OVERVIEW OF CONFLICT

Conflict just comes with the territory in family enterprise. In fact, wherever there are
people, there's conflict. However, as the three-circle model so aptly demonstrates when the
family system interacts with the business system, we've got two very opposite structures
which causes a natural tension.

The definition of conflict is the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values, or wishes,
resulting in stress or tension. Conflict is not bad or good, contrary to popular belief. It's just
an expression of differences.

There is a huge variety of responses to conflict. On the one end of the continuum, there's
pretending nothing's wrong or just giving in, or sometimes using the silent treatment .On
the other end of the spectrum, it can be as horrible as getting visibly angry and lashing
out at the other person or even worse. Or you might complain to someone else or you
might cry or yell. In the middle, some people might agree to take a break and talk about it
later. The most important thing to understand is that we all have beliefs about conflict

. What does conflict mean to you? What are the beliefs about conflict in your family? I
believe that any important relationship has some level of conflict in it. My belief about
conflict is that it's absolutely inevitable and it's normal. People are not built to like conflict,
but conflict can actually help bring people closer together. However, resolving conflict
requires courage, patience, and discipline.

One of the things that I think has been really fascinating is our understanding of the brain's
response to conflict. We know that the brain has a stronger, faster, longer-lasting and
more automatic response when we're faced with an uncomfortable situation. We know that
our brain pumps adrenaline and cortisol into our system when it's under stress or under
threat. The neurosciences have helped us also to understand that social pain, such as
rejection, verbally harsh statements towards us ,and other types of social rejection, are
experienced by the brain in a very similar way as it experiences physical pain. What's
interesting to note about this is that although our bones may heal when they're broken, I
find that most people remember the harsh things that were said to them or rejection that
they had many years after it occurred.

So what are some of the sources of conflict in a family enterprise? Some sources of
conflict include things like
  unmet expectations
 different goals, limited resources-- again,
 harvest or reinvest.
 Ambiguous roles or lack of role clarity
 differing values and beliefs,
 violation of agreements or rights,
 sudden change and different perceptions, or
 unmet underlying needs.

So what are the positive functions of conflict?.Conflict is useful for a number of reasons

1. First it provides a release valve .It helps us blow off some steam as things build up in
relationships if done that constructively.
2. It prevents stagnation, and can create movement forward if you're willing to work
things through.
3. It can stimulate interest and result in greater cohesion and better performance in
your family firm. If you think about it, any major social change that has occurred in
our society or any society around the world, almost invariably has been preceded by
conflict.

And so what are the costs of avoiding conflict? What happens is resignation sets in.
People sometimes displace their feelings onto others, and may be even their animals. We
tend to gossip or gripe and complain to other people. There's an enormous amount of
stress and anxiety and avoidance when conflict isn't resolved. In addition, sometimes
people stop talking to each other for up to 20 years. Unbelievable, but true. Sometimes
families end up selling great assets and get into litigation when conflict is avoided and not
addressed constructively.
CONFLICT STYLES
As we all know, families in business, inevitably have conflicts. As a matter of fact, KPMG
did a study a number of years ago, and looked at families in business. And they asked them
whether they have plans for how to deal with conflict. 71% of all of the family firms that
they interviewed, said that they knew that they would have conflict one day, one way or
another.71% of them had no plan for how they were going to deal with conflict.

Alexander Haim says there's five ways of handling conflict.

 The first is to accommodate. That means going along with the other person.
 Second way is to avoid. It's really not handling the conflict, it's dismissing it, or
setting it aside and getting it out of the way.
 Third way is to compete, or to fight. To try and win. I win, you lose.
 The fourth way that most of us are familiar with is compromise. A little bit here, a
little bit there, and we can find a solution that may be partially satisfying to each of
us, but we can move forward .
 And the fifth way is to collaborate.

All of these, Alexander Haim would suggest, are suitable in certain circumstances. So
there are examples of how collaboration compromise compete, avoid, and
accommodate, can each in their own way be suitable

1. To illustrate an example of when avoid maybe a suitable way of handling conflict.

Imagine you're at the office, and your boss has a very big deadline they're working
towards, to submit the largest competitive bid of their year. And you walk in, and
they speak to you in a way that you are offended by. They are a little bit curt to you.
They ask you to get something. You might be tempted to say please don't speak to
me that way. That would be a good time to avoid that conflict. Know that you might
be able to address that if that happened all the time, might be suitable to talk about
another day, but that would be a time to avoid.
2. Second idea. Think about accommodation. That means letting the other person
have their own way, or to put it in other terms, I lose you win. If you're married, and
my wife and I've been married now for almost 4 years, it's a really good idea to learn
to accommodate. If we're thinking about which movie to go to, and I would have an
idea of some action thriller I want to go to, and she has some romantic comedy she
wants to go to. If I want to stay married I probably need to learn to accommodate
her from time to time. Sometimes going along with someone else builds goodwill in
the relationship. And so accommodating can often be a useful management style.
3. How about competing? How about I win, you lose. When is that appropriate? Well,
if you're in the marketplace, and you're trying to buy a car, and there's two or three
people trying to sell you a car, it's appropriate for them to compete .You can't buy all
 the cars, and it's not appropriate to buy half of one car from one half from another,
someone has to win. In the marketplace, I think competition is entirely appropriate.
Not necessarily so within the family circle, but certainly in the marketplace.
4. Fourth way of dealing with conflict is to compromise . At its core, compromise is
setting aside some of the things you want. Typically, compromise is required when
you have a limited amount of time, or limited resources that need to be shared
between a limited number of people Example : Sister Helen and brother Chuck co-
owned a summer cottage. After a number of years, my brothers decided he would
like to build a home on another island. And so he wanted to sell his 50% interest to
my Sister Helen. She wanted to buy it. So we had a buyer, we had a seller. What were
we going to do about price? My brothers expectations were up here, and my sister's
expectations were here. There was no other buyer, no other seller. The only answer
was to compromise. As the younger brother had the privilege of working with them
to develop a solution. And in the end, my brother got a little bit less than he'd hoped
for, my sister paid a little more than she wanted to, but through a compromise. We
were able to come up with an answer.
 The final way that we can resolve conflict is through collaboration. That's looking
for a win-win solution. Takes more time. But if we're going to make a win-win
solution, both parties are looking to help one another. Requires trust building,
requires exploring what each are looking for. Think about it as an example .When is
collaboration important? It's when the issue really matters, that you're talking about
,and when the relationship really matters. For an example, think about a couple
who are contemplating perhaps having another child. They already have two
children, and one of the couple would like to have a third. You can't have half a child.
One of them can't do this on their own. It needs to be something they collaborate on.
And so in order to resolve something like that, a collaborative solution requires
looking below the surface. What are the real motivations? And also what are the real
concerns? If one of the couple is concerned about having more responsibility falling
on them to do more dishes, or to do more laundry, they might decide to get some
external help to assist in the circumstance. If one member of the family is keen to be
able to have a child, they might be willing to work fewer hours in order to be able to
be at home, and to help out more. So you can see, that working through a
collaborative solution, where they can both come up with a win-win solution that
they can both embrace the new child, and embrace the decision together. If you
think about it, collaboration requires exploring what's behind your real motivations.
 There isn't one right way of dealing with conflict. There's five choices. Key in a family
enterprise is learning which one is most suitable. Avoiding and accommodating can be dangerous
, competing can be harmful. whenever possible in the family business context, to look for either
compromise, or collaboration.
SOME STRATEGIES FOR DIFFUSING CONFLICT:
Diffusing conflict is a necessary skill set in a family enterprise. it's a complex
environment fraught with lots of opportunity for challenges and tension. Therefore, your
ability to de-escalate the conflict is imperative to managing, or resolving, the issues you
face.

1. The first and most important thing is to stay calm. This can be particularly difficult
given our brain, when faced with a conflict, moves into what's called, limbic
hijacking. Essentially, that's where our limbic system takes over and creates a lot of
noise in our brain. Preventing us from using our higher level thinking brain, , from
functioning properly. Taking deep breaths can help you maintain a calm disposition
and keep cool in the heat of the moment. I really cannot overestimate how useful
mindful breathing can be in helping you remain calm and diffuse conflict.
2. The next strategy for diffusing conflict is learning how to ask powerful, curious
questions and your ability to paraphrase, or reflect back, what's being said. Conflict
sometimes arises from the inability for someone to articulate something well.
Sometimes people are not able to say what they mean, or perhaps, they misstate
what was intended. Therefore, before things escalate, asking a powerful question in
an open, curious way, is helpful as it may create an opportunity for you to truly
understand what's going on for the other person. Some questions that might be
useful to ask include things like what's the most troubling part of the situation for
you, or what would you like to see happen .Or another question might be, what
would it take for us to move forward. I remember, during a highly conflictual
situation, where a family was discussing a massive argument they were having
about how to handle their shipping process. In a round robin exercise each family
member was asked what the most important thing to them was. One of the family
members sat back, looked up in the air and said all he really wanted was his family
to be able to get together and have Christmas dinner again. Pretty profound when
you think about what's really important to someone. So asking questions, to ensure
that you truly understand what the person's saying and really what's important to
them is a critical skill. Sometimes we think this skill is really easy. What I'd like you
to do is actually practice in a situation, just asking short, powerful, curious
questions, and see how good you're at it.

The next part of asking questions, is to ensure that you truly understand what
a person's saying by paraphrasing, or reflecting back, what they say. This helps to
clarify and ensure you're both on the same page. See what happens when we're
communicating with another sometimes is that they're encoding their messages to
us and as the receiver; we need to actually decode that message. And part of the
challenge is, in our decoding process we have a filter, as we've talked about
 previously. So we want to minimize our filter as best we can. By reflecting back to
the individual what you heard them say, you’re decoding, so to speak, and checking
in whether you've decoded properly.

3. Another strategy in diffusing conflict is to use what's called the round robin
process. This is where you ask each person to weigh in on how they feel about a
particular issue or decision. What you do is, you go around the table ensuring
everyone has an opportunity to speak. This allows everyone to have a voice and
ensures everyone understands each other's perspectives on a particular issue.
4. One final strategy for managing conflict, which actually starts at the outset prior to
a conflict happening, is for the family to create rules for fair fights. This can
include things like no yelling, no blaming, no use of force, taking turns speaking,
using timeouts if necessary, and the like.
One family had a great plan for when things got too heated. They would say,
let's go feed the fish. They had a pond in their backyard with a fish and a family
member would go out when things got too hot for them and metaphorically feed the
fish. However, the family also had an agreement that when they took that break and
they went to go feed the fish that they would come back within 15 minutes

Diffusing conflict is not an easy thing to do. But if you have an intention and are
committed to solving the problem, or the issue at hand, then taking the time to
implement some of the strategies discussed can make all the difference in the
world to finding a constructive solution to the conflicts you're facing. One of the
things that families need to work on is building competence in diffusing conflict
.It takes time and a lot of practice. Again, it's not natural for us to like conflict; we're
never going to be able to get to that stage. So, we need to work hard to build skill in
managing it more effectively. Finally, when things go wrong, finding the humility
within yourself to apologize; don't sweep and cover the problem. As it doesn't go
away but rather it bubbles up at a different time and a different place. A valid
apology has a few important characteristics; things like acknowledgment of the
wrong doing, providing an effective explanation of perhaps what happened and why
things went awry, an expression of feelings, and a reparation of some kind. If an
apology is necessary, likely it will be difficult for the other person or persons to
move on without one.