Teaching negotiation skills to overcome workplace conflict

Image taken from t1businesstraining.co.uk

When we think of training our staff in negotiation skills, we often have some fixed ideas of how these will be applied. Perhaps we are looking at making our managers more effective in negotiating contracts with staff or clients. Alternatively, we may want to increase the ability of sales staff to close deals with the best possible result. Within the wider sector, we may think about labor unions and management negotiating wage deals and even wider still, countries negotiating peace deals.

image taken from www.haartelz.com

In my early career as a therapist, I began to see the value in applying negotiation skills to the resolution of marriage and family conflicts. I would often see family members stuck in their particular mindsets, firing bullets at each other as they sought to persuade the other person of the rightfulness of their position. A regular phrase that I would hear would be, "I just don't get why they can't see my point of view?"

It was the classic book on negotiation skills, "Getting to Yes, Negotiating Agreement without Giving In" by Fisher and Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Department (1981) that provided a process for principled negotiation, that helped to equip those undergoing therapy with an ability to be solution focused and neither hard nor soft on the players. On a similar basis, it is interesting that by 1987, "Getting to Yes" was being used in some schools in the USA to teach students non-adversarial bargaining.(wikipedia: Getting_to_Yes). Among the greatest and most liberating principles used by true negotiators are those of generating options and being able to truly understand the other person's bottom line or goals. I have watched many couples walk away having resolved their conflict by identifying solutions that neither of them had even thought of at the outset of their discussions.

As discussed in an earlier blog, conflict between staff members is a major drain on the morale, culture and even economic resources of businesses across the globe. Some mitigation can occur by vetting new staff to maximize the fit of prospective members into the workplace culture. However carefully we recruit, workplace conflict is inevitable, particularly in work environments with highly motivated, intelligent and assertive individuals where confidence can sometimes turn to "I want it done my way." 

Some organizations place a great deal of pressure on managers to resolve staff conflicts, to act as the peacemakers. However, using managers to put out emotionally charged fires between staff is not the best use of management time. It distracts management from working towards achieving organizational goals. Additionally, once resolving a conflict is in the hands of a third and more senior party, it can actually enflame the situation, making it much larger than it needed to be. One of the key principles of conflict resolution is that it needs to be handled at the lowest possible level for the greatest chance of success. 

What if all staff were trained "negotiators" and were individually given the skills to seek out win-win solutions in every aspect of their work? If your organization is experiencing any level of down time because of anger and unresolved conflicts in the workplace then it would be a sound investment to train ALL staff in negotiation skills. Staff would be upskilled to handle their own personal issues directly with any other staff member and work on solutions. 

Being solution focussed in staff relations would have a flow-on effect to other parts of the business or organization. Both workers and management would be much more able to break free of pre-conceived notions or judgements about their work and become more innovative, more creative in overcoming all kinds of obstacles that previously stumped them. It becomes a way of thinking, constantly generating ideas and new solutions, looking beyond the obvious. True negotiation skills involve freeing the mind in relationships but this freedom extends to all other aspects of our existence.