People and Projects

You’re sitting across the table from a person who is losing it. They’re upset again. It could be your boss, a key stakeholder, a customer, or even a member of your team or family, but the fact is, when the formula includes You + Them, the result is a meltdown.

If you lead people or projects, conflict is inevitable. In his insightful book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer, Michael Roberto talks about the differences between cognitive conflict and affective conflict. You need cognitive conflict—this leads to better solutions because well-intentioned people are actively disagreeing—even vigorously—to end up with a better solution. If you don’t have a fair dose of cognitive conflict with your team, Roberto suggests it could be a sign they just don’t care.

But that’s not what this post is addressing. I’m talking about affective conflict—when the line of respect gets crossed. When emotions and biases cloud judgment and people stop listening to each other. When a personal win is more important than a shared win. When you walk away from that meeting and you feel like the life was sucked out of you.

Affective conflict sucks. Yet here you are again, with it screaming in your face.

Dan Shapiro is the founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program. The guy knows a thing or two about highly emotionally charged conflict and negotiation. He consults with the hostage negotiation arm of the NYPD. He gets Palestinian and Israeli leaders to the table and helps them make real progress. He facilitates sessions with world leaders to show how they are often too apt to prefer seeing the world explode than solve its problems.

And Dan released a new book this week that can help you deal with that person across the table.

Negotiating the Nonnegotiable (Viking, April 2016) helps us look at the issues underlying the most emotionally charged conflicts and offers insights on how to stop the pattern of craziness that too often ensues.

There are no easy answers to the most challenging conflicts we face. But Shapiro lays out a case for how these conflicts are not typically a matter of rational differences. They’re not even just about the emotions raging. Under it all, Shapiro argues it often is a matter of tribal differences: who we are vs. who they are. This tribal mindset can be seen in a range of conflicts, from marital disputes, to arguments across organizational silos, to clashes between nations. It’s likely an issue with that stakeholder across the table from you.

In Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, Shapiro shares practical lessons about how to recognize when you’re barreling down a path of what he calls vertigo—where the conflict is so out of control that we’re disoriented—seemingly unable to perceive what’s really going on. He provides vocabulary around how to recognize therepetition compulsion—the self-defeating patterns of behavior that just get repeated over and over. And he shares perspectives on office politics that alone are worth the price of the book.

If you’re waiting for that person across the table to resign or get a job in a different part of the organization, you will probably have a lot of birthdays. If you’re sick of the affective conflict and can muster up the open-mindedness to chisel away at the underlying problems, Dan Shapiro’s new book is a great place to start.

You can hear Dan talk about some ideas from Negotiating the Nonnegotiable in this interview: http://PeopleAndProjectsPodcast.com/148. When the yelling calms down, I recommend you listen to it.

What are some of your most challenging conflicts? What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned about trying to resolve those conflicts? I invite you to share your lessons below in the comments.