Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #46
Show Notes:
This week Sara takes a dive into The Thomas Kilmann Conflict Management Styles. People have different preferences around dealing with conflict. Rather assertiveness or cooperativeness each style that stems from that is neither good or bad. Sara talks about competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode!
Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.
Episode #46: Business Bites: Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Management Styles
Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week we're going to be talking about Thomas Kilmann Conflict Management Styles. The Thomas Kilmann Conflict Management Styles came from two psychologists, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann. This style has four primary areas where it assesses individuals into different conflict management styles. Neither of these is good or bad, right or wrong, just different approaches that folks tend to have preferences around when they're dealing with conflict.
This particular model operates under two axis. One, focusing on assertiveness, which is the degree to which you're looking to satisfy your own concerns, your own needs, or your own priorities. The second dimension is on cooperativeness. This is the degree to which you're looking to satisfy the other person's concerns, needs, or objectives. Let's run through each of these five areas. As we're looking through the specific model, the five areas are competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating.
Let's first look at competing. This is where folks are high on their assertiveness, but lower on their cooperativeness, and they're looking to pursue their own concerns, their own goals, at the expense of others. And it's evaluation of goals over the relationship. Perhaps this individual may need to force others to accept their solution or to overpower them in a specific conversation.
That being said, again, this isn't necessarily good or bad. Competing is an effective style where we need quick action to resolve a critical issue that's at hand. This is not the opportunity to have a long discussion, have a conference about it, and I like to use this as an example of when you're in a crisis situation. Let's say you're working in an emergency room, we don't have time to have a long discussion about what to do with the patient. We need to decide and immediately determine what we're going to do in that moment.
In order to be effective at competing, you need to be able to clearly express yourself assertively, help other people understand what your position is, and use the influence to help guide that forward. If you use too much of this style, however, you're not going to hear from other people because it's going to seem like you're pushing your own agenda a lot. But if you don't use this style, there is a challenge where people won't think you'll step in to make the decision when it's needed.
Let's move to the collaborating style. This is where folks are high on the assertiveness scale and high on the cooperative side. We're trying to really dig into the issue to understand what are the underlying concerns, or we're valuing both the goals and the relationships. That problem we've got is just an opportunity for us to get to know each other better and reduce any tensions that might happen. But collaborating takes time.
When we're thinking about doing collaborating, we want to integrate solutions, seek commitment, which means we need to include everyone. We have to show we can do active listening, confront without intimidating, and get to the root cause of a situation. That being said, if you're overusing collaborating as a style, some folks view that diffusion of responsibility or accountability as a challenge, that you're not willing to step up and make the decision if it's needed. However, if you're not using collaborative as a style, you're not giving folks the opportunity to participate in the decision-making and the resolution of what the issue might be.
Moving on to compromising. This is where folks are in that middle ground around assertiveness and a middle ground around cooperativeness. We are concerned with goals and relationships, but we're seeking to find a compromise where you can get a little bit of what you want and we can get a little bit of what I need too. That being said, if you're going to use compromising as a style, you have to be willing to sacrifice part of your own goal in able to reach that resolution. But you can't do any compromising if you don't know what that other person wants as well.
This is an effective style if we're thinking about we've got time constraints or we're coming up with a temporary solution. You need to be really good at negotiation, communication, and assigning values to issues. Is this the item that you want to fight on or, you know what? I'll let it go this time. Or we need to maybe find a different way to come up with a solution. If you overuse this conflict mode of compromising, you can give the perception to people that everything is negotiable. Come at me. We'll find a way. I'll give up a little, we'll give up a little and then we'll go forward. But if you don't use this style enough, it will create power struggles and unnecessary confrontation because folks won't think that you're willing to give anything up.
The next style to focus on is avoiding. This is that lower assertiveness and lower cooperation. Now, I often hear from folks, this sounds like a bad style, and it's not necessarily. This is about not choosing to immediately address the conflict at all, and the keyword there is immediate. It's not that you're avoiding the conflict altogether, it's you're choosing to wait. You're choosing to sacrifice potentially both the relationship or the goals by buying more time.
Perhaps you don't have all the information you need. You might not have the power or the control on the situation, and waiting a few hours or a few days might be the right decision. In order to do this effectively, you need strong diplomacy skills, a sense of timing, and to be comfortable to just let things sit, which can be very hard to do.
A thing to note about avoiding is if you use this style a lot, decisions are going to be made by default or by someone else. And you may get the reputation of not handling issues. Even if you've got a plan around handling it, if you're not communicating that to others, it may seem like you're letting issues fester. However, underusing this model means you're getting involved in a whole lot of conflict that maybe isn't yours to solve. So consider whether avoiding might be an appropriate strategy depending on what the specific challenge is.
The last style is accommodating. This is where we're lower assertive and higher on the cooperative. I'm willing to neglect my own concerns in order to satisfy others. This is valuing the relationship over my own goals. Now, this sometimes happens with folks that maybe they want to be well-liked, maybe they want to have a strong team. Maybe they want individuals to feel like they have that empowerment and we don't want to damage the relationship because that's the core of what we want.
Accommodating is a great style if you want to build goodwill. If you want folks to feel empowered. And you need to have the ability to yield, to have comfort in not getting your own way. But when you are more focused on the relationship over the goals and overuse of accommodating can cause a little bit of anarchy. It's important to understand that not everyone can get their own way because it may not meet the business goals. However, if you're not using accommodating as a style, helping folks achieve their goals, their accomplishments over your own, you may be viewed as being inflexible to make exceptions based on judgments that are fair or equal.
As I mentioned before, each of these styles, there's no good, there's no bad. It's what's situationally appropriate depending on your skill, the individual you're involved in, and what the actual conflict is. So, a benefit of this tool and kind of understanding what conflict style you tend towards is important to know your preference. What do you have the most skill in? What do you prefer to do versus what actually the situation might need?
This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. And as always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.
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