Interview: How To Resolve Conflict With Skill. You can view the full video of the interview www.drgeorgiana.com/the-dr-georgiana-show
Broadcasted on Channel 29 on July 24th, 2017 at 8pm PST.
Host: Dr. Georgiana Spradling
Guest: Michael Altshuler, specialist in Problem-Solving and Leadership
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Hello. Welcome to the Dr. Georgiana show. I’m Dr. Georgiana, your Emotional Intelligence Relationship Coach. Every week, we bring you people who are dating, in a committed relationship, separated, or divorced, as well as experts to have the tough conversations about the relationship world. We have a great show for you this week. The topic is how to be more skilled at resolving conflict. Our guest is Michael Altshuler, an executive and life coach who has a lot of experience with conflict resolution. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Altshuler:
Thank you very much, Georgiana. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling
What is your background and experience in dealing with conflict?
Michael Altshuler:
Like everyone else, conflict is everywhere you look in life. Originally, I went to law school. I went to law school because I thought, I’ll become a lawyer and I’ll solve problems. Then, after 10 years of practicing law I realized that law was not necessarily so much about solving problems, but winning was what it was all about. I went back and I revisited by original interest when I was younger, which was psychology. I got a degree in marriage and family child therapy and thought that mediation of conflict would be something that would interest me. I was up in British Columbia. I attended a lengthy certificate program in conflict management, communication skills, mediation, etc. I became a mediator and subsequently became a trainer in those skills as well as a mediator. I’ve been involved with dealing with conflict, really, most of my professional life, and it’s been the most gratifying part of my professional life as well.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
You really deserve that button now (…the “expert button on his lapel).
Michael Altshuler:
Well, I deserve the button. By the time we’ve been through a couple of careers, yes, we all deserve a button. I think we often fail to give ourselves credit for just having survived and done well and being where we are and being able to look back and talk about what we’re glad we’ve done.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Right. Tell us a little bit about your work as a coach. You are an executive and life coach?
Michael Altshuler:
Yes. I retired pretty much. I thought I was going to retire pretty much in 2007 and ’08, but I really missed working in collaborative problem-solving. It means a great deal for me. Psychology was very interesting to me, and therapeutic relations can be very, very valuable. For me, I think what is most interesting is to see what can be the readily rapid transformational experiences people can have when they get involved with coaching. When I’m talking about coaching, I’m talking about people identify a particular objective that they have and they work and they collaborate with the coach in determining skills or what they may need to add to their tool belt or their perspective they get from here to there. They can do that in a relatively achievable and short period of time. That’s very gratifying. I’m only semi-retired now, and I enjoy working with executive coaches, pretty much mid-level and higher executive coaches, and people with life issues, too. It’s the same situation about identifying what a problem is and trying to examine the skills and abilities you need in order to deal with it effectively and having the supportive collaboration of coaches on your side to help you do that. That’s why I enjoy what I do.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Could you explain to our viewers what conflict is?
Michael Altshuler:
Conflict gets a really bad rap in our culture. It’s usually something that makes people go into freeze mode. We live in a very adversarial culture. It’s always been an adversarial culture, and it goes all the way back to knights during the Middle Ages. During that time, when two guys had a fight, they would take to the field and the person who lived was obviously the person who was right, and the one who died was obviously wrong. To the same extent, although we don’t do that today, our adversarial system in court is pretty much the same thing. It’s not really so much about really figuring out where justice lies, but it’s more about which lawyer is going to win, which lawyer is going to lose. We get into this idea that conflict is a zero-sum game. When it’s on our face, we either feel like we’re either going to win or we’re going to lose, and that makes us sometimes tense and actually defensive, which really limits our ability to deal with it effectively.
When you get up in the morning, whether you’re talking about who’s going to take the kids to school, who’s going to do the laundry, what am I going to do with this negotiation skill? If I’m going to be a mediator, is it the city that’s going to be right and the property owner who’s going to have to forfeit their ownership of the property in order to comply with the law? It’s all a matter of each side has certain interests that need to be met. Rather than immediately going to what do you think has got to be your solution, if people can step back and evaluate what the interests are that are on the table, it’s easier to do. One of the things that is a constant need that you need to evaluate. There are two very important things that are at stake when a conflict is on the table. One of them is, what is the result going to get? How much of what I want am I going to get? The other very important thing that people often forget is, there’s a relationship on the table, too.
Sometimes, the tactics that we use in winning don’t really help relationships. We have to balance and weigh, one, what do I need to do to win? Two, do I want to exercise all those powers? Or is there something that I’m going to want to do in order to make sure that the relationship I’m involved in continues to be a healthy and an open one? There are a whole lot of different types of communication skills that you can use in order to address conflict that can mitigate against the destruction nature of people trying to figure out, are my interests more important than your interests? Or is there some middle ground where a lot of each of our interests can be met?
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Yes. The subject of winning is very important, and I’d love to explore it at some point in another segment. I assume you’re saying that there are some healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with conflict. Could you reflect on that a little bit? What are some healthy ways of dealing with conflict, and some unhealthy ones?
Michael Altshuler:
When I’m talking about healthy, I’m talking about what’s it going to do to the relationship that you’re involved with. If this is a commercial transaction, if you’re a big shipper and you ship 10,000 tons of wheat to Asia, and you’ve got a farmer who’s coming to you and you’re only going to deal with this farmer one time and this farmer is very unhappy about the price that’s he’s going to pay and the terms that you’re offering, you’re not necessarily going to want to spend a lot of time and energy in order to make sure that your continuing relationship with him is going to be a good one. The extent to which you consider his needs and interests, the extent to which you let him know that your interest in what his needs and interests are, and the extent to which you let him know that you would like to see him meet his needs and interests, as well as meeting your own, is not so much when it’s just a one-shot deal.
You want to treat the farmer fairly, but it’s not the same kind of thing if you’re involved in a partnership, whether it’s a marriage or whether it’s a partnership at an accounting firm and you’re going to have a continuing relationship with your partner. You want people to feel like they’re being treated fairly. Even if you do have a lot of power in one particular situation, you may not want to exercise it, because there are two really important elements in dealing with a conflict. One is the substantive outcome. What is actually going to be the outcome? Who is going to get what? The other thing is the process part of it. Do each of the parties feel like they’ve been treated fairly? Have I been treated fairly by the process? By that, I mean, have I been treated with respect? Has the other person indicated that they’re concerned about what’s important to me?
Were my interests perceived to be as valuable and worth addressing as the other party’s? These are the process elements of dealing with conflict, and the more important the relationship is, or the more important the sense of process fairness is to the parties involved, you’re going to want to spend more time. Once again, it’s the extent to which you value the relationship and you value the extent to which the process is perceived as being fair. There are lots of big companies in this country who spend a lot of time dealing with their customer satisfaction, because the idea of having the customer feel like they are being treated fairly is very, very important. Some companies don’t do that at all. They’re not invested in that. Same thing with relationships.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
It seems that one of the skills that are necessary to resolve conflict effectively is empathy.
Michael Altshuler:
Empathy is very important. When you think about what happens when conflict is on the table for most people, you get in a defensive mode because you think, I’ve really got to win. You become very, very focused on what’s going on for me and what I think the solution needs to be. One of the most important things to begin to do when you’re trying to deal with conflict in a collaborative way is to begin to separate the people from the problem. You have to step out of your ego, and you have to recognize that the person on the other side has an ego, too, and there’s a lot at stake for them. One of the things that I have known, whenever you get into an argument and you have something that’s really important to say, probably the person on the other side has something that is really important for them to say, and you can rest assured that they are not going to listen to what you have to say until they have felt that you have heard what they have to say.
One of the things that I always do is, I always try and create a lot of space to make sure that, let me know what’s on your mind. It sounds like you have a lot of strong feelings about it. It sounds like you’re really angry about it. Let me know what that’s about. That’s really helpful, because my experience has taught me, whether I’m dealing as a mediator with people on opposite sides of the table, or whether it’s my own conflict, people are not going to be able to listen to other people until they feel that they’ve been heard. That’s pretty much it. Empathy is what you do. Getting enough information from them, asking them enough questions so that you can honestly say, with authenticity, that you have a sense of what it is to be standing in their shoes. Not that you agree with them, but that you have a sense of what it’s like to be standing in their shoes. Very important.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
It seems like listening is very important, and people don’t like that very much. They don’t see the point. They want to make their point.
Michael Altshuler:
That’s true. That’s absolutely true. If it’s going to work, that’s called active listening. There’s a whole lot of active listening skills. Paraphrasing, repeating back what someone heard, making sure that they know that you heard what they heard. Not making assumptions. It takes a lot of time and space, and it also keeps us from stating our views, which we are very anxious to do when there’s a conflict on the table. Once again, people are really not going to listen to us until they feel we’ve listened to them. The active listening skills, it’s very important. People on the other side, they’re not necessarily using active listening skills, and sometimes after you’ve listened to somebody and you want to make sure they understand what you said, they’ll go back into their story again. Sometimes it’s really helpful to ask them to use active listening skills. For instance, I think I listened to what you said, and I just said something that’s very important to me. I’m just wondering if you could let me know what you heard me say. There’s something about doing that. When you begin to do that, people are coming from a very emotional, trigger-responsive part of their brain when they’re angry. When you ask them to reflect upon something, like, could you repeat back to me what you heard me say? Then, they have to move from that emotional part of their brain into a more cognitive part of their brain. Then, it’s in that cognitive part of their brain where problem-solving occurs. It’s really helpful to do it on both sides.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
To some people, it may seem like a tedious thing to do… all these questions you have to ask, like to ask the other person whether they’ve heard you or not. In the end, you’re saying that if you want to win, you have to be able to listen, because listening is a skill, and it’s also a strategy.
Michael Altshuler:
Listening is a skill. It’s a strategy. Building a house with walls is a lot more tedious than putting up a tent or a hut with palms on it, but ultimately, it’s much more effective. It’s the same thing. There are lots of skills that make life a lot easier, and we’re not taught them when we’re young. We are brought up in an adversarial culture. Win-lose. Go out on the football team. There’s no compromise. There’s no negotiation. There’s no collaboration between opposing teams on the football field. There’s no collaboration even in our political system today. It’s very adversarial. There are skills that, if you want to help people look at—conflict and opposing interests are present whether it’s in the parking lot with a parking space, or whether it’s getting admitted to a university. Competing needs are everywhere. You can go through life with a lot of stress, taking it head-on, taking it as a win-lose kind of a deal. Or you can try to make a problem-solving situation out of situations of competing interests or conflict that come up.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Yes, interesting. What are some other skills that you need in order to resolve conflict effectively?
Michael Altshuler:
Patience.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Patience. Yes.
Michael Altshuler:
Patience is an important skill. You have to be patient. You have to be able to sit back and have to be able to step back from the immediate need that we often feel, that my interest has to be met and has to be met now. That’s one thing. Another skill is, I think, to make the space so that you can let the other person feel that their needs and concerns are being respected. It’s not until they feel that, that they’re one, going to calm down, because sometimes people get very emotional. It’s not until they understand that you have really heard them. Or they understand that you really get how angry they are, because they don’t get that. They’re going to continue to be angry. They’re going to continue to scream and shout, and they’re not going to be listening to you. That takes a certain amount of skill. Once again, divorcing your ego from the problem, it’s not about if I win, I’m better. If I lose, I’m defective and my ego is bruised.
This happens in the office all the time. When there are offices that have a lot of conflict, you have too many bruised egos going home at the end of the day, because people get so invested in winning. If you can make collaborative problem solving and the communication skills, the active listening skills, the asking questions that invite people to share information, and being able to show respect for people with whom you don’t agree, letting them know that you can understand what they’re talking about and you can understand why issues are important with them without agreeing with them, that’s a good way to bring them to the table to discuss. A lot of it mindfulness. You have to be present, and you need to paying attention what’s going with you, and you need to be paying attention what’s going on with them as well. There’s really a lot. There’s a lot to it. It’s very interesting, but you find that when you make a habit of working on developing these skills, they’re very useful, not only in situations of conflict, but all kinds of situations that come up throughout the day.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Yes. It seems like you don’t really learn that often at home when you’re a child. Sometimes you don’t even learn it in school.
Michael Altshuler:
Well, no. You’re quite right. The way we learn to deal with conflict, essentially, is the way it’s modeled for us, and that depends pretty much on what your parents do and then what your peers do. Some parents deal with conflict very, very effectively. I happen to come from a family where there was no conflict. No, no, no. I shouldn’t say that. We all know that there isn’t—
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
No wonder you do what you do. You’re an expert at that.
Michael Altshuler:
Well, there’s no conflict-free family. What I should say is, there was never any conflict evident by my parents between themselves, which made anger a very, very difficult thing for me. What does a young child—they knew how to repress, deny. I don’t know what they did with their anger, but they didn’t exhibit it in front of me or my sister. Conflict was a scary thing for me to deal with. I had no tools to deal with it. I had no sense of, yes, conflict and anger, these are all ordinary, real parts of the human experience. I had to learn that, and we are not taught the skills about collaborative, interest-based problem-solving. We are pretty much brought up in a culture that teaches us winning is everything. Whether it’s getting your child into that preparatory school that is going to make them excel relative to all their peers. Or whether it’s whose football team is going to be number one. It’s all about winning. There’s a great deal of value our culture places on it, and to a large extent, by emphasizing that, we lose the nature and the value of collaborative community, living, and problem-solving.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
What you’re saying is, if you don’t have conflict at home, it could also be a problem in the same way as when you have too much conflict at home, because conflict is healthy and it has a lot to teach you. It’s good to have some conflict in your family of origin and learn how to manage it.
Michael Altshuler:
I think there’s always conflict. My question is, when I look back upon my childhood is, I don’t know what my parents did with it. Conflict is not only normal, it’s a good thing. When you’re working on a project at work or you’re working on a—let’s say you’re working on a relationship. Every relationship that’s a long-term relationship has to be worked on. Things and differences come up. People have needs and interests that aren’t being met. If conflict isn’t allowed, if they’re never allowed to say, you’re doing this and I need this. Or when you do this, this makes me feel bad. If people don’t have an opportunity to do that, and if that’s not okay, those issues are never going to be resolved. Then, the longer a relationship continues and issues are not addressed or resolved, it begins to stultify the relationship. A certain amount of conflict is always going to happen. It’s just to what extent you allow it to escalate into bad behavior. There’s nothing wrong with conflict. It’s only, will you use good, productive behavior to deal with it? Or do we use destructive behavior to deal with it?
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
That’s important. That’s about the behavior. Let’s say that I am with my significant other, and he or she begins to lose control verbally. I’m beginning to feel angry, too. What can I do to help both myself and them regain control?
Michael Altshuler:
Once again, I think the first thing to do is to realize, wow. When I feel I’m getting angry, then I know I’m being triggered. When I know I’m being triggered, I know I’m probably going to go into a defensive mode of behavior. A defensive mode of behavior in conflict often means I’m going to become aggressive. I’m going to begin to scream. I’m going to get loud. If I do that, I know that the response to that is going to be escalating aggressive behavior on the other side. If I’m invested in a relationship and I want to do as little damage to the relationship as possible, I put my own feelings aside, because I know that my partner is not going to want to listen to me until she is no longer angry. You empathize. Give them space to be angry.
I can see you’re really angry. Boy, I’ve never seen you so angry. What’s going on? What are you so angry about? Tell me about it. Let’s talk about it. Ask questions. Let them know that you understand their anger. Sometimes, when I’ve been involved in a mediation and sometimes parties really don’t want to calm down, I’ll say to the parties, let’s just take a break. Fred here is so angry and outraged at the extent to which your insurance company has denied to acknowledge the pain and suffering that he has had for five years. Let’s just be quiet. Fred, I want to invite you, just dump everything you have to say and just put it all out on the table. Let’s just sit back and let’s just let Fred do what he needs to do, and that’s okay.
Sometimes you can do that in the context of a personal relationship, but you want to make sure that some of these things are felt like they’re techniques. If somebody that you’re trying to resolve a conflict with feels like you’re using a technique or manipulating them or not being authentically interested, that’s going to really tweak them out. You really need to be experienced as being authentic, but when somebody is escalating, one of the best things that you can do when you feel yourself escalating, you put yourself back into that cognitive part of your brain and say, what can I do to help this person de-escalate? Empathize, invite them to express what’s going on for them. Let them know that I’m interested in what they have to say. That takes me into the cognitive part of my brain and away from that emotional, defensive part. Hopefully, by the time they’re done, I’ll have calmed down and then I can talk about what’s important to me. Does that answer your question?
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Absolutely, and you get into the empathy.
Michael Altshuler:
Empathy.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
By tapping into that empathy and trying to understand what’s going on with someone else, then you calm down as well.
Michael Altshuler:
That’s right because it takes you from that emotional, sensitive part of where you are easily triggered and puts you into that thinking part of your brain, where problem-solving happens. It’s also a place where you can be respectful. People don’t feel respected when you’re shouting at them. The more tension on either side escalates, the more it becomes me versus you, and the further away you get from whatever issue that may actually be underlying the problem.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Very interesting. You seem to have a lot of experience with conflict resolution.
Michael Altshuler:
Yes. I actually do.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
In terms of work, when someone is interviewing for a job, for example, they’re often asked about instances in which they were confronted with a disagreement at work, people don’t usually like this question. What do you think the interviewer is looking for with this type of question?
Michael Altshuler:
One of the reasons why I think that people don’t like that kind of a question is pretty much because most people haven’t really thought out a strategy about how to problem solve when conflict is present. I think it’s really helpful for people to think about, what are effective ways to deal with conflict? I think there are several reasons why I think an employer would want to know. I think first and foremost, from a most practical point of view, they want to know because conflict is present in almost every situation. Particularly in new dynamic companies. Particularly companies that characterize themselves as being agile, flexible, able to address situations that arise. Being able to consider new and better ways to do that. Conflict is always going to come up. They want to know how capable someone is in dealing with conflict. Then, on a more abstract level, and many employers are not looking for the abstract answer here, but I think on an abstract level, they want to know that people have good interpersonal skills. Good interpersonal skills are certainly demonstrated if you have an ability and a strategy to deal effectively with conflict when it comes up. For instance, one of the things to do is, you separate the people from the problem.
You acknowledge that there’s a problem. You acknowledge that there are differences, and you try and determine what each of those interests are in a way that’s going to be creative and help the parties move on, to one, not only solve the problem, but secondly to continue to have a productive relationship. As we said before, absent empathy and respect, differences of opinion, people use bad and aggressive behavior. That damages relationships and then makes it less likely that people will be able to work well in the future. As opposed to even when people have a conflict and they can’t come up with what they think is a good solution. If they have dealt with one another in a way that seems fair and respectful, if they have both listened to one another, then they’re at least going to say, we can’t deal with this one, but we feel fairly treated by one another. You build trust. You build stronger working relationships, even if you’re not able to resolve every conflict in a way that feels good to both parties.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
Great. Michael, thank you so much for coming. I know that our viewers have appreciated your insight and experience with conflict resolution. Thank you.
Michael Altshuler:
Georgiana, it’s been a real pleasure. Be glad to do this anytime. Thank you.
Dr. Georgiana Spradling:
We’ll do it again. Thank you. To all of our viewers, thank you so much for watching. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please head over to my Facebook page at Facebook.com/DrGeorgiana, and join the conversation. Also, I would love to hear your stories, so please don’t hesitate to contact me through the contact page on my website at DrGeorgiana.com/contact. Thank you so much for watching. I’m Dr. Georgiana, your emotional intelligence relationship coach. I will see you next week.