible of the larger moments, when the pressure is enormous.
The pressure to behave unethically.
The pressure to surrender a critical position.
The pressure to sacrifice long-held principles for short-term gains.
The pressure to avoid losses that appear insurmountable—in the emotional present.
Recognizing that managing the small moment of conflict matters more than anticipating how you’re going to manage the larger moments (should they come) is a huge advantage in a work world of shifting priorities.
Four traits to focus on growing, in the small moments:
Gaining self-awareness.
Refining your story.
Connecting with other people by growing empathy.
Giving yourself a break.
Focus on learning and absorbing the lessons from dealing with the small stuff, not to obsess over those lessons, but to allow those small interactions to prepare you for the next large conflict.
The uncomfortable truth is that an understanding and appreciation of the impact of human emotions is required to address the conflicts of the present day.
The comfortable fairy tale is that everywhere human beings are freed from the impact of their emotions by more economic choices, more scientific knowledge, and more opportunities to engage rationally with an ordered world.
The uncomfortable truth is that people very often refuse to change their behavior and walk the hard emotional path from awareness to competency unless a radical catastrophic (either positive or negative) personal or social event occurs to them.
The comfortable fairy tale is that humanity (both individually and collectively) is trending inevitably toward an integrated, united, globalized mindset, less captive to the paradigms, conflicts, and drivers of humanity’s conflict-ridden past.
The uncomfortable truth is that some people don’t want resolution (or closure) to the conflicts they are experiencing, and seek instead to inflict the consequences, process, and results of their personal conflicts on others.
The comfortable fairy tale is that resolution would be easier to get to if only irrational actors ceased acting irrationally through the auspices of more knowledge, more data, but less received, conceived, or perceived wisdom.
The uncomfortable truth is, the more that we think about the very nature of the human beings with whom we are in constant contact (and with whom we are in constant conflict) the better we get at managing, not the conflicts of others, but the reactions in ourselves.
The three areas in which we grow are often overlooked, but as conflicts, and the confusion about why they occur, increases, these areas will become more critical to engage in with mastery:
Intentionality—no more accidents. Yes, it seems exhausting to always be consciously aware of what we say, what we do, what we think, and what we feel. But it’s equally exhausting to experience the results of a lack of intentionality.
Self-awareness—physician heal thyself. Yes, it might be a more entertaining and distracting approach to be filled with the noise of others (and the constant pitch of the world). But healing yourself requires coming to terms with the signal coming from inside yourself.
Hearing—rather than listening to speak. Yes, it requires patience to listen to others with whom we disagree, and with whom we agree. But when we miss a critical conflict message because we didn’t hear it, we will have to be far more patient with the consequences as they roll out in our lives.
As the framing of more and more comfortable fairy tales run up against the wisdom of uncomfortable truths, it becomes imperative for those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, to become more strategic around these three areas.
The world inside rules the world outside.
One of the terrible functions of the last half-century has been the rise in the perception of people, both at the individual level and at the group level, as purely economic actors.
When viewed this way, people’s reactions and behaviors (and even group reactions and behaviors) are chalked up to science or economics.
People are perceived as rational actors, realizing that they are in a play called life, full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing.
Oh, but were this so.
The fact is, conflicts, disputes, disagreements, and more are worked out in the inner life between our two ears, in much more complex ways than economics or scientific analysis can determine. This happens long before they spill out of the container of ourselves and begin their impact on others.
The fights we have are of fancy: Trapped inside our own experiences, we struggle to get out, to escape, and to connect with others.
The very act of escaping from ourselves creates an internal conflict inside ourselves. And as our technology has become more granular, able to connect people at the surface level, across cultures, and even national borders, we have become blinded and less connected to the inner drives of other people.
The tools we have designed can be used to connect, but only if vulnerability, self-awareness, and introspection are built into the tools themselves.
And those traits aren’t built into the tools because they escape the notice of the builder. Primarily because of the inner life of the builder.
A clock with a clock maker.
The world inside rules the world outside.
The reasons why we have abandoned the exploration of the inner self are many, but the reason that we have abandoned even attempting to understand the depths of the inner world that drive conflict is one: We are afraid of what we will find and we are selfish in our interests.
The work of radical self-awareness, intentionality, empathy over sympathy, true vulnerability and intimacy with others cannot come through connecting through our tools.
We must escape the world inside (both ourselves and our digital distractions) and get to the world outside.
Avoiding what we are allergic to is good sense when we are talking about preserving the long-term health of our physical bodies.
Avoiding what we are allergic to is not good sense when we are talking about preserving the long-term health of habits we have acquired that no longer are producing optimal outcomes for us.
Understanding the difference requires us to engage in radical and persistent self-awareness. But the act of bringing our behavior under control becomes difficult (if not impossible) when we are surrounded by more noise that signal, and by more marketing than wisdom.
Engaging in such self-awareness is the price that we pay for becoming the human beings that we want to be. But we cannot often do this out of our own power. Self-awareness comes from listening to others about ourselves, engaging with ideas and philosophies that are difficult and challenging, and then making the hard decision to make the hard changes to our ingrained behavior.
Conflict becomes easy to engage in when we lack self-awareness (or are allergic to our behavioral need for such self-awareness) because conflict becomes the way of life that makes meaning out of the confusing flotsam and jetsam of a life only barely lived.
Constructing a behavioral existence focused around avoiding the allergen of self-awareness results in the construction of elaborate mental and behavioral echo chambers, silos of information that the challenges of new knowledge cannot penetrate.
And all the intentional emotional and psychological energy that goes toward constructing this existence (which could instead be deployed against a lack of self-awareness) transmogrifies conflicts in our lives from events to be managed to problems itching to be resolved.
And always in ways that work for us, allowing a continuance of avoiding the allergen of self-awareness.
Learning, adaptation, gaining new knowledge and then deploying it to accomplish an outcome.
What’s really triggering your allergies?
Organizations, founders, managers, and employees who are self-aware do better than those who aren’t.
This should come as no surprise, but in an economic, social, and even political climate where “knowing thyself” is as mysterious as “knowing thy customers,” it becomes incumbent upon an organization–and the people employed by it–to be self-aware.
Here are a few questions to get you started:
Answering all (or any) of these questions honestly and clearly, requires the courage to speak up, be in the room, stay engaged, and be open to self-critique.
And in case you’re wondering if this all actually works, well here’s a little something to watch…
When the emotional labor of addressing a dispute with a customer, a client, a co-worker, or a boss, is the work we don’t want to do, we revert to doing the work that makes us the most comfortable.
This is usually the task that we were hired to do in the first place.
A graphic designer, instead of confronting her client with what she knows about design, graphics, colors, and what is appealing to the human eye in practice, rather than in theory, will instead revert to the statement “Well, it’s what the client asked for.” And then do the bare minimum on the project.
A human services professional, instead of respectfully establishing boundaries with a client who has engaged in bad/poor behavior in the past, will allow that client to continue to run roughshod over him. He will revert to the statement “Well, I hope that the client changes this time.” And then he will do the maximum to ensure that the client follows the same rules and policies that didn’t change the client’s behavior before.
A factory worker, instead of confronting co-workers about shoddy work, or not showing up on time, will allow that co-worker to continue the behavior unabated. The worker will shrug her shoulders sagely and think “The boss should do something. After all, it’s not my problem.” And then the worker will start to come in a little bit later, and a little bit later, and a little bit later, until her arrival time matches that of her tardy co-worker.
A manager, instead of engaging in radical self-awareness work and self-confrontation about how they can improve as a leader and manager, will engage in radical “doubling-down” on driving the team forward to accomplish a seemingly unattainable goal. The manager will firmly think “That’s why they’re here. To work and get a paycheck. I have enough responsibilities without babysitting them as well.” And then the manager will make excuses as various members of the team quit, transfer to other parts of the organization, or gradually become “C” players, committed radically to performing just at the average.
The ironclad law of life is that we get more of what we subsidize and we get less of what we tax. When we subsidize laziness, disrespect, cynicism, disappointment, ignorance, appeals to “the rules,” or “the policies” we get more of the same types of behavioral responses in the organizations we seek to lead. When we tax emotional labor, self-awareness, leadership, insight, and open conversation, we get less of the behavioral responses that will raise up our organizations.
And yet, human intuition is to avoid, prevaricate, be selfish, be lazy and ultimately, to do the bare minimum at scale. This is the work—hidden behind the cover of our job/task descriptions—that we think we are hired to do, from founders and managers to employees and interns.
But, what if we’ve intuited the wrong thing?
What if the work that we should be subsidizing is the work that negates the effects of what we think is “natural” and “just the way that it is”?
What if we not only thought differently, but acted differently?
As people choose the messages that they will receive and believe, does self-awareness, critical reasoning, and altruism matter?
When mass media falls apart at scale, and when the historical, cultural, political, and social forces that used to bind disparate populations in the United States together in the last century and a half, no longer matter, can altruism, critical reasoning, and self-awareness matter?
Or, are we returning to a smaller, localized, conflict-ridden past that may be out of our historical memory, but that hews closer to the way people have always interacted?
And the sub-question: Cui bono? Who benefits the most from this seeming cultural return to a baseline we don’t remember?