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The variety of these conflicts is enormous. They can be about almost anything and can involve almost anyone you meet, work, play or live with. Resolving them can make considerable demands upon your time and patience. Given all of this, you shouldn’t be too surprised to find that there isn’t a single ‘right’ way of coping with or managing all of these conflicts. You have to make a choice; a choice from a number of ways by which you can manage your conflict. But these ways of conflict management do have a common objective. That is that they enable you either:

• to resolve your conflict, or
• to limit its effects or consequences.

This choice about how you resolve your conflict will be made by you from the Five Basic Ways of Conflict Management. Let’s look at them in more detail so that you can see what they involve.

Avoiding the conflict

This, the first of the Five Basics, is called the Avoidance style of conflict management. It is often described as being the ‘Ignore it and it’ll go away’ style or, alternatively — and in an industrial relations situation — it’s described as the Tut it into procedure’ style. When you use this you limit, or at least try to limit, the effects of conflict by ignoring it. You literally turn your back on it and hope that it will ‘go away’. Not a style of conflict management to be used with major conflicts, it does have uses with conflicts that are trivial or have low priorities. You can also use it with conflicts whose cost of resolution outweighs their benefits or those conflicts which you can’t, however hard you try, resolve.

Competing

The Competition style of conflict management is a straightforward and obvious style. It’s about making sure that you win and, of course, making just as sure that the other person, department or organization loses. Often called, for obvious reasons, the ‘win—lose’ style, it uses and exploits power and rivalry; its advocates say ‘We take no hostages’. It’s a style that, in the heat of battle, can be appealing. But you should always remember that, next time you meet, your opponent will be better prepared, and you could then find yourself on the losing side. It’s a disruptive style of conflict management and should generally only be used in emergencies or on unpopular issues. But it does have its uses as, for example, a defensive response when others seek to exploit what they see as your apparent lack of competitiveness.

Giving in

The third of the Five Basics is the Accommodation style of conflict management. When you use this style you accommodate the needs of others by giving in, by surrendering. For that reason it’s often called ‘Submit and Comply’ style. It’s a style that is best used when you find that your conflict is creating major and insuperable difficulties — when you are, almost literally, ‘up the creek and without a paddle’. It’s also worth using if you find, partway into the conflict, that you’re in the wrong or when you need to minimize losses when you’re in the right, but losing. The Accommodation style can be useful when you need to reduce the overall level of conflict or to `restore the peace’, and when the conflicts you’re involved in have trivial consequences or costs.

Working together

The fourth of the Five Basics is called the Collaboration style of conflict management. When you use this style, which is often described as a `win—win’ style, your objective is to defuse conflict

By generating a consensus solution to which all are committed. This often takes a lot of time and demands considerable _commitment from both sides. But its potential to restore longterm relationships, by ‘working through’ feelings, can make it worthwhile. The time it consumes means that it is often only used in major conflict situations or to support relationships that are needed in the long term. Outside our workplaces it forms the core of many relationship counselling processes.

Finding the middle way

This, the last of our Five Basics, is known as the Compromise style of conflict management. It is about deals and trade-offs. In its broadest form, it is a style that is used to resolve the conflicts created by incompatible goals and to generate appropriate solutions when under time pressure. It is a very effective alternative to the Competition and Collaboration styles — particularly when these would be, respectively, too disruptive or too demanding.

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