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Conflict Resolution
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Responding to Criticism and Negative Feedback
Almost everyone I've ever known and worked with acknowledges significant difficulty with this fundamental relationship management skill. They tend, at least at times, to react to criticism and negative feedback with a range of defensive, hostile or avoiding tactics.
Sometimes they agree with criticism received no matter how poorly it is given and before it is clarified. At other times they retreat hurt, wounded, distressed or distraught, believing themselves to be victims of unfairness.
To respond constructively to criticism and negative feedback, it's useful to possess or develop a number of attitudinal abilities and skill-sets . . .
Read the full article ».
Expressing Anger, Annoyance or Displeasure
In terms of technique, there is little difference between giving constructive negative feedback, and expressing criticism, anger, annoyance or displeasure.
What is different about anger is its close links with fear and with the times in our lives when we experienced extreme and damaging expressions of it. Recollections of terror, panic, tyranny, oppression and violence can be brought quickly to the surface very easily and associated with our current impressions of someone's behaviour. Without care, we may find ourselves apparently dealing with a current issue but in reality, well and truly locked into replaying our past.
Before you criticise or give negative feedback to anyone else . . .
Read more, download free.
Some people are just impossible!
You'd prefer fewer difficult or destructive conflicts in your life? You'd like to be more mature and confident when confronted with differences? Sometimes your interactions are fraught with feelings of anxiety, anger, guilt, blame and thoughts of retaliation and attack? Too often, the causes of these problems are difficult to find and remedy? You're not alone, by any means.
These things are true for most people at one time or another. But far too many unnecessarily resign themselves to finding conflict "too hard" or too difficult for mature dialogue. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, they say and anyway, some people are just impossible. Well, it ain't necessarily so. Read more, download free.
Difficult to resolve differences? Test your problem-solving process.
An effective problem-solving process is fundamental for dealing effectively with criticism, hostility, negative feedback and conflict. It's essential too, for giving performance feedback and discussing sensitive issues.
How constructive is your problem-solving technique? How well does your team or group deal with day-to-day problems?
Test yourself »
Gulf words syndrome and the language of conflict
The words we use can provide a window into our attitudes and applied values if we learn to observe and monitor the language we use in dialogue, especially when we feel strongly about an issue or others' behaviour. The process can also provide insights into:
- The causes of others' difficulties with us
- Our own difficulties in making ourselves heard when we are in conflict; and
- Why it is, sometimes, that everything we say creates a wider gulf between the parties.
During the 1991 Gulf war reporters at The Guardian demonstrated this, (though that may not have been their intention). They studied media coverage (in theirs and other UK newspapers) and noted the selective language used. The full list is at once hilarious, dismal and shocking: Read more, download free.
How am I doing?
Constructive feedback is one of the main contributors to organisation, team and personal effectiveness. Faulty feedback is one the biggest contributors to their learning disabilities. If I don't know how I'm really doing because you don't or can't tell me or if I can't hear what you say because of the way you say it, I can't improve.
Managers often shoot themselves in the foot on this score: the gains they want are impossible in the working environment they create. It becomes too poisonous for innovation, enthusiasm and efficiencies.
Those particular outcomes require individual self-confidence, collective learning and real teamwork. They depend on managers' ability to develop trust and effective communication, skills that are often lacking or insufficiently present.
Read more, download free.
Ain't It Awful
They sat ahead of me on an early morning flight. Three sharply-dressed people, sufficiently loud, articulate and interesting for me to pay some attention to their discussion. Mid-level managers in a high-tech industry, I figured. After 25 minutes I realised I'd heard it all before. They'd spent all that time agreeing they could be much better people if it wasn't for their incompetent colleagues, clients, staff and senior managers who impeded their progress. This, I realised, was an Ain't it awful group.
Most organisations have them and they're more prevalent in some than others. They can form anywhere at any time at all levels of seniority, in pairs or larger arrangements, no matter what the group's original purpose for meeting. The predominant theme is consensus that we could be more successful, happy and achieving if it wasn't for those appalling SOB's and pathetic individuals who get in our way. Wherever Ain't it awful groups exist you can be confident that certain things are going on in the lives of their members and certain conditions are present in their organisations. Read more, download free.
Productivity, Interpersonal Competence and Constructive Relationships
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