Week Ten: Evaluating my conflict styles

The outcome of my conflict styles evaluation from the Wilmot and Hocker text was not necessarily surprising however, it was interesting to see my outcome in comparison to the other options. In the evaluation of my conflict communications with my husband, I was happy to find that I most likely operate from a collaborative standpoint.  This comes after many years of avoidance on both sides, a significant amount of accommodation from my side and two years of premarital and marriage counseling.  After eight years together, not only did we become aware of our tendency to avoid conflict, we acknowledged that a fair amount of resentment had built up and took steps to learn communication strategies to improve them (The Four Horsemen in particular).  After reading the excerpt regarding the Collaborative conflict style, I do agree that it is possible for one of the parties in the relationship to use collaborative techniques to manipulate the other.  I have been guilty of this as has my husband.  For the most part though, collaborating with one another has helped us grow as individuals as well as a team. 

Similarly, I was definitely not surprised to see that I use the Accommodation-style with my boss with the Avoidance-style as a close runner-up.  I find that I tend toward these styles when I am interacting with someone whom I consider to be an authority figure (supervisors, those with seniority, professors, elders, etc).  Sadly, I find myself habitually operating from my adolescent perspective. I was raised in a very hierarchical family where my father was the boss, my mother didn't have a voice and we certainly didn't think or speak for ourselves as children.  My mother likes to say I was a "yes" girl or a people-pleaser and growing up it was something for me to be proud of.  I didn't talk back, I listed to my teachers, I did everything I was asked to do and understood that was not appropriate for me to assert myself, provide suggestions, etc.  As I got older, I went through quite a rebellious and resentful stage where I would find myself in the cycles that Wilmot and Hocker outline in Chapter Five.  Initally I would Avoid-Avoid.  As I get older, I find myself  in the Avoid-Escalate-Avoid cycle.  Both cycles are unhealthy and both cycles are habits that are difficult to break when I develop relationships with new individuals.  As I become more comfortable in my relationships, I find myself using other tactics.  That being said, I've been working with my boss for four months now so it may be a while before I stop being Accommodating or using Avoidance and begin using my voice in a constructive way.

Week Eight: My name is Melissa and I am a control freak

My current position at a downtown law firm requires me to motivate, encourage and lead teams of staff and lawyers on pro bono legal projects, community service activities and employee giving campaigns.  I had previously viewed my responsibilities as creating the opportunity for employees to give back in altruistic ways.  More recently I changed my views after reading research about altruism vs. core competencies as employee motivators and realizing most employee volunteers are persuaded to do community service when it provides a personal return for them.  And now, after I read about the Organizational Identification and Control theory, I'm reconsidering what I think about the company reasoning behind such programs.  I had always viewed my position and my programs as a way to encourage employee satisfaction, increase business goals and provide training opportunities for workers.  However, I never really considered what I did as controlling in any way.  However, after reading the theory and the methods used to control in organizations - I definitely do.  I find myself using or encouraging the use of unobtrusive control and concertive control.  As soon as new employees come on, our department presents the Community Service mission and vision of Faegre & Benson to the new hires.  We then set up meetings with them to outline all of the opportunities we have for them to volunteer.  We also encourage their group leaders to be involved and inspire involvement.  We also employ concertive control by using team leaders/group leaders for each volunteer/service/giving program who then use peer pressure to persuade involvement.  I am not going to deny that I'm a bit of a controlling personality, however I was surprised at this new understanding of other ways I control people - for better or for worse.

Week Eight: Leadership refined by Emotional Intelligence

It is safe to say that I have read hundreds of articles, books and research on professional leadership topics over the course of my thirteen years in the workforce.  I have also done some personal work on my own emotional intelligence (EQ), however I never expected that I would one day relate the two.  Rather, I have always thought of emotional intelligence as something that should be viewed in the lens of family dynamics or personal relationships.  Whether it was naive or not, I was pleasantly surprised to find that D & Z created a bridge for the two while Table 6.2 gave some concrete examples of high emotional intelligence in the workplace.  As a professional who motivates staff, peers, superiors, etc. to participate in activities that are many times not related to their job duties, I always knew leadership was important to my job.  However, I'm now interested in doing additional research on EQ in the workplace. 

Week Six: Saving Face

The article "10 instances where being rude doesn't pay" outlines a number of examples of Politeness Theory at work in the airline industry.  Any of the ten anecdotes can be used to demonstrate negative face whether it be the burnt-out flight attendant who made fun of passengers or the VIP passenger who threw her coat on a flight attendant.  Each of these examples depict someone making the decision to act freely without regard for the person they are communicating with.  A few of the examples show individuals performing bald on record face threatening acts including example number three in which a man communicated rudely and abrasively toward a flight attendant who was trying to upgrade his seat to first class. The flight attendant performed corrective facework by calming explaining her request and offering the upgrade to the man sitting next to the rude passenger.  In example number two, a flight attendant on his last flight before he took a new job miscalculated the social distance and power of a frequent flier when he performed a face threatening act by publicly berating the man only to find out later this passenger was the boss he was hoping to go to work for.

Week Five: Reducing uncertainty

I was hired into my current position in January of this year and have spent the last three months desperately attempting to reduce the amount of uncertainty I feel with my immediate supervisor.  It has been much easier to develop clarity and confidence in my relationships with other co-workers which, according to D&Z, is for a number of reasons.  The first relates to the incentive value of our interaction - my boss is the only individual that has the ability to provide me with rewards or punishments.  Secondly, I work with her everyday in ways that I don't with other co-workers which is explained as the anticipation of future interaction condition of our relationship. 

Almost immediately I sensed that my supervisor and I did not share the same ways of communicating.  These differences caused friction between us right away.  Initially I used what D&Z called passive strategy and observed how she interacted and communicated with others at our firm - her peers, my peers, her boss, her former assistant, etc.  These observations made me feel even more uneasy about our interactions.   I inferred that her behaviors demonstrated low consensus (others were very pleasant toward me), high consistency (mostly unpleasant when interacting with me) and low distinctiveness (because her negativity happens often). 

When my passive strategy for reducing uncertainty left me with more questions than answers, I approached her former assistant who is now a peer co-worker of mine to determine if she had similar interactions with my supervisor (active strategy).  I was somewhat relieved to find that she had. 

Soon after I spoke with her former assistant, my supervisor and I had a serious disagreement that caused me to confront her in a public way and then schedule a private meeting later that day to discuss.  And without realizing it, I had initiated an interactive strategy for getting to the bottom of our uncomfortable interactions.  We spent more than a half hour discussing our misunderstandings leading up to the confrontation. 

Since our meeting, our interactions have been more pleasant. The conversation helped us to identify our differences in communication styles and interpretations.  It's only been a couple weeks so I can't definitively that my uncertainty with her has been reduced however, it seems to be moving forward on a more positive path.

Week Four: Experience with SET

Although I didn't have a title for it and perhaps didn't even realize I was making an analysis, Social Exchange Theory was instrumental in my decision to end my oldest friendship.  M and I had been like sisters for 16 years - from the time we were 12 years old to 28 years of age.  Looking back it was always a dysfunctional friendship but felt normal to us (we hadn't come from the most emotionally healthy and communicative families). As we left our small town and went off to college, I began seeing that the costs from this friendship heavily outweighed the benefits.  This new awareness came from comparing my friendship with M to my relationships with new college friends.  As I began to notice the negatives were outweighing the positives, I began attempts at altering the dysfunction in our relationship.  However, because relationships are two-way streets and M wasn't emotionally ready to make changes, I spent 7 years trying to evolve our friendship on my own.  When that didn't work, I analyzed my options: stay in an unhealthy, enmeshed friendship that lacks the kinds of benefits that I need in relationships OR end the friendship and put that energy into the other healthy relationships I had developed in adulthood.  I chose the latter.  And it was painful.  Painful for her and painful for me.  But ultimately less exhausting and stressful that it was to stay in this friendship.  I don't think she has forgiven me for severing ties but I know it was the best thing for both of us.

Week Three: Uncovering my MDL

I have had the pleasure (and many times displeasure) of spending most of my professional career working under two very intelligent, accomplished and expressive women.  And it has been exhausting.  The expressive message design logic is a reactive approach to communication and before I had terminology to describe this behavior I would infer that my bosses were miserable, egotistical, rude, and thoughtless.  At other times I considered them appropriately direct, and because of that directness, inspiring.  As a professional who uses what I consider the conventional MDL, many times I took their words personally and became extremely offended by what I considered inappropriate outbursts.  Other times (when not directed at me) I admired their courage to say what was on their mind and assert themselves. 

My conventional message design logic requires me to constantly be hyper-aware and analyze every word (gesture, facial expression, etc) in a conversation.  This too is ultimately exhausting.  Over the last few months, I have begun to contemplate and address my tendencies toward passiveness, aggressiveness and assertiveness. I tend toward passivity when dealing with authority figures but become aggressive when pushed to my limit because I haven't yet developed my assertive voice. Understanding these tendencies in relation to the expressive, conventional and rhetoric message design logics assists me in continuing to mature my communication style.  I hope one day I will operate more in the rhetoric MDL style - proactive instead of reactive (or no reaction at all).