HR.com's Thought Leaders for April 12, 2007

Tim A. Flanagan is Director of Custom Programs at the Leadership Development Institute at Eckerd College.  He has designed and delivered public and custom leadership and team development programs for many clients including Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Energy Northwest, and the US Department of Energy.

KE: Let's begin by having you tell us what prompted you two to write this book.

TF:  There is so much conflict in the world and within organizations. Many individual leaders come to us with issues that revolve around conflict and they are looking for help.  Four major studies have been done in the last 30 years, and it turns out that most managers believe they spend 20-30% of their time dealing with conflict. So it seemed like an important and natural topic on which to write a book.

CR:  We have also looked at the great costs that are inflicted on organizations when they don't handle conflict well. One of our colleagues, Dan Dana, suggested that the largest controllable cost within organizations is better conflict management.  The kind of costs we are talking about include things like wasted management time, and lost employees resulting from conflict with their managers.  Also, absenteeism is often caused by people not showing up as a way to avoid conflicts they are in, or because they are stressed out because of poorly handled conflict.  And, there are larger cost issues like lawsuits and vandalism that can result from poorly managed conflict.

KE: What does it mean to be "competent" at conflict?

CR: In our book we suggest that competent conflict leaders need to do two different things.  First of all, they need to be personally competent in dealing with conflict. Secondly, they need to be a champion within their organization for more widespread skill development around conflict.  We think they need to start with themselves in order to be credible when they then issue the call to others to do the same.

The first step in becoming more competent is: knowing its importance and the value associated with it. That is why we almost always begin by talking about the costs associated with dealing with conflict, and in particular, the costs if you don't deal with it effectively.   

Second, we begin to look at how they personally respond to conflict. What kinds of things trigger them; get them angry in conflict situations? They begin to understand how they behave when they are faced with conflict, which leads to the development of better, more constructive conflict skills, which they will then use during conflict situations and model for others in their organization. Once they have done that, then they are in a position to become a more effective champion of conflict competence throughout their organization. That involves getting other people involved in skill development and, as we will see later, making sure that the organization's overall values are aligned with effective conflict management skills.

• Why Bell's thinking about leadership development changed even though the initial approaches were successful. 
  
• Why Bell is skeptical of transformational leadership training ...
  
• Why some workers get stuck in their career and why this causes their performance to decline.
• The specific of Bell's new approach to leadership programs.