New Conflict Prevention Tool?

I saw this item on KnockKnock and got a chuckle. Maybe I’ll start providing it to clients as one of my conflict prevention tools!

“This pad could save marriages, and relationships too. When you’re in a lousy mood, why leave emotional communication to chance? A note outlining state of mind is far more clear. Or if your day has been triumphant, let your cohabitant know it’s time to celebrate. Doesn’t your partner deserve the benefit of fair warning?”

Click on the photo to be taken to the website, where you can view a much larger picture.

Strength from the Women in Our Lives

One question I get frequently in my coaching and training work is how to successfully confront a colleague or boss without compromising one’s job.

This post on misbehaving.net references a 2004 New York Times article profiling Mary Callahan Erdoes, Chief Executive at JP Morgan Private Bank. Erdoes tells about an event early in her career when a male colleague presented her work as if it were his own. [Read more]

Strategic Questions

Strategic Questioning: An Approach to Creating Personal and Social Change is a solid little online guide (also available in downloadable .pdf) to using questions for effective problem-solving. It’s based on a paper by Fran Peavey and edited by Vivian Hutchinson, and you can use it to broaden your conflict resolution, negotiation or leadership toolkit. [Read more]

Monkey Business in Conflict and Negotiation

We can learn a lot from a monkey.

Last week’s Science edition of the New York had an interesting column by Carl Zimmer: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t. The article’s not available for free viewing online anymore, but if you have access to a LexisNexis account you can acquire your own copy. The column discusses a Yale research project seeking to understand how we learn: [Read more]

I Didn’t Do It Intentionally

My husband and I have an ongoing inside joke. I can get pretty inward-focused when I’m working on a project, so much so that I tend not to pay much attention to what’s going on around me. I know I’m really absorbed when I start to notice small bruises on my legs and arms. They come from my banging into door jambs as I walk around oblivious to my surroundings, thinking about whatever I’m thinking about. That’s pathetic, isn’t it.

Door jambs are not my only victims. My husband also bears the brunt of this over-absorption. One evening I opened a kitchen cabinet door into his head, because I was thinking about a coaching client and forgot (probably didn’t even notice, frankly) that Rod was standing there. He yelped. I woke up. [Read more]

Avoidance Is a Poor Business Strategy

We have a terrific petsitter. She’s an animal lover, is very reliable, and spends some real time with our dogs when she comes to walk them on days when our schedules would otherwise make for a loooong stretch between walks. She’s also an excellent communicator, leaving us detailed notes about anything she noticed with the dogs or cats, returning calls promptly, and showing willingness to work with us to sort out the occasional glitch.

As I was pondering how lucky we are to have Laura and Spoiled Rotten Dawgs, I thought briefly about the petsitting company we hired when we first moved to this region. The women who ran the business seemed very professional—lots of forms to fill out, a careful interview of us before they’d accept us as their client, lots of paper handed over for our files. After a couple of instances when they didn’t show up to walk the dogs when we thought they would, I phoned them to see what might straighten this out. Sounds like a communication gap, I thought. The conversation went badly. I still cringe when I think about it.

“You’ve got no right to question us when you never even pay your bill on time,” said one of the owners over the phone. I could sense the clenched teeth through which these words were uttered.

Huh? What could she possibly mean? We dutifully wrote a check, with tip included, and put it in the mail the day after each bill was received (they left the bill on the counter after each day’s worth of walks). I’m far from perfect, but a late bill-payer, certainly not. Ahem! And what about that awful word, never?

She explained, without mincing words, that the contract we had signed obligated us to pay them at the time of the visit itself. So, instead of writing a check the evening after the bill was received, we were supposed to be writing it the morning before it was received; the bill, apparently, was just for our records. Uh oh.

When I asked why they’d never said anything—this had, after all, gone on for several months—she told me that they preferred not to confront “problem clients,” since confrontations could get ugly.

I have a rather distinct memory of thinking, yeah, this conversation is much better than her mentioning this months ago, before she was so ticked off at us she almost couldn’t put two words together clearly. And before our dogs suffered some uncomfortably long days without the chance to take care of their own business. We agreed to part ways, sort of a mutual firing. I dug the original contract out of the files—yup, there it was, several pages in: Payment due immediately at the time services are rendered. No question—we were in the wrong, contractually speaking.

And, had this been pointed out to us much earlier, we would have apologized, mea-culpa-ed, and gotten it right from there on. But we couldn’t fix what we weren’t aware was broken. And the more we erred, the angrier these women apparenly got at us, until their interest in serving us well was pretty seriously eroded.

Confronting a problem or conflict is sometimes hard, no question. But failure to do so isn’t a healthy business strategy. In this instance, the problem behavior continued far longer than it need have, and the anger and frustration these women experienced really got in the way of the business relationship. Not to mention, they lost a client who could have been a good one for them over the long run.

I realized recently that I haven’t heard mention of their petsitting service in a while. They used to have a pretty visible presence in the region. Maybe they’re still out there somewhere. Or maybe the hyper-avoidance led to more than the loss of just a single client.

Incrementalist Negotiating

Incrementalism may not be such a bad thing. Often disdainfully dismissed for being a copout behavior that preserves problematic systems by tweaking instead of overhauling them, incrementalism has its place in some negotiation situations.

This morning’s New York Times is reporting on yesterday’s drama in the Montreal climate talks. Harlan Watson, representing the Bush administration, walked out of the talks after objecting to the wording of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to move the 1992 Kyoto Protocols forward. The Bush administration has steadfastly withstood pressure to sign onto the Kyoto accords, citing the binding limits on greenhouse gas reduction as the dealbreaking factor.

President Bill Clinton was invited to speak to the delegates and here’s the part that attracted my attention:

Mr. Clinton said that, given the impasse over global targets for emissions, countries might do better to consider specific, smaller initiatives to advance and disseminate technologies that could greatly reduce emissions in both rich and poor countries.

“If you can’t agree on a target, agree on a set of projects so everyone has something to do when they get up in the morning,” he said.

Clinton’s reminding us that when we’re stuck on a major issue in a negotiation, there’s often other work we can do that still moves the matter forward. It’s tempting, when our frustration gets the better of us or we want to use drama to force the other side’s hand, to literally or figuratively walk out. An incrementalist headset may serve us better in such moments, giving us something worthwhile to do when we get up tomorrow.

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