Name: I Don't Agree
Rating: 4 (231 reviews)
Author: Michael Brown

What’s in it for me? Learn how to become an expert negotiator and collaborator.

The average eight-year-old has had a staggering 89,000 conflicts. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve had tens of thousands more. But in spite of being such experienced fighters, most of us are hopeless when it comes to resolving conflicts. In fact, over 90 percent of fights end in a standoff.

That’s because both parties in a conflict usually believe that they’re right, and the other person is wrong. This dynamic can be found in disputes between global leaders over coal tariffs and in playground squabbles between children. As long as we’re incapable of seeing the other side, we’ll always take disagreement as an attack and be unable to find resolution.

Unresolved conflict is destructive in our personal relationships, in our workplaces, and in global politics. We urgently need to learn to listen to each other. In these blinks, you’ll learn ten strategies that will help you develop skills in dealing with disagreement constructively.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why pride can be a constructive emotion;
how to convince multiple people to agree to a crazy plan; and
why the key to successful workplaces is hiring more women leaders.

Start learning conflict resolution skills while you’re young.

We’re all seasoned fighters, especially if we grow up with brothers or sisters. According to psychologist Laurie Kramer, siblings between the ages of three and seven have a whopping 49 disagreements every day, spending over two hours in conflict.

That means by the time you’re a teenager, you’ll have spent many thousands of hours arguing, surpassing Malcolm Gladwell’s famous benchmark of 10,000 hours to master a new skill.

The problem is that while children are practiced in fighting, they’re much less seasoned in resolving arguments. Research has shown that only 12 percent of arguments between siblings reach a resolution. The rest are left to fester until they flare up again.

And argumentative children become argumentative adults. That fight in the boardroom over stock options isn’t so different from the fight in the playroom over who is going to play with the train set.

The good news is that this cycle can be broken. You can learn how to resolve conflicts. Especially if you start young.

Parents commonly allow children to sort out fights by themselves, or get into disciplinarian mode and punish them for misbehaving. But expert research has shown that it’s much more productive when parents do intervene, and actively work with their children to teach them how to sort out their conflicts. The best tactic is to wait until tempers have cooled down, and then call everyone to the table for some collaborative problem-solving, listening to everyone’s point of view and brainstorming how to come to a compromise.

Of course, this will all be fruitless if the parents aren’t themselves modeling how to resolve conflicts between themselves. Children are like sponges, they mirror everything you do. Showing that you can talk about conflicts and come to a compromise teaches them much more than a lecture ever could and gives them vital skills for navigating the world.

Identify your core values, and those of your team members.

Evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin wrote extensively about the finches that live in the Galápagos Islands. What’s so interesting about these birds is how the species has evolved over time. The finches have undergone a remarkable number of adaptations that allow them to survive in the resource-scarce islands. For example, some finches live off insects and leaves, while some of them live off prickly cacti! These adaptations mean that the finches can coexist – they aren’t competing for the same scarce food sources.

Make collaboration a daily practice instead of just a buzzword.

Anyone working in the corporate world will have become very tired of hearing about collaboration. The term gets tossed around by CEOs and managers all the time. In fact, a study by IBM found that three-quarters of the CEOs that it surveyed talked about collaboration being central to success.

Become authentically proud of your workplace contributions.

Being proud isn’t considered to be a positive thing. In fact, pride is listed as one of the deadly sins.

Tackle gender inequality in the workplace.

Look at the senior staff of most corporations and you’ll most probably find a crowd of men, and a small handful of women. Despite progress in gender equality, women are still discriminated against when it comes to getting senior positions in companies.

Become aware of your body language, and how other people interpret it.

How do you greet new colleagues or acquaintances? If you’re like many people, you may plaster a big smile onto your face, and hold eye contact.

Discover how much of your worldview is culturally learned and become sensitive to differences.

Cultural differences don’t stop at body language. More fundamentally, they can shape our core values and how we imagine our communities. Seventy percent of the people in the world come from collectivist cultures. That means that they live in societies that put the needs of the group ahead of the individual, and value familial relationships and connectedness above all.

Bridge the animosity gap by acknowledging your opponent’s point of view.

Some disagreements are so acrimonious that they seem impossible to resolve. Think of the furious fighting between Democrats and Republicans in the US. Or a couple slinging insults at each other in a very nasty divorce.

Develop active listening skills to defuse conflict situations.

Sometimes, the best communication skills can be learned by the people who have the most to lose in a conflict. Hostage negotiators are a prime example.

Develop a strategy for getting multiple stakeholders onboard.

As you’ve learned from the high-stakes world of hostage negotiation, resolving conflict is about being able to understand the other person’s position. Nowhere is this skill more useful than when you’re trying to get agreement from multiple stakeholders.