- Managers report that they spend 25% - 60% of their time dealing with conflict
- “Tribes” means subcultures. Each group has different goals, priorities, needs.
- Formal Tribes: staff, elders, deacon board, musicians, etc.
- Informal tribes: traditional/contemporary, men/women
- Men and women are raised in different subcultures throughout the world
- different subcultures use language differently
- ex. “I’m sorry”. Women often say “I’m sorry that happened.” to mean “I sympathize” whereas men usually use it to apologize
- Application of skills
- What do you say or don’t say
- Preparation: what is the situation? What is the strategy that I should use?
- This is where most of the mistakes are made
- Unless you are able to state the other person’s position more elegantly and persuasively than they can, you are not prepared to negotiate.
- Skills
- Anatomy of a conversation
- 1. Transaction (what): topic of conversation
- 2. Relationship (how): tone, style
- There are four impacts: build, maintain, repair, or damage.
- Damage is the default option. If you do nothing, this is what happens
- Ex. If you could add “you idiot” to the end of the sentence, it wasn’t the best way to say it
- If you feel like you have a great email over a conflict, you should probably not send it because it will probably not be well received.
- As “nice” Christians, we spend more time on the relationship building than on the transaction, so we never communicate the conflict.
- Need to be able to speak other groups’ dialect
- Try writing down other groups’ favorite words
- Some words are not well received
- Ex. Telling an operating nurse that “two items are back-ordered...” when they ask about parts for a surgery
- Leadership: coaching people—"what are you going to say in that conversation?”
- Discipline of Listening
- Most of us have more skill at listening than discipline
- Two ideas for listening: take notes, repeat what they say
- If people are angry, when they are venting, do not say anything more than “mmm” until they show signs of cooling off, or they will feel it as interference, even if you are trying to help.
| Fact / logic | Visual / spatial | |
| Fast-paced | Machine-gun thinkers (1) | Dreamers (3) |
| Slow-paced | Detail thinker (2) | Storytellers (4) |
- Machine-gun thinkers: six word question, want a quick six word answer
- Detail thinker: sequential, detailed
- Dreamers: ideas, entrepreneurs
- Storytellers: gut feel, “know”
- 1 and 3 think in summaries; they want the high-level
- Connect generalist and specialist tribes
- Specialists: experts in one area. Leaders, technology, finance, musicians
- Leaders of a group (e.g. children’s director) are a bit of a hybrid, because they will speak for the group
- Don’t want to turn specialists into generalists and vice-versa. Want to build bridges between them.
- When all else fails, make them laugh. It seems to resolve things well.