Creating Resolutions

Ellen took The Conflict Lens™ as part of a leadership training course that her company was sponsoring.

For the first conflict, she chose to analyze a conflict with a peer, which was ongoing. Despite her best intentions, she had been unable to bring the conflict to a constructive resolution.

The second conflict was with her boss; and even though the disagreement was more serious, the conflict had been resolved to her satisfaction.

When Ellen received her results from The Conflict Lens™, she discovered that her behavior was very similar in both situations.

As she had expected, the peer conflict showed a destructive outcome, while the boss conflict had a constructive outcome.

She asked the trainer how the same behaviors could produce such different outcomes. Ellen learned that the behavior of the other person in the conflict was the determining factor.

In the discussion, she saw how her peer was engaging in very destructive tactics, whereas her boss was more inclined to look for a positive outcome.

Ellen learned an important lesson- no matter how she reacted in a situation, both parties needed to want a constructive outcome in order to achieve it.

Building Trust

Chris was involved in a partnership dispute about end of the year distributions in his law office. The stakes were high, emotions intense, and the outcome risked the potential of a partnership breakup and a lawsuit.

The law firm decided that using The Conflict Lens™ as an educational tool might help them avoid what seemed to be an impending business disaster.Participation was voluntary and just under half of the partners chose to utilize the instrument.

Chris chose to analyze a conflict he had been in with the partner whom he most disliked. When Chris received his results, he quickly saw many of the negative behaviors he had been engaging in.

As expected, his scores on Emote, Egoize, Stand Firm and Control were all high. What did surprise him was that his highest score was on Distrust and his lowest score was on Empathize.

He learned that his large distrust of this person had led him to take an overly egocentric approach, with little attention paid to how the other person might be seeing the issues.

While he continued to distrust the individual, he did begin to think about how the other person framed the issue, which led to more self-restraint and empathy in future discussions.