THE PRACTICE: THE 7 PRINCIPLES OF EARLY CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Introduction
The 7 Principles for Early Conflict Resolution have been developed to provide you with a set of foundation skills and practical tools for approaching and addressing conflict situations when dealing with conflict in your own life or during the course of working with or advising others.
As a manager or leader, you will be equipped with skills to address challenges that you have with your staff and to better manage the tensions or blocks that they may be experiencing with each other.
As an employee, the principles will empower you to be more resourceful in dealing with conflicts and challenges at work, enabling you to better manage up as well as down and ensure your needs are being met.
For legal or professional advisers, the principles will enhance the value you add to your clients and increase your capacity to get your clients what they want and need and to achieve the best result possible in all circumstances.
If you experience conflict situations in your business, day-to-day life or community, the principles will give you opportunities to navigate through difficult situations with others and impact not only on their behaviour but also their experience of the situation. In all of these situations and more you will have the tools to turn around dysfunctional or negative dynamics, that you may have previously thought were hopeless, into a force for progress and change.
The one condition of this book working for you will depend on you keeping an open mind and not giving up too soon. An urban myth illustrates this very well.
There was once a man who was told that there was a pot of gold under his garden and if he searched for it he would find it. The man dug a number of tunnels under his garden over the course of many months until he finally stopped believing that the gold was there. The gold was later found by someone else an inch away from the end of the last tunnel the man had dug.
We have to know that even though we can’t see a resolution it may be possible. The only way to see that is to keep practising the principles and honing your skills. In this way you will markedly improve your situation, albeit sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, and you might very well come to find solutions or options that you hadn’t considered before.
When and how you use the principles will depend largely on the situations you find yourself in and the change you want to effect. They start with supporting you to take responsibility and ensuring you are in the best possible position to achieve your goals. A developed use and understanding of the principles builds our capacity to support others without compromising ourselves and finally to being in a position to effect cultural change.
The principles can be used as standalone tools but are best used cumulatively. It is crucial to understand that part of our success in using the later principles to help others will be based on our ability to internalise and apply the early principles in our own experiences of conflict. Equally, sometimes we can take full responsibility and manage the early stages of conflict effectively but rely on people and forces other than ourselves to participate in that process to make the results sustainable. In these circumstances we will need to rely on the later principles.
The interdependence between personal and organisational application of the principles is set out in the virtuous circle below.
