Managing Conflict (Patrol Presentation)
Time Allowed
60 minutes
Learning Objectives
As a result of this session, participants will be able to
• Better understand conflict from a leadership point of view.
• Acquire new tools for successfully managing conflict situations.
Materials Needed
• Key points of the presentation, presented as PowerPoint~ slides, overhead projections, or flip-chart pages
• A copy of the Norman Rockwell painting The Scoutmaster
Recommended Facility Layout
Patrol meeting area
Delivery Method
The presentation and activities are facilitated by each patrol’s troop guide.
Presentation (Show the group a copy of the Norman Rockwell painting The Scoutmaster.)
Procedure
Introduction Consider the Norman Rockwell painting of the Scoutmaster. It is a starlit night and the boys are
all asleep in their perfectly pitched tents. The Scoutmaster, who looks like a cross between Cary Grant and John Wayne, is standing by the embers of the campfire. He is deep in contemplation, his face serene and satisfied. The message seems to be that the Scoutmaster is utterly competent in all that he does.
On the other hand, the message could just as well be that the only moment of peace and quiet the poor man gets is when the entire troop is unconscious.
Where was Rockwell earlier in the day when the Scoutmaster was shouting things like, “Hey, you kids stop poking that bear with that stick!” Where is the painting of the Cubmaster trying to calm parents upset over the outcome of a pinewood derby? Where is the portrait of the Varsity Scout Coach trying to get a team to
stop arguing over the officiating of an intersquad basketball game? Where is the image of the Venturing crew Advisor attempting to sort out the differences between several crew members on the first day of a two-week adventure? What about the district committee member confronted with a seemingly unresolvable argument between others on the committee?
Leadership is easy when everything is going well—or when everybody is sound asleep. Much of the rest of the time, leadership involves managing conflict by finding common ground among individuals, providing tools for people to settle their own disputes, and on rare occasions stepping in to make unilateral decisions.
Opening Exercise
Let’s begin our exploration of conflict management with this exercise.
Get with a partner. One of you makes a fist. The other has two minutes to convince the first to open that fist.
(Give participants a couple of minutes to do this.)
What happened? Did anyone manage to convince the other to open the fist? Whether successful or not, what strategies did you try?
POSSIBLE STRATEGIES
• Bribery—”I’ll give you five dollars if you open your fist.”
• Concern—”It doesn’t matter to me if you open your fist, but unless you do you won’t be able to pick anything up.”
• Persuasion—”I like your hands better open than closed.”
• Interest—”I’m curious to see what’s inside your fist.”
• Straightforwardness—”Hey, open your fist!”
The point of this exercise is to remind us that we can’t make people do anything they don’t want to do. If you ask a Scout, or a coworker, or a family member, or an adult colleague in Scouting to do something and they refuse, you can’t force them to do it. There must be boundaries and rules, of course, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, but the bottom line is you can’t coerce someone to do something.
Think about one of the most basic conflict situations—between a parent and a child. How do you convince a child of 5 or 6 that it is time to put away the toys and take a bath?
(Let the group offer suggestions.)
In that situation, many of us use all sorts of rewards—you can read a book after your bath, you can bring one toy into the tub, you can fire up the massage jets, etc. But if that doesn’t work, then what? What if the child digs in and absolutely refuses to obey? Often that’s when we punish: Time out. Take away a toy. It is a “power over” situation. The same sort of situation often occurs with a boss and an employee. It can occur with a leader and a Scout.
Ultimately, you can only empower yourself. Then, within boundaries, you can encourage others to act in certain ways.
Be Aware of Yourself
The first thing to do in any relationship, but especially one that may involve conflict, is to look at yourself. Why is the issue at hand important to you? In the great
Show slide 418, scheme of things, does it really matter whether the other person opens his or her
Managing Conflict. fist? Does the child really need a bath?
A Scoutmaster found himself nagging his Scouts on every campout to get busy with evening meal preparation so that they could eat supper at a reasonable hour. After this happened three or four times, he asked himself what was really at stake. When he was honest about it, he realized that he wanted the meal on time because he was hungry then and eating late made him grumpy. On the next campout he took along a sandwich and a couple of granola bars but kept them hidden from the Scouts. He said nothing to the Scouts as the afternoon lengthened into evening, but when he felt himself getting hungry he walked a short distance from camp and had a snack. The Scouts procrastinated a little longer, but eventually they got hungry, too, and in their own good time they prepared their meal and invited him to dine with them.
What the Scoutmaster had stumbled upon was the self-resolving conflict—a situation that, if given time, will work itself out without confrontation or argument. The Scoutmaster realized that he was attempting to impose his schedule on a group that was in favor of the ultimate outcome but resisted the time frame. When the Scoutmaster understood the larger picture and took steps to alter his role in it, the problem went away.
Be Aware of Others
When are people most likely to do what you ask them to do, especially if it is something they are less than excited about?
• When they trust you
• When they have experience with you and have found you to be a reliable leader and ally
• When they understand that you are making decisions for the good of the group
• Most of all, when they sense that you care about them
Early in this Wood Badge course, we discussed the importance of Listening to Learn. Listening is the most important skill in resolving any conflict, whether the conflict involves you as a participant or as a moderator. Unless you make a conscious effort to listen, you will miss vital facts and beliefs that could lead to a satisfactory resolution.
Consider this story:
A woman gets on an airliner. She is tired after a long business trip and just wants to get home. She has a window seat. A large man who is sitting by the aisle will not get up to let her reach her window seat. She struggles to get past him and sits down very put out. But she wants to be polite. “Where are you going?” she asks the man.
He doesn’t look at her, but in a gruff voice says, “Farther than you, so don’t think I’m going to get up when you get off.”
She feels herself become angry, but takes a deep breath and decides to get more information. She continues to press the man to talk to her, and discovers that he is just recovering from an automobile accident and that it is very difficult for him to get up and down from a seat. It frustrates him, and he is fearful about whether he will ever fully recover.
The reality of that situation changed how the woman thought of the man’s actions. They did not become best friends, but she realized how her first impressions of him had been wrong and that only through careful listening was she able to understand what was really going on.
Set the Scene for Cooperative Resolutions
Listening to people and paying attention to them is an essential step for establishing a relationship in which cooperation can occur.
Think back to the Who-Me Game we did earlier in this course. Think of how you and others in your patrol have shared information about yourselves with one another. Remember the experiences you have shared in the last few days. Those are all points of contact, connections that provide a foundation of trust, understanding, and familiarity for further communication and, if necessary, for resolving conflicts.
In real estate, the rule is “Location, location, location!” In leadership, and especially when dealing with conflict, the bottom line is “Involvement, involvement, involvement!”
As a leader, the more you have shared with those you lead, the greater your chances of finding cooperative resolutions for conflicts. Developing that kind of connection cannot happen overnight, though. It is one of the ongoing challenges and rewards of good leadership.
The Most Important Question
Whenever you work with people, the most important question to ask them is, “What do you want?”
Think about that. When was the last time somebody asked you that? When was the last time somebody really listened to your answer?
For example, as a presenter I really want this presentation to go well. But if it isn’t going well, then what? What can I do? I can lash out at you, demand that you pay attention. I can start crying. I can plead with you to cheer me on. I can just run away and leave all of you behind. Or, I might even be so bold as to ask all of you for suggestions about how this could go better.
So the first question in working with someone is: “What do you want?”
The Most Important Follow-Up Questions
Once you’ve gotten the answer to “What do you want?” there are three
follow-up questions.
• “What are you willing to do to get what you want?”
• “Is what you are doing working?”
• “Do you want to figure out another way?”
Questions for Conflict Resolution
1. What do you want?
2. What are you doing to get it?
3. Is it working?
4. Do you want to figure out another way?
Think about the power of these questions when asked in this order. The first one focuses people’s attention on what their real needs are and helps you see more clearly other people’s points of view. The subsequent questions put responsibility on other people to be a party in examining where they are and then in finding pathways to reach where they want to be.
Questions 2 and 3 are vital. Don’t skip them. They are questions that empower people. Give people the time and encouragement to figure out the answers, to understand their own path.
Too often we as leaders skip questions 2 and 3. We ask, “What do you want?” and then jump immediately to a variation of question 4, telling someone what we think they should do.
Questions 2 and 3 help people figure things out on their own and discover their own path. Question 4 gives them a way to invite you to help them explore other approaches to a problem. It encourages a cooperative effort—working together to help everyone get what they want.
Remember, you can’t control another person—you can’t open the fist of a person who refuses to open it. But you can persuade. You can join forces with him or her in a mutual search. You can encourage him or her to become an active seeker after meaningful answers.
Effective Communication in Conflict Situations
In the Wood Badge session on Communication, we talked about the fact that there is much more to conveying a message than simply repeating the words. Body language sends powerful messages, as does tone of voice.
For example, I can ask the most important question in four different ways and convey at least four different messages about my attitude and my willingness to work together toward a solution.
What do you want?
What do you want?
What do you want?
What do you want?
Professional conflict mediators are trained to manage their emotions so that they can be as objective as possible. That allows them to view a situation for what it is rather than to allow their anger or excitement or some other emotion to dictate their reactions.
Most of us here haven’t had that kind of in-depth training. However, simply being aware of the need to step away from our emotional responses can help us react more effectively when a situation involves conflict.
One trick is to pay attention to your breathing for a few moments. When we are under stress, we often take rapid, shallow breaths. A few slow, deep breaths can refresh your brain with oxygen and help you focus more clearly.
If anger or frustration or some other emotion is clouding your ability to see an issue as objectively as possible, it’s probably wise to step back for a minute or an hour, or even a day or more. Allow time to collect yourself before going forward. Remember the parenting trick of counting to 10 before reacting to a child’s confrontational actions? The same principle holds true when you are engaged in difficult interactions with teenagers or adults.
Work on issues in the present and the future, not in the past. Rather than looking for blame and recrimination, steer conversations toward seeking solutions.
Any time you feel that you aren’t making progress or that you don’t know what to do next, return to the basic four questions.
1. What do you want?
2. What are you doing to get what you want?
3. Is it working?
4. Do you want to figure out another way?
Negotiating Limits and Rules
Are you law-abiding? (Most people will say yes.)
When the freeway speed limit says 55 mph, do you drive 60? If so, why?
If a meeting is set to start at 8 A.M., do you arrive at 8:05? Is that OK? Are you still law-abiding?
Scenario 1
Here’s a situation many of you have probably experienced firsthand. The parents of a 16-year-old son set his Saturday night curfew at midnight. The first week, he comes in at 12:05. Is that OK? The parents trust him and they are so glad that he is home safe that they accept the late arrival and say nothing about it.
The next Saturday, he comes in at 12:15. The parents are again relieved that he is home and safe, and so again they say nothing.
The next week, he comes in at 12:30, and the parents freak out. They give him their very best lecture about trust and responsibility. The boy’s eyes glaze over as he listens.
What time will he come in next? Probably about 12:20. He splits the difference between what he understood was OK and what he knows is not. 12:15 was OK, 12:30 was not, so the real curfew time (originally set at midnight) must actually be somewhere around 12:20.
What’s the lesson here? If there are limits that you as a leader expect group members to respect, you need to be clear about what those boundaries are and then stick to them. One of the best methods of doing that is to involve the group in determining those limits. You can use the four basic questions of conflict resolution to establish standards that may deter conflict from occurring. What do you, as a leader, want? What does your group want? Where is there common ground for agreement? What are the factors that may prove nonnegotiable?
Scenario 2
Here’s another scenario. On a Scout hike, three or four of the older Scouts speed ahead of the rest of the group. When they get tired, they stop and wait for the others to catch up, but as soon as the others do, the older Scouts take off again. To make the scenario more interesting, let’s have the Scouts hiking in grizzly bear country.
Are there reasons why this should concern you, the leader?
• There’s a safety issue. If someone becomes injured or lost or happens upon a bear, the group is split up and will be less able to cope with the situation.
• Dividing the group like this can damage group morale and team building.
• Dividing the group makes it more difficult for adult leaders to provide appropriate leadership.
You gather the older Scouts to discuss the situation and try to find an acceptable solution. In resolving this conflict, you can begin by encouraging a cooperative approach. If that fails, then you can use another leadership tool— the proscriptive approach.
A Cooperative Approach
The ideal approach to a conflict is to engage everyone on an equal basis and help them come up with a solution on their own. We’ve already seen how this can work by asking the four questions:
1. What do you want?
2. What are you doing to get what you want?
3. Is it working?
4. Do you want to figure out another way?
You may discover that the older boys are eager for some time alone. Stronger than the others, the older boys may want to hike fast for the sake of hiking fast.
When the older boys hear you answer the same four questions, they may discover the importance of staying together for safety, for effective leadership, and for group morale.
Given the chance to figure out ways to resolve these differing needs, the older boys may have some good ideas. Perhaps for the duration of this hike they will stay with the rest of the group and be supportive of the younger Scouts. At a future date, you will help them organize an older Scout hike, or perhaps even see about organizing a Varsity Scout squad or Venture patrol in the troop.
A Proscriptive Approach
Sometimes cooperation fails. The older Scouts of the group hiking in bear country continue to split off from the others, jeopardizing the safety of themselves and the rest of the group.
Leaders sometimes must make the decision that certain behavior will not be tolerated. Perhaps the most dramatic instances are when safety is being compromised and someone must take action immediately.
“Stop swinging that axe right now, and I mean right now!” Once the axe is out of the Scout’s hands, you can begin discussing the dangers of chopping while barefooted.
Within the context of making such decisions—that is, proscribing behavior and then demanding that it happen that way—it is still possible to act in a manner that is effective for you and understandable to those you are leading.
Rather than four questions, proscriptive conflict resolution is built on four statements:
1. This is what I want.
2. This is what I understand you are doing.
3. This is why that isn’t working for me.
4. Here’s what I need for you to do.
While the end result is an immediate change in behavior, this approach gives leaders tools to explain themselves and provide a basis for a decision. It allows a leader and group members to interact on a healthy level, and it provides the opportunity for proscriptive decisions to evolve into arrangements developed through a more cooperative approach.
As with any sort of leadership, being able to step in, if necessary, and set certain boundaries is easier to do if leaders have already established a relationship of trust and understanding with those they are leading. Leaders who have taken the time to listen and learn and care for people in their groups will have a much easier time negotiating with group members and individuals to establish the needs and solutions of everyone, leaders included.
You can be open with people in your group about your understanding of your responsibilities and what you expect from them. At its most basic, the contract between leaders and those who are led is as follows.
My Job Is Your Job Is
To do all I can to ensure your safety. To tell me when you don’t feel safe.
To help you get the most out of this To help me ensure your safety.
experience.To be honest with you To be honest with me and treat
and treat you with respect. me with respect.
Ideas we don’t share often enough with others include these:
• “If I’m doing something that bothers you, I’d like you to tell me in a respectful way.”
• “How will it be if we really get along? What will that be like?”
• “If I see you’re having a problem, what do you want me to do?”
Conclusion
Return to the fist exercise. The right words will open it, but it takes awareness and understanding to discover what those words are. It is well worth the time and the effort—an open hand is far better than a fist.
Now ask each pair of participants to open their fists and shake hands with one another. That’s the ultimate goal of conflict resolution—to build on common ground, to listen, to find solutions to situations that allow us to grow closer to one another rather than farther apart.
