Have a Nice Conflict: How to Find Success and Satisfaction in the Most Unlikely Places

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, this book would not have been possible without the invaluable and practical theory of relationship awareness developed by Elias H. Porter (1914–1987). Each of us has devoted a significant portion of our careers applying these concepts with people in all walks of life and all types of organizations. We are most grateful to the many people who invited us into their organizations and allowed us to learn with them on difficult interpersonal conflicts.

Tim Scudder

Michael Patterson

Kent Mitchell

About the Authors

Tim Scudder, CPA, is the president of Personal Strengths Publishing, Inc., and has consulted with the organization development, training, and human resources departments of many corporate, government, education, and nonprofit organizations. The author of several experiential training programs, Tim is a founding director of the Center for the Development of the Leaders at the California School of Professional Psychology. He lives in Carlsbad, California, with his wife and three daughters.

Michael Patterson, Ed.D., is the vice president of business development for Personal Strengths USA. Mike began his career as a U.S. Army officer and then spent twenty years in a variety of sales, marketing, and training roles in the pharmaceutical industry. Mike is also a speaker and adjunct professor teaching in the doctoral program at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology. He lives in Aliso Viejo, California, with his wife and son.

Kent Mitchell is the vice president of communications for Personal Strengths USA and a produced and award-winning writer and playwright. Before joining Personal Strengths, he ran an advertising design agency in the Los Angeles area. Kent has actively worked with the principles and tools of Relationship Awareness for over fifteen years. He lives in Long Beach, California, with his wife and son.

Personal Strengths Publishing, Inc., is based in Carlsbad, California, and serves customers through a global network of interrelated distributors who offer products and services consistent with the ideas in this book in three main categories:

1. Training and development services: direct training for teams and individuals

2. Train the trainer services: Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) certification, co-facilitation, and curriculum design

3. SDI and related products: self-assessments, workplace learning tools, books, video, and other paper and electronic resources. The SDI is available in over twenty languages.

SDI assessments are available for use by certified facilitators who successfully complete the SDI Certification training. Facilitators may be independent or employed by any type of organization. As such, training and development services that incorporate the SDI are available from many individual consultants and large consulting organizations. The capacity for delivery of these services can also be developed within an organization's training, human resources, organization development, or other similar departments.

Introduction

In the story that follows, we explore the practical ideas of relationship awareness theory. Although this tale is pure fiction, the situations were inspired by our real-world experiences in personal and organizational development—and life in general.

We hope that this book will make accessible to you some of the principles of managing conflict effectively. And when we say effective, we mean in ways that not only resolve the problem but also strengthen the relationships of the people involved. We further hope that you will discover a new understanding of people and learn new techniques that can reduce the amount of conflict you experience in your life.

Much of this story focuses on the workplace. But as you will soon see, the principles of conflict management explored here apply to the entire spectrum of your relationships—personal and professional.

Relationship awareness theory was developed over forty years ago and is being applied in some of the world's largest organizations. Those who are familiar with the theory (and the tools based on it) may enjoy referring to the material that follows the story where we have provided the motivational value systems and conflict sequences of our characters. And if you are not familiar with the theory, don't worry. That's about to change.

Thank you for reading this book. We trust you will find something useful on this journey—something that will help make your next conflict a nice one.

Chapter One

At exactly 3:07 in the afternoon, John Doyle concluded that this was the worst day of his career. He could barely feel his feet hitting the floor as he retreated to his office, which now felt like a hundred grueling miles from Human Resources. As he made his way back through the bustling office building, the HR manager's words repeated in his head until they lost all form and meaning. From her first words, he knew what she was going to say. He could see it in her face as she rattled off the obligatory pleasantries. It felt like an eternity before she got around to the point, and it was all he could do not to walk out in the middle of it. Yet somehow he sat there, on the edge of his seat, praying he was wrong.

Finally, her face took on a tortured look he was sure she had practiced in the mirror beforehand. I'm sorry, John. You were not selected for promotion at this time. The words that followed may as well have been in Swahili. They bounced off him and littered the floor. Her weak offers of constructive feedback were drowned out by the tornado raging in John's head—thoughts of panic, embarrassment, exhaustion, and anger swirled with ferocious intensity.

Now he was walking through the crowded bullpen of the sales department, his face burning, his limbs tingling. Did they know? Were they staring? The infamous grapevine of Starr Industries was quite clear on the matter. Although not an official policy, John knew that there was a three-strikes rule in the company: get passed over for promotion three times, and you might as well start looking for another job. You were damaged goods as far as senior management was concerned. John had just sat through his second strike. If he could bring himself to look around, he was sure he'd recognize the looks on his coworkers' faces. They were watching a man whose career was racing toward a brick wall.

How did it go? The mere sound of Cassie's voice made John nauseous.

Without even a glance at his sales assistant, he passed her desk and closed himself in his office. He hated that Cassie knew his schedule. Granted, it was her job to know, but now he just wanted to be anonymous—and anywhere but here. He wanted today to have been a bad dream. He was anxious to wake up, wipe the sweat from his brow, and turn over.

But he was very much awake. His visit to HR was only the most recent gut punch in a day full of them. John collapsed in his chair and stared at the wall. It wasn't lost on him that a promotion to regional sales manager would surely have meant an office with a window. For now, he had a wall. For light, he had the cheap fluorescent tubes humming above him. He hated mediocrity and now felt bathed in it—confined by it in his poorly lit, windowless office—all of it seeming to pour salt on his wounds.

He had always been proud of his life's trajectory, his steady rise through the ranks. Working constantly and driving hard for results had been his standard approach since college, and up until recently, it seemed to be working. No one had ever questioned John's commitment to the job or even his ability to deliver results, but now that didn't seem to be enough. Somewhere along the way, he'd been derailed. He just couldn't seem to break through this last barrier—he didn't even know what it was—that was preventing him from moving up. What was he doing wrong?

As the clock closed in on four, he thought of his family. How could he face them? In a few hours, he would have no choice. It was J.J.'s first home game that night, and Nancy would have made sure that everyone would be taken care of. The home of Saint Nancy—as he jokingly called her—was a warm sanctuary where no child or husband was without proper nutrition and clean socks. He knew she would take the bad news with cheery, uplifting words of support, but it made him no more eager to admit his failure. Being late to the game? This is what made John most nervous. He was sickened by the irony that his drive for success at Starr Industries had taken an obvious toll on his family. And he knew Nancy well enough to know that Saint Nancy could quickly become Mt. Saint Helens when John fell short as an active participant in the family.

Looking down at the papers on his desk, he was jolted out of his thoughts. Round one of the day's lopsided boxing bout had begun with a sucker-punch the second he entered his office. A single piece of paper lay neatly on his keyboard—a faxed copy of Holly Styles's letter of resignation. John had felt the wind knocked out of him after reading only half a sentence.

Holly was John's top-performing sales representative for three years running and an informal leader of the team. John prayed that Holly had found a job in an unrelated industry, but he immediately began to worry that she had been lured away by a competitor. He began to calculate just how many customers might follow Holly to her new company and how hard it would be to find another salesperson with Holly's skill and ability to build relationships with clients. More than anything else, John worried about how her departure would look in the eyes of senior management—especially since this was the second superstar John had lost in as many months.

John checked his desk phone. The voice mail indicator remained dark. Why hadn't Holly returned his calls? Throughout the day, he had left messages on her cell phone, but so far he was met with only silence. He wracked his brain, trying to recall any warning signs he might have missed. He had no idea she was unhappy, let alone that she had intended to leave. She was making great money and had a number of large deals in the sales pipeline. Nothing made sense. Had he been too hard on her? Pushed her too much?

Round two—the 9:00 A.M. teleconference with his team—had been notably awkward. Several people asked why Holly was not on the call, and John felt a bit guilty playing dumb about it. He hadn't felt prepared to share the bad news yet. He knew there were rumors floating around about other team members shopping their résumés, and he worried that Holly's abrupt departure might fuel the flames of discontent. He would need to approach that announcement carefully. Then again, maybe they all knew. Maybe that's why everyone was so quiet on the call. Did they know their boss was lying?

Round three began around 10:30 A.M., as John finally mustered the courage to call his manager, Gail, to tell her that he had lost yet another top performer. Gail was not the shouting type. John could hear her disappointment in the stilted gaps of silence. He couldn't help feeling like a schoolboy in