Page 9 - DMGT519_Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Unit 1: Conflict

regulatory system), relevant NGOs (environmental, worker’s rights, human rights, etc.), and Notes
more. Effective leaders today must develop the skills for turning these differences into
opportunities – or they simply won’t succeed.
Leaders who can traverse divisive boundaries have always been vital to civilization, but today
the need for this leadership capacity is even more urgent and widespread. Leading as if the
world stops at the edge of one’s tribe, religion, nation, or corporation has become impractical,
and often impossible. We simply cannot manage a whole company, a whole community and
certainly not a whole planet – with leaders who identify only with one part. Instead, more often
than ever before, we need boundary- crossing leaders who can help the parts work together to
strengthen the whole.
“Leading through conflict” involves facing differences honestly and creatively, understanding
their full complexity and scope, and enabling those involved to move towards original solutions.
Such leadership requires going beyond the powerful, primordial responses to difference that
result in an “us vs them” mentality. It requires capacities that such bear both personal and
professional skills that turn serious conflicts into rewarding opportunities for collaboration and
innovation.
Following are the vital tools of the mediator:
1. Integral vision: committing ourselves to hold all sides of the conflict, in all their complexity,
in our minds – and in our hearts.

2. System thinking: identifying all (or as many as possible) of the significant elements related
to the conflict situation and understanding the relationships between these elements.
3. Presence: applying all our mental, emotional, and spiritual resources to witnessing the
conflict of which we are now a part.
4. Inquiry: asking questions that elicit essential information about the conflict that is necessary
for its transformation.
5. Conscious conversation: becoming aware of our full range of choices about how we speak
and listen.
6. Dialogue: communicating in order to catalyze the human capacity for bridging and
innovation.
7. Bridging: building partnerships and alliances that cross the borders that divide an
organization or a community.

8. Innovation: fostering social or entrepreneurial breakthroughs that create new options for
moving through conflicts.
Through interviews with scores of leaders around the world, it is established how they have
transformed – not just managed, settled, contained, or resolved – some of the most challenging,
intractable conflicts of our time. Transformation means that the conflict is neither superficially
‘settled’ with a quick compromise nor temporarily “fixed.” It means that the stakeholders go
through a process of change that raises the dynamics of the conflict to another level.
Transformation requires us to “wake up” out of vengeance and numbness. It challenges us to
stand up and defend these life-affirming values – not to hurt but to heal; not for victory but for
justice; not for our rights but for the rights of all; not just for our “side” but for the whole of
which we are only a small and fragile part.
As our world grows smaller, opportunities for conflict multiply. Ethnic, religious, political and
personal differences drive people apart in organizations and institutions of all kinds – with
potentially disastrous consequences. It’s the task of effective leaders with mediator skills to
bring people together again.

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