Michele Harmon
Building a better team by utilizing your employees’ modes of conflict. What?
In May, I wrote about successful and efficient meeting leading. This month let us review building successful teams. First, you must hire a good team. Then you need to know how each new hire gets their job done while interacting with your internal and external customers. Now I know that personality tests are getting a bad rap these days, but this suggestion makes sense in building a better team.
The best instrument I have found—and one that is inexpensive to give—is the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI). It is not an opt-in or opt-out of hiring someone kind of instrument, but it will tell you which conflict mode they use too much or too little. It is also beneficial to the employee if they use it as a professional building tool. It is not the new psychology recently described in the Wall Street Journal. It was first developed in the 1970s and based on Robert Black and Jane Mouton’s even earlier work.
You can take the assessment online per person for $45, or you can pay someone trained on the instrument to launch the online evaluation for each individual and then interpret it for each team member. Ralph Kilmann wrote an article—one whose title says it all—and many of our readers might consider using this instrument: Managing Ego Energy: The Transformation of Personal Meaning into Organizational Success. You remember Freud’s ego, so others have posited that the source of ego energy is the desire to succeed and the fear of failing. Those are both solid motivators for our behavior.
So how do you handle conflict at work? Thomas and Kilmann have classified our reactions into five styles or modes: Compete, Compromise, Accommodate, Avoid, and Collaborate. Each individual uses each conflict style at different times, but we should not overuse or underuse them. Thomas and Kilmann explain the five modes this way: There are no right or wrong answers in conflict-handling behavior. All five modes are helpful in some situations: each represents a set of valuable social skills. Our conventional wisdom recognizes, for example, that often, “Two heads are better than one” (collaborating). But it also says, “Kill your enemies with kindness” (accommodating), “Split the difference” (compromising), “Leave well enough alone” (avoiding), and “Might makes right” (competing). The effectiveness of a given conflict-handling mode depends on the requirements of the specific situation and the skill with which you use that mode.
The first style is the competitor. They are assertive and uncooperative, and power-oriented. They are often all about themselves, but they also may be competitive when defending what they believe in.
Collaborators are assertive and cooperative and maybe your best problem solver because they look for the root cause of conflict and might solve a problem early. The collaborator works towards a win-win, making things better for everyone. They will confront a problem to find a creative solution.
The Compromiser is both assertive and cooperative. They want to find expedient and mutually acceptable solutions that partially satisfy everyone. They are not too competitive and not too accommodating.
The avoider is unassertive and uncooperative. The avoider may procrastinate or remove themselves from a difficult situation and avoid circumstances that create conflict. They may also ignore unimportant issues focusing on the important ones, and gather more facts before deciding.
The accommodator is unassertive and cooperative, the polar opposite of the competitor. They are full of self-sacrifice and may be very charitable; this guy will also yield to another’s point of view when they disagree with it. They want to maintain harmony and will put their wishes aside for the good of the organization.
The best part of the results is they explain how an individual might overuse or underuse each style. Company presidents generated the overuse and underuse lists, and additionally, there are lists of some diagnostic questions regarding warning signs of the overuse or the underuse of each mode, included in the results profile.
I am an H.R. Professional, so thank goodness I am a compromiser and a collaborator at work. I am 87 percent compromising and 87 percent collaborating. I am almost square in the middle at 49 percent avoiding, choosing my battles carefully, 31 percent competing, and I am last at 7 percent accommodating.
You need to know how your employees handle conflict to not only keep the peace but to place a balance of conflict styles in your work teams. The results profile may be a great way to start a coaching session.
Check out my website: www.rrrabc.com to learn about the Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument and Myers Briggs Career Inventory.
Tip of the Month
Read the Influence of Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini. It is an oldy but goody. Cialdini is a social psychologist with some timely information about the art of influence and persuasion. It is not the 2021 quick-fix psychology reviewed in the Wall Street Journal‘s April 10 and 11, 2021, weekend edition.