Conflict at work
Understanding the source of anger through metaphor
The client from a National Charity was sent for anger management coaching and told she couldn’t progress through the company until she had undergone training. Her understanding that her team was slow and scatterbrained and that her angry response was frustration at their behaviour. The facilitator started by eliciting a metaphor;
When you’re getting angry, you’re like what?
‘I’m perfectly calm, then there’s a sharp tug backwards, followed by a red mist.’ During the red mist she ranted and railed at her team, five minutes later she would be calm again whereas her team would be belligerent and uncooperative which served her belief that it was their behaviour that was responsible for her anger. During the red mist she was unaware of her actions and wouldn’t accept that she had raised her voice. This resulted in her team losing their trusting in her.
By developing the metaphor with clean questions she mentioned that she remembered how her parents used to keep her on a set of leather reigns as a toddler and how she’d be engrossed in something when someone would yank on the reigns. This would be followed by the red mist of a toddler’s tantrum.
She came to realise that any unexpected problem raised in a meeting was triggering this ‘reign-yank’ response followed by the red mist and wasn’t actually due to her team members at all.
What difference did knowing this make?
On realising it was the unexpected that she was reacting to she asked her team to give her a brief list of potential problems arising before her team meeting so she could process them in private and respond to them appropriately. Her manager reported that both she and the team had noticed a significant difference in her temperament at work.
Negotiating conflict resolution in a team
Training Attention was brought in to assist a team of employment advisors at Working Links whose performance was dropping. It was suggested that there were dynamics within the team that meant they were under performing for their potential. Our facilitators elicited metaphors by asking;
When you’ve working at your best you’re like what?
A pattern emerged where nearly all the team had other people in their metaphor; I’m like a fly-half in a rugby team, I’m like the lead singer in a band and my group are behind me and everyone’s applauding us.
Then one participant said, ‘I’m sitting on a rock, by an empty lake at the bottom of a big empty mountain and there’s not a sound, not even a bird, and I’m calm, serene and efficient.’
This instigated a discussion about how often the team met as a whole group and how this annoyed the ‘lady of the lake’. How the team constantly invited her to join her for lunch, to ask her about their case load and to make personal chit chat. She had responded to these ‘intrusions’ by moving further away from the team, not turning up to meetings and working alone in a office with the door closed.
They thought she was stand-offish, cold and lazy because she didn’t share work and she thought they were over-personal, noisy and lazy because they didn’t get on with their own work and kept disturbing her.
There followed a discussion about how she would like them to come to her island, to accommodate her way of working and then a realisation that she was expecting far too much movement in one direction. She was expecting the whole system to accommodate her without being willing to shift her own patterns in relation to them.
After discussion with the line manager she took herself out of the team into a role with an isolated workload. Both her performance and the performance of the team improved dramatically.
Minimising conflict during Mergers
Three services merging to form a new primary care trust were planning to merge and were keen to avoid the difficulties of previous mergers and to make this a smooth a transition as possible for all involved.
Training Attention used symbolic modelling to facilitate the leaders of the three organisations to first determine their own personal values and then to clarify what they individually wanted in the future organisation. Their three very different models (a group of beehives, a willow tree and an Olympic team), allowed them to understand what was important to each of them and to identify what conflicts could result from a clash of values. With this knowledge, they creatively negotiated a model of the future organisation (an enlightened United Nations) which incorporated all of their key values.
With facilitation from our facilitators, they took the model to a cross-section of managers. Given an explanation of the “enlightened UN”, the managers stayed within the structure of the metaphor to produce refinements to the model, such as the role of the ambassador, export-import arrangements, and internal sharing of surpluses. Then they produced crucial questions that would require more research, such as local versus federal decisions, and relationships with other nations. Following this, they translated the metaphor into the reality of the future organisation.
As a result of this work, the model, or metaphor, provided a common understanding and shared language with which to achieve the goals. Issues could be simply explained to staff, clients and suppliers, and organisational structure could be agreed with minimum conflict or detail.