Listening

One day in my job in the auto plant, Hughie the local union rep came to see me. He was red in the face and kept shouting and banging his fist on my desk: ‘we are not going to put up with it! We have had enough! It’s totally out of order! It’s a disgrace.’ I put up with this for about five minutes totally mystified as to what he was talking about. I kept saying: ‘what’s the problem Hughie, and he just shouted louder: ‘(the thing) we are not going to put up with!  So then I started down the list of all the things we had done recently that might have upset him. And at number five, he became even more agitated: it was the overtime rota!

Now when faced with this level of emotion, you probably need to invest a little time and let it vent. The other side can vent, but you should usually avoid it. (And I don’t mean to suggest that large scale emotion was the monopoly of the union: I had the same experience with Production Managers.) But then you can help it a bit by trying to paraphrase exactly what the problem is, what the source of the strong emotion is. When I did this, Hughie said: ‘exactly, so you agree with us’. I said: ‘no I am just trying to understand the problem’ and we started to work on how we might solve it. But at least he knew I knew what he was agitated about though it took time!

So one of the first lessons of conflict handling might be called inquiry or active listening. Respond to aggression or anger with questions. Why do you think that? What has been happening that makes you think that? Why do you feel so strongly about this? You have to judge your audience and choose your timing and not make your questions a counter aggression. You are role modeling listening, hoping eventually the other side will realize that you are finding out a lot about their position but they know nothing about yours. Eventually, you may say: ‘would you like to hear my side?’ But don’t be surprised if it takes a few attempts. All of this takes practice!