Your Conflict Management Toolbox May Contain the Tool from Hell
Like any other tool, conflict management tools become truly useful when you use the right tool for the situation and get practiced enough to use if effectively.
Years ago, when we lived in Vermont, my husband and I decided to build a very large deck off one side of our home. It was a giant undertaking. Since both of us have terminal degrees in our academic disciplines, building a deck was one of those projects where we often joked, “How many people with a doctorate does it take to…” Deck-building was, quite frankly, not our strength and we had a lot of learning to do in order to achieve the end result we wanted.
Fortunately, our contractor, a woman who had masterfully completed projects for us in the past, agreed to help us learn how to build the deck while she made sure we didn’t mess up the project completely. Rita visited with us for several hours while we marked out the deck’s dimensions and identified the location for each of the footings. Of course, we didn’t pick a simple rectangular shape. No, we designed a deck with several unusual angles and corners. No small dreams for us!
Rita left us to dig the footings, insert the Sonotubes, and get the concrete truck in to fill them. Then she’d return to walk us through the next step.
We decided to rent a tool we’d never used before: A gas-powered two-person auger. If you’ve not seen one, it’s rather like a giant drill. With each of us stationed across from the other and holding very tightly on the handles, we’d fire up the auger and start drilling giant holes into the Vermont earth. So much easier than shovels.
The auger quickly became the Tool from Hell. We’d marked chalk X’s in the precise locations where the footings needed to be. The minute we started the auger, the chalk X disappeared beneath its churning drill bit. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but the auger didn’t just drill straight down. It lurched and jumped and hit rocks and tried to shimmy all the way to Tucson. And after each jump, we couldn’t be sure where the original chalk X had been. And yet, since we’d paid good money to rent the Tool from Hell, and we only had it for 24 hours, and the concrete truck was arriving in the morning, we had to make it work. It wasn’t, we learned later, the kind of auger we could have rented, with a gizmo that sort of stationed it to a precise spot.
It was a very long day.
When Rita returned, post concrete pouring, she stared for a long time at the footings. She measured again and again, in silence. Once, we saw her shake her head and murmur something under her breath. Finally, she straightened up, looked at us with a plastered-on smile, and said, “Well. We can fix this. Let me just re-work the deck plans a bit to match where the footings ended up. ”
How many people with a doctorate does it take to…drill a proper hole in the ground?
We rented a tool we didn’t know much about and didn’t end up with the right model for our job. That’s like learning a new conflict management tool and trying it out in an a circumstance that isn’t quite the right one. We set about using it by assuming the instruction booklet told us what we needed to know. That’s like learning how to uncover interests in a conflict and assuming intellectual understanding automatically translates to effective use. We forged on in our determination and ended up drilling holes off center. That’s like saying, “I learned this tool and I’m going to use it, even if it does look like the other person gets more frustrated every time I open my mouth.”
We’re proud of trying, of course, and could get better with a little learning assistance and practice. The same is true of your conflict management toolbox…you get better with guidance, commitment and practice.
The deck turned out beautifully, by the way, thanks to Rita’s hand-holding at every stage. But to this very day, Rod and I break out into a cold sweat when anyone utters the word “auger.”
Copyright © 2007 by Tammy Lenski. This article was originally published in my regular column for The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.
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