Resolving a Protracted Conflict (Ed Batista)

Lock Horns by Panegyics of Granovetter sarah_c_murray 14742900223 EDIT

When we're locked in a protracted conflict with another person, there's one critical step that's usually necessary to reach a resolution in which both parties feel a sense of trust and remain committed to the relationship: The higher-status person must express vulnerability first.

Here's why it's so important, why it's so difficult, and what to do about it:

1. Vulnerability is the key to empathy, and empathy is the key to conflict resolution.

Conflicts are concluded in the absence of vulnerability and empathy all the time. In some cases the higher-status person increases the pressure or waits until the lower-status person submits. In other cases the higher-status person gives way due to impatience or a sense that "winning" will carry a cost. These outcomes end the conflict for the time being, but in the process trust has been lost and the relationship has suffered, so there's been no resolution--merely a deferral until the next round. But an expression of vulnerability can lead to a very different outcome.

In most circumstances we reflexively turn toward vulnerability with feelings of interest and care. This may be a function of evolutionary biology, as an empathic response would have been highly adaptive in helping early humans work together to overcome challenges. [1] And when we empathize with another person, we see the world from their perspective; we understand their feelings; we suspend our judgments about them; and we actively communicate this understanding. [2] The mutual empathy that results is what enables both parties to be open to the other's perspective and actively seek a resolution to the conflict. We still may not agree with each other, but as I've written before, empathy is not agreement:

Understanding someone’s perspective and their emotions while suspending our judgments about both does not necessarily imply that we agree with that perspective or believe that the resulting emotions are justified. It simply means that we comprehend their perspective and emotions, and we are able to envision ourselves experiencing that perspective and those emotions under similar circumstances. [3]

And yet a challenge is that we habitually fail to "empathize up"--we find it very difficult to empathize with someone we perceive as higher status, particularly when we find ourselves in conflict with them. [4] We don't see the world from their perspective; we pay no attention to their feelings; we make endless judgments and assumptions about them; and we communicate as little as possible. In these circumstances it inevitably feels less safe for the lower-status person to express vulnerability, which results in a stalemate that only extends the conflict. This is why the higher-status person must take the first step.

2. Vulnerability can be profoundly uncomfortable.

And yet the higher-status person may well feel resistance to expressing vulnerability. They may equate vulnerability with weakness or may assume that an expression of vulnerability will entail a loss of face, and here the work of Brené Brown is instructive. Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston's Graduate School of Social Work, has dedicated her career to the study of such topics as vulnerability, empathy, courage and shame, and she writes,

The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous... To believe vulnerability is weakness is to believe that feeling is weakness... It starts to make sense that we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we've confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities. [5]

Many of us have been conditioned to view our emotions in just this way, and there's no simple solution to developing a healther relationship with our feelings. But a starting point is recognizing the vital role that emotions play in reasoning and communication, a topic that has been studied for decades by USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio:

Uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior...[and] seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion... Nonetheless...reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. [6, emphasis original]

In this context we have to distinguish between emotion suppression--which usually fails, or renders our behavior incongruous or even incoherent--and emotion management--which is an essential skill when navigating situations that feel risky or uncertain. [7]

To be clear, at times our caution regarding expressions of vulnerability is well-founded--not everyone will respond positively, and not all our adversaries can be trusted. But when we're always cautious and never take risks, we don't learn how to calibrate our emotional expressiveness, and any experience of vulnerability seems unsafe and out-of-control. Taking the risk to express vulnerability a bit more fully helps us learn how to do so with greater control and allows us to discover who we can trust in a conflict. And a benefit of getting out of our comfort zones is that they tend to expand. [8]

3. Relative status isn't always obvious.

In some cases our status relative to the other party in a conflict is a clear and mutually understood function of our respective positions in a hierarchy. But because contemporary culture often seeks to diminish hierarchical distinctions--despite the fact that human beings continue to rely on hierarchy as a fundamental organizing principle [9]--our relative status may be unclear. Further, it's not uncommon that when two people are locked in a protracted conflict, each perceives the other to be higher-status.

A form this can take in organizational life is when one person is perceived as higher status because of their role or title, and the other is perceived as higher status because of some aspect of their social identity: age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, physical characteristics, etc. Although our perceptions of status deriving from these dimensions of difference continue to evolve, the ability to pretend that they no longer have an impact on our perceptions is itself a privilege of high status. [10]

So when we find ourselves in a protracted conflict with someone we perceive as higher-status, a key question to ask is, "In what ways might the other person perceive ME as higher-status?" Our answers might shift our perspective and motivate us to take the first step.

4. Vulnerability and empathy are learnable skills.

Vulnerability can take many different forms, and there's no one right or wrong way to express it. That said, it's essential to cultivate the ability to convey vulnerability in ways that are likely to evoke an empathetic response. Because we can feel unsafe in the midst of a conflict, we may make what we believe to be a vulnerable disclosure in a sterile, non-emotional way, dampening the facial expressions, tone of voice and other cues that help others truly sense our feelings. This is a two-way dynamic, of course--if we're not actively looking for the other person's expressions of vulnerability, we may miss them, and our own empathetic feelings may not be triggered by their comments or non-verbal expressions.

But we can strive to improve our skills in these areas--a process that has been one of the central themes in my work in the MBA program at Stanford since 2006, first in Interpersonal Dynamics and later in a number of other courses (including The Art of Self-Coaching, which I launched in 2015). And my empirical experience as a coach and teacher is amply supported by a growing body of research from the field of health care that indicates that our capacity for empathetic communication is an eminently learnable skill. [11]

So what does this look like in practice?

Slow down, which helps us regulate our own expressions of vulnerability, heighten our sensitivity to those of the other person, and counteract the impact of stress on our ability to communicate effectively.
Recognize that hearing isn't listening--the goal isn't being able to accurately transcribe the other person's comments, but insuring that they truly feel heard.
Cultivate conditions of safety and trust, which are essential foundations for vulnerability and mutual learning.
While doing so, don't mistake psychological safety for a lack of directness: As Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has noted, in a safe environment, "individuals feel they can speak up, express their concerns, and be heard. This is not to say that people are 'nice...' What I am advocating is candor. Being open. And sometimes that might mean being direct to a fault." [12]

Finally, while engaged in this process it's important to be mindful of the surrounding culture--not only the larger organization, but also the "culture" of our relationship with the other person--and to "translate" vulnerability appropriately. As I've written before,

Each culture has a set of norms that define acceptable expressions of vulnerability... If you deviate too far from these norms, the culture won't be able to accommodate your behavior--and if all you do is conform to those norms, you'll fail to help the culture evolve and will miss opportunities... The key, as always, is to conform just enough. [13]

5. Mistakes are learning opportunities.

Our efforts to employ these concepts in conflict resolution will involve taking some risks and getting out of our comfort zone--so mistakes are inevitable. We can seek to make smaller mistakes and recover from them more quickly, but rather than strive to avoid errors at all costs, we're better served by openly acknowledging them and their unintended impact on the other person. I'm not suggesting we should act heedlessly but, rather, recognize mistakes as a natural part of any learning process and as signs of potential growth. This allows us to loosen the hold of the self-consciousness and embarrassment we may feel when we do make a mistake--and it's also one of the best ways to practice expressing vulnerability.

Footnotes

[1] Recent evidence suggests that humans evolved to work together cooperatively in larger groups than other primates, and this may have been our critical advantage as a species. For example: Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts (Dacher Keltner interviewed by David DiSalvo, Scientific American, 2009)

[2] A Concept Analysis of Empathy (Theresa Wiseman, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 1996)

[3] The Difficulty of Empathizing Up

[4] Ibid.

[5] Daring Greatly, pages 33-35 (Brené Brown, 2012)

[6] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[7] Taking the Leap (Dealing with Risk and Uncertainty)

[8] Comfort with Discomfort

[9] Organizational Preferences and Their Consequences (Deborah Gruenfeld and Larissa Tiedens, Chapter 33 in the Handbook of Social Psychology, 2010)

[10] For more on social identity, see Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination (Henri Tajfel, Scientific American, 1970), Social Identity Theory (Gazi Islam, Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, 2014), and Getting to "Us" (George Halvorson, Harvard Business Review, 2014)

[11] For more on empathy as a learnable skill: