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A look at personality and task conflict management.

Transcription

Conflict Resolution at work and beyond.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

You’re no doubt watching this long after Halloween is said and done. But as in all of our episodes, this one’s being recorded on Halloween, that not all of our episodes are recorded on Halloween but, but they’re all recorded.

And this one happens to be on Halloween. Okay, but hopefully that makes sense.

It’s an interesting thing, because Halloween, everything regarding the horror, genre, and terror and scary things, all has to do with the conflict. And I’m going to tie this into the business realm if you don’t mind because we talk about business here we talk about principles and strategies and tactics.

As far as when it comes to business and especially from the perspective of leadership end of the business, which are the people I deal with quite often, which are business owners and executives.

If you happen to be from that realm, one of the things you’re going to deal with a lot is conflict resolution. So how do you go about resolving conflicts like it’s a funny thing, I’m taking it back to Halloween for a second here?

It’s funny, I was just reminiscing and when I was a kid Halloween, at least in my family, it happened on one day, on one day, we went out, we visited a couple of families households, and we hit up a hand and we hit up a neighborhood or block or two, you know, is nothing major, it’s just a short period of time on one day, one day a year. Now they people have stretched it out to be multiple days.

And because of that, and especially because my kids aren’t as sugared up as I was as a kid. And so they’re not as used to that much candy all at once. Not that we just give them carte blanche, but they’re going to get a little bit of candy on around the holiday what appears to behold a week now.

That happens and the whole temperature of the household changes, I mean, just everybody is on a different level. And so you get relative conflict.

As you would imagine, it’s really not that big a deal but you got to know how to handle that at home. And you got to know how to handle that at work.

One of the main tips I can pass along that I’ve learned and how it popped up in a book that I’m reading right now, and I’ll tell you more about that in the future. Because I think it’s going to be a really good book.

And just so far, I’ve gotten a lot out of it. They discuss differences in conversations that come up. That specifically regarding goals, and I’ll get to that in a second but just in dealing with any people, there are certain things where you’re arguing with somebody, but oftentimes you’re arguing about two completely different things, although you’re using similar words.

For example, most arguments when it comes back to personality theory, which is one of my favorite things to get around conflict is to understand what that person’s personality is of what yours is.

And one of the main pieces in there is a thing that is task versus people. So just about any conflict, you’re either going to be talking about a task conflict, or a people conflict. So the emotional, interpersonal thing.

He looked at me this way, he said that thing she said that she said this, the people thing is very different from the task thing. And sometimes someone will be arguing from a task perspective, while the other person’s speaking from the people perspective. And they’re not arguing properly. They’re not hitting, they’re both right, or they’re both wrong, but about two completely different things.

And so there’s nothing, there’s no conversation there. And you’ll never resolve anything until you say wait a second, is this a people issue or is this a task issue?

That’s extremely common, you’re going to find a whole lot of your arguments, whether they be at homework, or otherwise, that’s going to be in there.

And just by letting somebody step back for a moment, and identify that and kind of tap into that part of their brain that usually reduces emotions a little bit.

You can get a little bit further, especially if they’re familiar with the jargon to begin with. So it’s good to have these conversations before something happens before conflict arises. Here’s another one.

So that this was in the book that I was discussing, and that is in the process. And this happens a lot from the leading end of things in the process of trying to do something new, and produce a new behavior, in your employees in the partners in the people that you work in, and around.

If you’re trying to produce a new behavior, there’s always a conflict between what they have to do on a day to day basis, no matter what these are just things or week to week basis or month to month, the regular mechanics of a business that are always moving one way or the other, they’ve got to go, they’ve got to move, or at least that’s the understanding is that there are certain things that have to get done.

And then there are these new things that get tossed in, or switched about the regular thing.

And if you don’t acknowledge that they have all these other things to do, you throw something new on them as if they’re not doing anything waiting for something to happen, that that can add a whole lot of tension and conflict that wasn’t necessary.

And so you have to acknowledge, okay, on top of what you’re doing here, we’d like to switch this thing over here, or we’d like to switch this one thing here. And if you keep that limited, and you acknowledge what’s going on, and you build a process, in order to get there, you tend to go a little faster, but you tend to go in a better direction.

But you have to acknowledge the difference between those two worlds.

There’s different terminology for that we’ll talk about that more in the future, but that you have to differentiate, you have to step back and be able to see, what am I talking about, versus what is that person talking about.

If you can bring things out of the emotional realm, and talk about things as far as close to as black and white as possible, then you can resolve conflict, you can’t resolve conflict if one or more parties is being emotional.

Because then it becomes an ego thing, then it becomes so there’s protecting something and arguing about something that can’t possibly be resolved. Because it’s an emotional issue, there’s something else going on there.

And so if you ignore it, you may be able to do that for a short period of time, but that will definitely fester, especially in a workplace environment. So hopefully, that’s helpful to you to at least start questioning these things and start looking for answers in terms of how do we categorize things?

How do we have these conversations before they become a conversation that is way too heavy and weighed, and weigh not work appropriately?

You’ll end up there anyway at some point, so you might as well get ready for it and prep everybody with the proper tools to be able to resolve their conflicts. Hopefully, that makes sense.

And I see this a lot because it’s not the realm ideal when initially, I tend to deal in causing conflict, which is producing new ideas. Moving a new system in place, changing people’s behaviors is a lot of what I handle.

And so I’m getting better and better and finding ways that I could be doing those things better and helping my partners and people that I work with in order to do that. I have a book about those types of changes that can make you’re your business competition proof basically I call it Amazon Proof. You know you you’ve got you find enough competition, even if it’s Amazon.com it’s, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

I wrote a little book about it. You go get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com where you can buy it if you want a hard copy.

You can buy that off Amazon or Barnes and Noble or what have you.

You have a good night. We’ll be back here tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.