1. Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Managing Conflict
Bernard L. Erven
Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics
Ohio State University
Before leaving the title slide, focus attention on “managing” in the title. We will be talking about managing conflict, not avoiding conflict. Managing suggests that we will take a proactive approach to dealing with conflict. This makes managing conflict a manager responsibility.
Employees can be helpful in managing conflict provided they have been given some training on how to collaborate rather than compete for a win/lose outcome.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

2. Conflict is inevitable
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Conflict is inevitable
Whenever two or more people work together, there will be conflict.
The manager’s challenge is how to manage the conflict not how to avoid it.
People are not alike in their goals, experiences, training, skills, ages and personalities. Therefore, conflict should be expected. Absent of conflict suggests that managers are avoiding problems rather than addressing them.
Again, return to the key point that our focus is on how to manage conflict. This point deserves so much emphasis early in the presentation because many people long for ways to address conflict comfortably, easily and without much change on their part.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

3. Conflict: negative or positive?
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Conflict: negative or positive?
Conflict may lead to improved relations and solutions to problems, i.e. be positive.
On the other hand, conflict may destroy relationships and cause additional problems, i.e., be negative.
Conflict need not be negative. Managers can aspire to having a positive atmosphere in which spirited disagreements are directed at making better decisions.
Most people have had negative experiences with conflict. Ask participants to think about strained and broken relationships that grew out of unresolved conflict. Ask them to speculate about whether the broken relationships could have been avoided.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

4. Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Working to avoid, bury or deny conflict results in continuation of its underlying causes.
Conflict can continue indefinitely without resolution.
The underlying causes of conflict often hinge on perceptions rather than facts.
Thus, conflict may be the unrecognized root cause of failure to resolve a problem.
The challenge is to manage conflict in a way that it turns a problem into an opportunity for improvement.
Avoidance, burial and denial are the opposite of managing conflict.
Patience is a helpful conflict management tool but it does not substitute for conflict management. Waiting for the conflict to disappear may simply give people time to harden their positions and add even more justifications for their own positions.
Although perceptions and unrecognized root causes complicate conflict management, nevertheless, they are factors with which the manager must deal.
This slide concludes the introduction. The introduction is designed to end on the positive note of making conflict management an opportunity for improvement.
The goal of turning a problem into an opportunity for improvement needs to be emphasized. It is a positive point intended to motivate managers to dig into what conflict management is and how it can be accomplished.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

5. Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Getting to Yes – Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Roger Fisher and William Ury, Penguin Books ISBN ), a widely recognized authoritative book, provides the basis for the following guidelines on conflict management.
The guidelines incorporate key conflict management principles.
The guidelines center on the basic premise for successful conflict management – collaboration works best.
Much has been written about conflict management. Getting to Yes has the advantage of being both research-based and applicable to many situations that managers face.
Conflict management requires creativity. No single set of rules or procedures works in all situations. Therefore, astute managers depend on a series of principles to guide them.
All of the guidelines relate back to the basic premise of successful conflict management – collaboration works best.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

6. Guidelines for collaboration
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Guidelines for collaboration
Don’t bargain over POSITIONS.
Separate the PEOPLE from the problem.
Focus on INTERESTS, not positions.
Invent OPTIONS for mutual gain.
Insist on using OBJECTIVE CRITERIA.
This slide provides an overview of the five guidelines for conflict management. Note the five keys: positions, people, interests, options and objective criteria. Call attention again to collaboration. Explain that the five guidelines deal with one negative thing not to do and four positive things to do. Explain that the rest of the discussion of conflict management will focus on understanding and applying the five guidelines.
Using a current conflict that someone is dealing with helps to make the discussion more challenging and real to the participants. The universality of the five guidelines can be demonstrated by letting the participants nominate conflict situations. It works well to ask people to briefly describe conflict situations they are currently facing. Ask each person to briefly describe the situation. After three to five situations have been nominated, pick the one that appears to be the best choice for demonstrating the five guidelines. Choose a conflict situation that is complex and robust enough to be challenging while allowing application of all five guidelines. Avoid situations that incorporate multiple conflicts. Also avoid simplistic conflicts. It is also important to select a situation for which the nominator appears able and willing to be extensively engaged in the discussion that is to follow.
It is important to stay committed to this conflict situation for the remainder of the discussion. This means that the discussion will not always be neat and tidy. Real situations challenge the speaker to struggle with the participants in applying each of the guidelines. Sometime, the outcome is highly satisfactory because all five guidelines were applied with relative ease and the opportunity for collaboration became apparent. On the other hand, sometimes the outcome is unsatisfactory because the guidelines did not lead to closure of the conflict situation. In such cases, there is an opportunity to discuss whether the people involved would have been better off not having tried to use the five guidelines. It is highly unlikely that the people in the conflict are going to be worse off for having tried to collaborate.
Before jumping into discussion of the guidelines, it is helpful to point out that they work best when all parties to the conflict understand the guidelines and are sincerely interested in applying them. Success in conflict management is unlikely when one person is closed minded, unwilling to consider alternatives and convinced that there is no reason to be fair.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

7. 1. Don’t bargain over POSITIONS
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
1. Don’t bargain over POSITIONS
Produces unwise agreements.
Creates inefficiency.
Endangers an ongoing relationship.
Encourages giving in or being nice for the wrong reasons.
Bargaining produces unwise agreements because both parties failed to attain their desired outcomes. The outcome can be what neither party wanted. For example, one party feels he/she paid too much; the other party feels he/she received too little. Neither party feels like a winner.
Bargaining is inefficient because the parties to the conflict often fail to consider its underlying causes. The result of the bargaining fails to bring closure to the conflict meaning that sometime in the future the parties are likely to rehash what was supposedly settled.
A sense of having been taken advantage of in the bargaining endangers the relationship. Even if the current conflict is seemingly resolved, the outcome may produce strains that will affect management of the next conflict between the parties.
Giving in, being nice and pretending that all has gone well is no answer to the conflict. Being nice is commendable. Being nice to avoid facing the conflict is unproductive.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

8. Outcomes from bargaining
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
Outcomes from bargaining
Win/Lose  One demands major concessions from the other.
Lose/Win  One makes major concessions to the other.
Win/Win  Both find an alternative that does not require onerous concessions from either.
This slide is an expansion of the bargaining discussion. The intent is to remind people that bargaining when approached as a win/lose challenge is based on demanding major concessions. This leads to the other party believing that the outcome was lose/win because the major concessions, e.g., being nice, were all on one side – the loser’s side.
Win/Win results from collaboration to find an alternative that requires neither party to be a loser.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

9. 2. Separate the PEOPLE from the problem
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
2. Separate the PEOPLE from the problem
Make people the priority.
Recognize both substance and relationship interests.
Deal directly with people problems.
Consider perceptions, emotions and communication barriers.
Making people the priority puts the emphasis on relationships between people not their differences that led to the conflict.
Resolution of a conflict’s substance issues is unsatisfactory if the resolution came at the expense of relationships. It is necessary to deal with the substance issues but not sufficient.
The relationship issues must be dealt with iexplicitly and directly rather than tangentially.
Conflict management must take people as they are not as we wish them to be. Therefore, perceptions often are confused with facts. Conflict almost always generates emotion that interferes with reasoning and consideration of facts. Finally, formal and informal communication is at the heart of how people relate to each other. Deficiencies in communication skills and communication barriers interfere with good intentions to get a conflict resolved. Each party must pay attention to the ways in which communication is helping or standing in the way of progress.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

10. 3. Focus on INTERESTS, not positions
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
3. Focus on INTERESTS, not positions
Reconcile interests, not positions.
Seek to understand the other person’s interests.
Ask, “Why?”
Ask, “Why not?”
Be hard on the problem, soft on the people.
Bargaining reconciles positions. In this guideline, we build on the first guideline which says to avoid bargaining. Reconciling interests substitutes for bargaining.
Interests may be thought of as goals. What is each party trying to accomplish? What does each party consider primary versus secondary to resolution of the conflict?
Asking, “Why?” and “Why not?” are techniques for developing an understanding of interests? Why to you find my solution unacceptable? Why is that important to you? Why do you have difficulty with what I find important?
Being hard on the problem and soft on the people means that we continue to highly value relationships. We must understand the problem. We must break down the problem into its essential parts. We must communicate clearly about what is causing a problem between us. We must do all of this without losing our relationship.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

11. 4. Invent OPTIONS for mutual gain
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
4. Invent OPTIONS for mutual gain
Be creative.
Broaden the options beyond the obvious
Brainstorm.
Consider unusual, nontraditional and even surprising options.
Look for mutual gain.
Make the other person’s decision easy.
This guideline challenges every manager because creativity is difficult. Explain that creativity improves with practice.
Inventing options that help both parties is very different from thinking of arguments to strengthen one’s own arguments. Mutual gain comes only through sensitivity to the interests of both parties.
Brainstorming encourages creativity if the usual guidelines for brainstorming are followed. Refrain from making judgments until all ideas are listed. Use new ideas to stimulate additional new ideas. Offer ideas during brainstorming without attention to what others will think of the ideas. Give brainstorming time because good ideas may not come in the first five minutes of thinking about new options.
It is through new options that the parties to the conflict are most likely to see an easy decision. It is the win/win characteristic of the idea that makes it easy.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

12. 5. Insist on using OBJECTIVE CRITERIA
Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers
Human Resources
5. Insist on using OBJECTIVE CRITERIA
Use fair standards.
Make the procedures fair.
Reason and be open to reason.
Never yield to pressure.
Fairness of standards and procedures is the foundation of win/win. That makes it the foundation of conflict management.
Reasoning is very different from bargaining. Being open to reasoning starts with listening and seeking to understand the other person.
Yielding to pressure, threats and emotional outbursts simply establishes an undesirable precedent for handling conflict in the future.
© Purdue University, Center for Food and Agricultural Business, 2002

13. Strategic Business Planning for Commercial Producers