How to Address Conflict When Stakes Are High

Conflict Management When Stakes are High and Relationships Matter.

How do you address conflict and resolve it efficiently when stakes are high and when the relationship at hand is important to you?

This topic was inspired by a number of my clients. I work with business owners and leaders who are naturally in collaboration and in partnership with others and over the period of time where they are working towards a vision or a goal naturally conflict arises.

How do you resolve this conflict? If you’ve been in a partnership for some time it’s possible that you have also formed a friendship around that partnership and so addressing a conflict may pose an additional challenge.

Well it’s important that you do resolve it, that you do address it, that you take a leadership approach to this because hoping that conflict solves itself or goes away is not exactly effective.

Let me give you two powerful approaches here.

The first one when conflict arises in a relationship that matters to you is you take the step forward and begin to address it and the way you do that is you find the common purpose, or rather you redefine the common purpose. You and your partner had a common purpose, a common goal before you went into this partnership.

You had a common vision of what you’re going to do and bringing that up and being able to articulate that and to validate that with the other person is the first step. Because you’re stepping away from the situation at hand, from the particular disagreement and you are reminding one another that we are working toward a common vision and this is the vision. Sometimes that alone is enough for one or the other person to back away or to not be as resistant and a mutual solution even begins to show up.

If not the next step in that process is to remind one another of your common value and that depends on the nature of the relationship. For instance, one of my clients was in a partnership with his partner because their common value, their number one value was financial independence and so when we started to look at a particular situation they were disagreeing on it was easy enough to see that approaching it from his partner’s perspective went against the financial independence value. It put them in a precarious situation and so bringing that up and speaking through that help them arrive at a more mutually beneficial decision.

So being able to step away from the challenge and to remind one another: number one your common purpose, your common goal, your common vision in this partnership and number two the common number one value that you share can help you approach this conflict effectively and through this process you are reminding one another that you trust each other and that you’re working toward the same thing.

Hopefully this is going to help you address your conflict.

I hope you found this video insightful and I will talk to you on the next video…bye!