The Art of Sparring and Crossing Swords
Strategic Alliance Magazine — Q3 2017
Cover story by Cynthia B. Hanson
As partnering complexity, hence potential for conflict, increases, savvy alliance executives can sharpen conflict resolution skills and even embrace conflict as an opportunity to drive creativity, alignment, and growth in their partnerships.
“We train people to be expert in managing technology, numbers, finance, and the law. But this most fundamental characteristic of human interaction—conflict—is something we are somehow just supposed to figure out as we go along. But we don’t. And not knowing how to handle it, we prefer to ignore it and hope it goes away. The bad news is that it won’t go away; unresolved conflict festers and grows. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.”—Margaret Heffernan, international businesswoman, author, interviewer, TED Talk speaker, and part-time lecturer at the School of Management, University of Bath, United Kingdom
It’s a constant universal in the human condition. In Ancient Egypt, it was called repdat. In Javanese, konflik. In Hmong, teeb meem. In Dutch, conflict. While the definition of “conflict” is pretty much the same in every culture, “conflict resolution” is a different animal. Cultural constructs and historical contexts influence the meaning—and practice. In English, conflict resolution is frequently interconnected with sports terminology and industrial disputes. In Arabic, it revolves around honor and Islamic ethics. In Hebrew, it’s tied to military metaphors.
Those constructs and contexts can influence business relations globally. It’s a pervasive challenge, and now, with the increasing complexity of multi-industry partnering, the potential for conflict is on the rise—internally and externally. Each additional partner added into a complex multi-partner alliance adds additional opinions, customs, conventions, and personalities. Alliance managers can’t help but be feeling the heat, and it’s a great time to brush up on conflict resolution skills.
One of the most comprehensive studies ever done on the workplace, “Workplace Conflict and How Businesses Can Harness It to Thrive,” CPP Global Human Capital Report (2008), found that employees in the United States spend approximately 2.1 hours per week involved in conflict (as defined as “any workplace disagreement that disrupts the flow of work”). In 2008, that translated into over $300 billion in paid hours or the equivalent of nearly 400 million workdays.
The employee survey also found:
- 85% at all levels experienced conflict at some point in their work experience
- 34% of conflict occurred among front-line employees
- 29% experienced it almost constantly
- 27% witnessed it leading to personal attacks
- 12% observed it frequently among the senior team
- 9% observed it causing a project to fail
Figure 1
The Art of Confronting Conflict
“We did some polling questions on a webinar, and one question was, What is your instinctive first response to a conflict situation?” says Lynda McDermott, president of EquiPro International Ltd., referring to her recent ASAP Netcast, “Why Does Great Alliance Collaboration Require Good Conflict?” “Some 53 percent said it was to delay responding,” she recalls. “Avoiding conflict can be highly destructive,” she observes. “My experience is if you avoid disagreements, they escalate into personal conflict. There are task-focused and relationship-focused disagreements. Often what happens is they start at task level, but if they go unresolved or fester, it can have a negative impact on the relationship and turn into a relationship conflict. Then a lack of trust permeates the entire alliance. So you are doing your company and alliances a disservice if you don’t raise and resolve issues constructively.”
Task-oriented communications are neutral or positive and focus on ideas and perspectives; relationship-oriented communications can be negative and focus on emotions and people. The goal should be to stay rational with the task and start with basic foundational questions such as “What is the task? Should it be done? What are the experience levels of the people doing the task?” she notes. The task should be objective and rational. But sometimes it bleeds over into the relationship- oriented side, and the skills you need to move it back to task-oriented require constructive responses and analysis to get you back on track, she says (see Figure 2).
Figure 2
- Standardize—repeat it over and over.
- Simplify—“or people aren’t going to do it, it’s human nature to take the path of least resistance.”
- Structure—it needs to makes sense.
Essential to conflict resolution are also what he calls the Four C’s:
- Commitment
- Communication
- Culture
- Continuity
“Write them on the back of your hand,” he advises. “I see these over and over. If you can address these, you have 80 percent of the win because all are impacted by conflict. A lack of any one of those can contribute to conflict. … If you create better communication protocols, clearly understand the commitment of each organization around the alliance, and keep the continuity going, then when you run into the culture piece, you have the building blocks already in place. It’s like a linked chain, and you can’t tackle the cultural component without, at least, addressing the others.”
Figure 3
Arreche also advises executives to use the Five Whys: Ask five probing questions to perform root cause analysis and help determine some of the best alternatives. And pay attention to the personalities at the table. “Understanding personalities will help you create options and handle your own conflict. Understand yourself and how you work your own personal traits … and your partners’ strengths,” he adds (see Figure 3).
McDermott also subscribes to a list of dos and don’ts for conflict resolution, which she calls The Basics:
- Don’t eliminate conflict—just its harmful effects
- Encourage candid dialogue and debate
- Seek to understand before trying to be understood—clarify mutual understanding
- Identify areas that you agree on, and isolate areas of disagreement
- Actively and mutually explore alternative solutions: Try to have more than two because by having three solutions, you are forcing yourself not to polarize.
Forging the Toughest Steel
The old adage “The toughest steel is forged in the hottest fire” may have some merit in conflict resolution practices. What many call “good conflict” can actually enable innovation and creativity when applied appropriately. Eli Lilly and Company has become a staunch supporter of this concept after the company analyzed 14 years of survey data that included questions on conflict. In their recent session at the 2017 ASAP Global Alliance Summit, “Building the Perfect Partnership: A Balance of Harmony and Conflict,” Lilly’s David Thompson, CA-AM, chief alliance officer, and Alan Colquitt, PhD, director of global assessment, organization effectiveness and workforce research, presented the data, which analyzed the relationship between the health of these alliances (as evidenced by the ratings on the survey) and the technical and commercial success of the products on which the partners worked. When the Lilly employees in the alliance were irritated with the partner, there was an increased probability of technical and commercial success (see companion article, Pg. 18).
McDermott agrees that conflict can have a beneficial component: “Having open discussions with disagreement encourages people to be candid and opens up points of view and perspectives,” she says. “If I’m on an alliance team, and our task is to come up with innovative solutions … if I’m worried about defending my ideas, I am more likely to keep my ideas to myself. Alternatively, if I’m working in an environment with openly shared ideas and critiques, we can build, and then innovative solutions can emerge.”
The Art of Negotiation
A similar dynamic can occur in the process of negotiation, says Harm-Jan Borgeld, CSAP, PhD, head of alliance management at Merck KGaA. Borgeld will be co-facilitating a workshop with Stefanie Schubert, PhD, professor of economics, SRH University, Heidelberg, Germany, on “Strategic Decision Making & Negotiations: Learnings from Game Theory and AM Practice” at the ASAP Bio- Pharma Conference this Sept. 13-15 in Cambridge, Mass. The session evolved out of a presentation given by the co-facilitators at the ASAP European Alliance Summit in London last year, where they talked about game theory and decision making. It received such positive
feedback that they decided to expand the session into a workshop that combines game theory, negotiation, influence, and decision making. The world of game theory will be explained using real-life business cases to enable participants to apply the theory in their daily work as alliance managers.
“Alliance managers often think alliance management is just executing contracts. But in fact, the alliance manager is negotiating … how to align and progress projects and resolve issues,” Borgeld explains. “Simply making a good decision doesn’t lead to an excellent execution.
You need to have people buy in. That is where the negotiation and influencing come in.”
Group negotiations make the process even more complex, he points out. And in a multi-industry, multi-partner alliance, it requires particularly careful consideration with both the internal and external negotiation processes (see Figure 4). As the complexity increases, the process of resolving conflict likely will require skilled management as well that could result in even greater creativity in problem solving.
The workshop includes exercises to encourage participants to turn conflict into cooperation. “If you want to resolve the conflict, you need to think out of the box,” Borgeld points out. This is why conflict resolution is so difficult. People think inside the box and actually tend to think even more narrow than the box actually is. By thinking outside of the box, options will appear that you might not have identified at all. This puts you into a strong position in negotiations and allows you to influence decision making so that the best decision is made.”
So what happens if progress is unlikely to continue and its time to throw in the towel? “There are always going to be times where people have such conflicting views. If you can’t build an agreement, you might have to go your separate ways,” says Arreche. “It’s okay to say ‘No!’ Negotiation is sometimes saying ‘Yes’ to maybe the better of the worst options. But conflict resolution and building an agreement could still be the genesis of something completely new. Many of the tools we use create options that support both parties and might be better than either extremes,” he concludes.
With so many considerations—cultural, personality, hidden agendas, etc.—it’s important to recognize when you’ve given negotiations your best shot and it’s time to conclude the process and bring in the litigators or walk away from the deal. Understanding when that time has arrived is just one of the many questions you can wrestle with in an ASAP workshop, conference session, and/or Netcast. These topics are surfacing more frequently in ASAP Media and conferences, an indicator that alliance managers recognize the need to add more conflict resolution techniques to their toolboxes. For starters, consider these resources:
- Why Does Great Alliance Collaboration Require Good Conflict? ASAP Netcast by Lynda McDermott
- The Right Kind of Conflict Leads to Better Products Harvard Business Review, December, 2016: https://hbr.org/2016/12/the-right-kind-of-conflictleads-to-better-products
- Strategic Decision Making & Negotiations: Learnings from Game Theory AM Practice ASAP workshop led by Harm-Jan Borgeld and Stefanie Schubert at the upcoming BioPharma Conference Sept. 13, http://www.asapbiopharma.org/17/bio17workshops.html
- Dare to Disagree Ted Talk by Margaret Heffernan, https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_ heffernan_dare_to_disagree n
ASAP Media Managing Editor Cynthia B. Hanson is a certified mediator who received her training from the International Academy of Dispute Resolution (INADR). The academy focuses on education at the undergraduate, graduate, law school, and professional levels. It is comprised of lawyers, judges, professors, and other professionals sharing an abiding conviction that mediation is the better way to resolve conflict. INADR was founded in 2002 with the mission to “encourage society to resolve differences and disputes in a more sensitive and compassionate manner; and to promote peace and civility in human behavior.” Learn more at http://www.inadr.org.
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