Business Coaching: The Concepts Of "conflict Situation" And "positional Conflict Map"

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Unfortunately, for many people, their success at work depends not only on how professional and diligent they are.

In some cases, their survival in the company may depend on whether they were able to notice the latent and obvious conflicts existing in the team in time, and also develop the correct strategy for behavior in these conditions.

Very often people face unexpected problems. For example, you spent a lot of time, effort and nerves to get a job we need. And this work turned out to be really interesting and promising, but unexpectedly several "BUTs" appeared. Namely:

• for some reason you do not understand, your immediate boss does not like you very much.
• In addition, apparently, having come to this position, you unwittingly pushed one of your new colleagues aside, he sharpened his grudge against you and now weaves intrigues in order to prove to everyone that, preferring you to him, the authorities made a big mistake.

All in all, you are faced with what might be called "hidden office wars."

In order to be ready for office wars, it makes sense to arm yourself with some concepts that will help you see hidden conflicts and possible confrontation zones in a new team for you. In this article we will look at two such concepts.

What is a "conflict situation"

First of all, it is worth understanding what a "conflict situation" is. Any work or social situation is determined by those people who are involved in it: these people have their own interests and goals. They defend their interests with varying degrees of determination and at the same time have different capabilities and means.

It so happens that a person who is not very pleasant to you turns out to be your ally, and vice versa, people who are attractive and interesting to you end up in a hostile camp. The fact is that the conflict situation is not created by the people themselves, but by the positions that they, willingly or unwillingly, occupy in this situation. And besides, conflicts arise not only because of the mismatch of goals and interests of individuals - sometimes the organizational structure of a company is formed in such a way that conflicts are simply inevitable in it.

A conflict situation is not an accidental dispute or quarrel between two people who simply do not love each other. These are specially formed or consciously organized conditions of interaction between people, which inevitably lead to conflicts between them.

If several candidates with a similar track record apply for one vacant position in the company, then conflicts are likely to arise between them, especially if there are suspicions that one of them is not playing quite by the rules.

You can have just an angelic character and be an excellent specialist, but once you get into a team, in the internal organization of which there is a conflict situation, you will inevitably get problems with those people whose goals and interests will radically differ from yours.

For example, in a company where bonuses are given only to those who demonstrate high performance, but objective assessments of the performance of individual people are not provided for, quarrels and disagreements are likely to arise. Someone will definitely decide that another colleague was awarded the prize undeservedly. As a result, even those people who previously felt sympathy for each other may quarrel.

"Positional map" of a conflict situation

Coming to work in a new team, you cannot know about all the hidden contradictions that exist between individual employees of this company. It is unlikely that the managers who hired you will tell you what conflicts exist between various hostile groups in their company, who is friends with whom and against whom. As mentioned above, it may turn out that you are acquiring an enemy before you start working in the company, simply because you have taken the place for which another person claimed.

A positional conflict map is a set of positions involved in it with the identification of interests and goals inherent in these positions.

There are openly hostile positions to each other, as well as those that simply found themselves at the intersection of the "lines of force" of the conflict. Imagine the heads of two departments who are at war with each other, since both claim to occupy some kind of higher position. They have their subordinates who are forced to interact with each other on work issues. And if there is any mistake or inconsistency, these employees may be at the center of a very stormy showdown, disproportionate to the situation.

In some cases, zones of tension in the team may arise due to work conflicts, they may occur due to latent or explicit competition between employees, and sometimes protracted wars flare up that are not motivated by any pragmatic goals or interests: people may simply not love each other, or, as they say, "do not match the characters."

Having identified the "lines of confrontation" and "hotbeds of tension" in the team, we can draw a "positional map" of conflict situations inherent in this team.

• We can determine between which positions quarrels will inevitably arise, because they are pushed head-on by the logic of the company's organizational chart.
• We can also identify people who have some subjective interests and goals and consistently seek their implementation, despite the fact that this may cause sharp discontent of other employees.

The warring positions seem to be grouped around the hotbed of the conflict, uniting in various configurations.

The alignment of forces in the positional map of the conflict

If conflict situations occur in the company, then someone will definitely use both honest and not very honest methods in this struggle. And the alignment of forces in the team may not always correspond to the positions occupied by the conflicting parties. There are times when subordinates overthrow their superiors.

• If a person has well-developed social reflection and he knows how to recognize in time the alignment of forces that is taking shape in the team, then he will be able to avoid wrong steps.
• If he has well-developed communication skills, and he knows how to calculate the consequences of his words and actions, then he has a chance to get out of even very difficult situations with dignity.

But there are times when a person, as they say, "gets into such a batch" that he simply does not have a chance to win.

The alignment of forces in the positional map of the conflict can develop in such a way that someone will constantly be in a high-risk zone. In some cases, those who take a hostile position obviously have more resources to fight, so that a person simply does not have a chance to get out of this situation as a winner.

In this case, coaching professionals usually advise their mentees not to overvalue the job, no matter how attractive the position may seem. In some cases, it makes sense to play not for a win, but for a decent way out of the situation.

In the West, where the legal aspects of regulating labor disputes are well developed, people are asked to collect material for future lawsuits against the company or against specific employees of these companies. In Russia, there is no legal culture necessary for this, and the habit of people to resolve conflicts by going to courts, but nevertheless, there are still some opportunities.

In those cases when a person has a chance to win in a conflict, it makes sense to try to defend himself. But more often than not, it is better not to engage in direct clashes with people - as mentioned above, conflicts sometimes arise not because your opponent is such a bad person, but simply because the situation pushed your positions against each other. In some cases, you can try to change the alignment of forces in the positional map of the conflict.

Achieve a change in the balance of power, for example, by publishing the true motives of the people who are involved in the confrontation. Thus, they lose the opportunity to demonstrate "righteous anger" and frantic concern for the interests of the company. You can try to change something in the general organizational scheme of interaction between company employees or the logic of joint activities with some specific positions.

Most often, new employees are not informed about the internal problems existing in the company, many conflicts are simply not published and unfold at the "undercover level". The larger the work team in which you have to work, and the higher your position, the more psychological and social problems you will have to deal with.

These circumstances ensure that there is a constant demand for the services of coaching specialists. One of the tasks that these specialists have to solve is the organization of social reflection in the people who turned to them. And one of the important tools for organizing such reflection is the construction of a positional map of the company's conflict situations.