Conflict as Partnership

Video Transcription

Hi, I'm Julie Tietz. And welcome to Conflict Resolution-- putting the pieces together. Today, we're going to talk about conflict as a partnership between the parties. And so when we're in a conflict resolution process, the idea is to make the process and solving the conflict as a partnership. And when the parties come in, they may be thinking of it as a game in which they need to compete. And in order for them, to win the other party must lose.

But we really want to change that thinking and make it as a team-building activity and a collaborative process where everybody can win. And so we want to move towards win-win thinking. And win-win thinking is where the goal is to meet the parties' interests equally.

So everybody in the situation wins. And we want to move away from the parties' positions and find those underlying interests to focus on. And once we find those interests to focus on, we can work more towards a collaborative win-win thinking approach and resolving the conflict.

And we really want to keep the parties on track here. And this can be kind of difficult because we come from a culture in the United States specifically where we're competing over our interests and our needs and our wants. And we want to avoid this at all costs. And so as a conflict intervener, our job is to reinforce and confirm.

So I'm going to come up with a scenario here. It's between Camille and Thomas. They share an office. They've been having a conflict over on what the etiquette in the office should be like. And so this is an example in a way that I could as a conflict intervener reinforce and confirm that we are staying on track with collaboration.

And that's Thomas needs to have designated uninterrupted work time. Is there any reason why this may not be possible? And you're asking Camille this question. And her answer could be, no, I think that this is something I can do. And so if there is a response where maybe they can't go along with that, then we need to redirect and really kind of let them know that we're here to collaborate and ask why maybe this isn't possible.

And so I may respond to this as great. How about we say that this is one interest needed to have a satisfactory resolution? So here, again, they can agree or disagree. But this is why we reinforce and confirm. We need to ask these questions and check in to be sure that we are staying on track and the win-win thinking and collaborating.

But if we're not staying on track, then it's our job to redirect the parties and really, again, focus on really trying to figure out the problem at hand here, which is ending or resolving the conflict or coming up with an agreeable solution.

So now that we've talked about conflict as a partnership, let's go over some of our key points here. So in conflict resolution, we want to gear the parties toward a win-win thinking atmosphere where everybody gets all of their needs met to the best of our ability here. And we want to focus on their interests and not the position. So we want to focus on what they need to feel satisfied and happy.

And we do this by reinforcing and confirming with the parties. So we want to ask the parties questions to be sure that they can be satisfied with an outcome and agreeable to certain options or parts of the resolution that we come up with.

Well, I really hope that you've learned something today. And before we go, I want you to look at our key terms, which is win-win thinking. Feel free to pause. And I can't wait to catch you again next time.