The Art of Cooperative Confrontations
21 November 2014
Read by 3907 persons
You are confronted daily with tense situations, viewpoints different from your own, conflicting interests, and sometimes attempts at destabilization, or even personal attacks. If, in addition, you exercise your managerial roles in matrix project organizations, you constantly regulate the issues of cross-functional projects and the issues of the hierarchy. Let's call this permanent regulation: daily negotiation approach. To excel at it, you need to know how to conduct cooperative confrontations; in other words, to assert yourself personally without devaluing your interlocutors.
This article begins a series on the daily negotiation approach to address tense situations with comfort and efficiency. Let's start with the "I" method.
Imagine that a colleague says to you: "You are incomprehensible!" You would probably want to justify yourself or counterattack. With this wording, they would stick a disparaging and absolute psychological label on you. On the other hand, if they said: "I didn't understand what you just said," you would probably want to ask them what points need to be clarified in your remarks so that they understand. You yourself, as a manager, might be tempted to tell one of your team members: "You are stupid!" or "You are exasperating!" when they don't understand a new procedure. You might be even more offensive by adding: "You are acting in bad faith!" You may not intend to humiliate them, simply to stimulate them; but you will surely miss your goal. Tell them instead: "I see that I'm having trouble making myself understood, what questions do you want to ask me?" Value judgments are offensive and humiliating and generate resentment, a desire for revenge, aggressiveness, or desperate gestures. Does this mean that you shouldn't say anything? No, express your opinion or your emotion using "I": I am worried, I disagree, I am annoyed... you thus give information about yourself without making it a non-negotiable generality. The "I" method allows us to assert our opinions while respecting the integrity of others. It differs from the "you" method. Our mothers had already taught us this nuance when they encouraged us to say: "I don't like this soup" instead of "This soup is bad".
Jean-Louis Muller.
Bogs.lentreprise.com
Published November 19, 2014.
Posted online November 21, 2014.
This article begins a series on the daily negotiation approach to address tense situations with comfort and efficiency. Let's start with the "I" method.
Imagine that a colleague says to you: "You are incomprehensible!" You would probably want to justify yourself or counterattack. With this wording, they would stick a disparaging and absolute psychological label on you. On the other hand, if they said: "I didn't understand what you just said," you would probably want to ask them what points need to be clarified in your remarks so that they understand. You yourself, as a manager, might be tempted to tell one of your team members: "You are stupid!" or "You are exasperating!" when they don't understand a new procedure. You might be even more offensive by adding: "You are acting in bad faith!" You may not intend to humiliate them, simply to stimulate them; but you will surely miss your goal. Tell them instead: "I see that I'm having trouble making myself understood, what questions do you want to ask me?" Value judgments are offensive and humiliating and generate resentment, a desire for revenge, aggressiveness, or desperate gestures. Does this mean that you shouldn't say anything? No, express your opinion or your emotion using "I": I am worried, I disagree, I am annoyed... you thus give information about yourself without making it a non-negotiable generality. The "I" method allows us to assert our opinions while respecting the integrity of others. It differs from the "you" method. Our mothers had already taught us this nuance when they encouraged us to say: "I don't like this soup" instead of "This soup is bad".
Jean-Louis Muller.
Bogs.lentreprise.com
Published November 19, 2014.
Posted online November 21, 2014.
