CHAPTER 12

HOW DO WE GET STARTED?

(Deciding What Process to Use, and Helping People Feel Included)

Good Starts make for good endings. In his research about group compatibility, Will Schutz found that groups first face inclusion issues.¹ This means people want to know whether they belong. Will they be included, are they significant, will others pay attention to them, or will they be ignored? People’s belief about their significance in the group can play a large part in determining whether they have a positive or negative attitude, and operate from the Green Zone or the Red Zone.

It is to everyone’s advantage to help each other stay in the Green Zone, with a positive approach, particularly when dealing with conflict. So, the first things you should resolve with your colleagues or counterparts are inclusion issues. How will you be clear with your intentions about both the conflict and the relationship? How will you help your counterparts feel included and significant in the process, to the extent they feel comfortable?

Have you ever given any thought to how important being included is to your relationship partners? Think for a few minutes about their FIRO Element B scores for inclusion. If they have high-inclusion preferences, it may be helpful to have a lot of face-to-face meetings to address the matters at hand. If they have low-inclusion scores, you may want to consider doing some of your preliminary work through memos, e-mails, or phone calls rather than face-to-face meetings. Give some thought to your own Element B inclusion scores. How do your preferences match the preferences of the others? Can you be flexible to make it more comfortable for the others, or might some of your own rigidity be getting in the way of a more compatible process?

CHEAP TRICKS DON’T WORK

Older books on negotiation strategy often suggested little tricks to put the other party at a disadvantage. Make them come to your office. Put them in shorter chairs so you can look down on them. Have your own coffee, but don’t offer any to them. Arrange the room so the light will shine in their faces, creating glare. Make their chairs uncomfortable. Make sure you’re sitting at the head of the table. Take telephone calls during the meeting to signal that other issues and people are much more important than they are. Make sure you have more information than they do, and make sure they know you do. Keep them waiting in your office or show up late to the meeting location. Announce that you need to leave early because you have important things to take care of. Deliberately have your staff interrupt you during the meeting with other issues. The list is long.

Our experience is that the older books were right to some extent. These tactics can have a profound impact on the process and eventually on the outcome. If your goal is to build collaboration, however, these techniques do not work. They only give you an advantage if your goal is to destroy trust, intimidate, or manipulate. Tricks like these are guaranteed to push individuals into the Red Zone and become more antagonistic. They are designed to make people feel insignificant, incompetent, and unlikable, which are the three issues that can trigger fears and foster rigid behavior. If you are trying to resolve conflict rather than create it, and to keep people in a positive Green Zone rather than a negative Red Zone, avoid petty tactics.

Instead, anticipate the amount of inclusion your counterparts are comfortable with and create that environment. Remember that everything we do and say, as well as what we don’t do and don’t say, will send a message. So be conscious of the message you may be sending. Give thought to how your actions will be interpreted or possibly misinterpreted. Using whatever words and actions are comfortable and congruent for you, make clear that you have both short-term and long-term interests in the relationship as well as in solving the immediate problem.

BE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR INTENTIONS

If you want to build a collaborative relationship, tell them that. On many occasions during a mediation one side would tell us, “I don’t know why they’re being so distant. We want to build a relationship, why don’t they?” We would ask, “Have you told them that?” and they would often reply, “Well, no, but they ought to be able to figure that out. Why else would we be here?” If they don’t have any information from you about your interest in finding a solution and building a relationship, they will typically fill in the blanks with their own story, which usually is not as favorable as you might wish.

Communicating that you want to reach a solution that is in the interests of all concerned, and that you are open to persuasion about how to resolve the issue, invites others to join you as an ally with a common purpose, rather than becoming an adversary. This is an excellent time to propose that both parties use the Interest-Based method to work the issue. We’ve had some clients who have sent their counterparts an outline of the process along with an invitation that they try the process during the upcoming meeting. They tell the other party that it is a nonadversarial method they’ve learned that may help resolve the issue while building their relationship.

Another client scheduled some Interest-Based training for their own employees and invited several of their suppliers to join the training at no cost. They explained that the training was about a collaborative method for resolving disputes, and since they wanted stronger, more collaborative relationships with their suppliers, they were inviting them to train together. This is a nice, clear way to tell the other party that you value the relationship, that they are significant to you, and that you desire stronger collaboration. It is also an excellent way to build a common culture between two organizations, whether they are separate companies or departments or teams within a company.

TALK ABOUT PROCESS ISSUES TO AVOID SURPRISES

It is important to try to reach agreement on the process you will use so that you can avoid as many surprises as possible. You can discuss procedural issues before your meeting or wait until you actually meet. Examples of process issues that have come up in groups we’ve worked with are meeting protocols such as whether to use a facilitator or flip charts or how agendas would be set. Timing issues are usually important. How often will the parties meet? Will they meet for an hour at a time or for a full day, once a week or once a month, or around the clock until the matter is resolved?

Information sharing is often an important issue. Some groups agree to exchange key information such as their perspective of the problem, or financial data. Some groups use this as an opportunity to discuss what information will be helpful. Other groups plan out a joint effort to search for information that will be helpful, so that the search for relevant information also reinforces collaboration in the relationship. Labor-management groups using Interest-Based negotiations will sometimes form joint labor-management committees to gather information about health-care costs or budget issues prior to beginning their negotiations.

This is also a good time to clarify decision-making authority. It’s stressful to a relationship if, right at the end of the process when one side is ready to sign an agreement, they learn they have different levels of authority and the other side announces that they have to take it to a higher level to get approval.

For most of these process issues there is no right or wrong or best practice to use. The point is to make those decisions jointly, not unilaterally. When we work with groups, we often rearrange the room so that they are not sitting across the table from each other. We may arrange the chairs in a semicircle facing a flip chart so that parties are focused on the flip chart rather than each other. These are small things that can sometimes foster a more positive Green Zone environment; however, they shouldn’t be done unilaterally.

We once had a client who had seen the room rearranged like that during a different project and liked it. They wanted to create the same positive Green Zone atmosphere with a different partner with whom they had a more traditional and slightly adversarial relationship. So, prior to an important meeting they removed the table from the room and rearranged all the chairs so they were facing a single flip chart. They even went so far as to have their team members sit in every other chair before the other party arrived for the meeting. They believed that interspersed seating around a flip chart instead of across a table would create a less “we vs. them” mind-set, and would instead foster a feeling of a single team. They believed these were all helpful little inclusion steps.

When the second group arrived and saw how the room was set up, their comment was “Who appointed you God? We like having a table to write on. We’ll come back after you fix the room.” Later, when they debriefed that issue, it became clear that the room setup was not the real issue. In fact the table didn’t really matter much at all; the second group eventually came to enjoy not having a table between the parties. What they were really upset about was that they hadn’t been included in making the decision. The first group’s good intentions were interpreted by the second group as just another example of insensitive, noninclusive thinking.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

A natural starting place for groups dealing with conflict is to talk about what process to use to resolve that conflict. Do what you can to help your counterparts feel included. It is important to clearly communicate your intentions about both the relationship and the problem-solving process. If you want to build a more collaborative relationship, tell that to the other side. When deciding upon process issues, be sure to do that jointly. That you are making the process decisions together is usually as important as the substance of the decision.