My conflict was with the center's director who had been running the center for some time. I came aboard because of a merger that took place between the two centers. The director was still in charge but I was asked to train her on some of our practices at the old center. She was not too acceptable to my ideas and our practices and became a bit upset that I had to train her. I explained to her that I was not there to take over and I thought that it would be in the best interest of the center if we put our ideas and goals together to reach our goals. Although she was still very short and she was not at all an effective listener she eventually came around.
She had developed an inaccurate perception that I was there to take her job. After some time she saw that her perception was incorrect and that her unproductive conflict between the two of us was making a negative impact on our relationship (O'Hair & Wiemann, 2012). She then decided that a productive conflict where both of us agreed and worked together would be the best approach. In the mean time I did everything that I could not to provoke her by aggression, a lack of fairness of any kind, or by being incompetent on purpose. I did everything in my power to avoid conflict with her and when there was a conflict I chose not to show an attitude. When I avoid conflict according to the authors this is known as escapist strategies (O'Hair & Wiemann, 2012).
The director gave up challenging me and became very cooperative so that we both could assist the center in reaching its ultimate goal which is to provide quality childcare to all of our students. According to the authors of our course book these strategies used were challenging strategies and cooperative strategies. I feel that I communicated effectively with the director and used several strategies that I have learned in this lesson that I was not aware of at the time to reduce and resolve conflict between the two of us.
Reference
O'Hair, D., & Wiemann, M.O. (2012). Real communication: An introduction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Hi Sharon,
ReplyDeleteI am so glad that everything turned out well with the Director. Oftentimes it lack of communication that causes people to respond in a manner that is not pleasing. But, by you continuously communicating a "win/win" situation, your director came around and became more open to ideas and suggestions from you! AWESOME!!
Brenda
Hi Sharon,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear that things worked out between you and the director. I agree that the escapist strategy was a good way to handle the conflict. Being the bigger person and doing your best to avoid conflict helped you to reduce the tension between the two of you.
Great post, It sounds to me that you did learn a lot from this conflict. It also seamed as though you two now are closer than you were before, which is great. Looking back on it now was there anything you would have done different with the knowledge you know now?
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your post. You were very patient in this situation. You made positive decisions. If you would have taken different measures things really could have gotten out of hand and probably hurt the center. This situation happens a lot because people think that their job is being threatened, so of course they jump to conclusions and make inaccurate assumptions. Your effective communication skills allowed you to resolve this situation.