By Bob Bordone, Cambridge Negotiation Institute

In the media realm, abundant with potential conflict, opportunities for negotiation abound. It can occur in the context of a formal business relationship. Or conflict may catch you by surprise in the moment when a colleague mentions something that seems offensive, misguided, or just plain wrong to you. There are ways of addressing and becoming operational for both businesses, contractual, and strategic differences as well as day-to-day relational ones.

If you are committed to a better way of dealing with hard conversations, going forward, there are a few major concepts worth considering: the importance of both conflict resilience and of being conflict ready. I’d like to share a bit about both. 

In my role, I play a number of roles. In many contexts, my focus is to facilitate hard conversations, to help people identify the relevant stakeholders, and create a space where they could feel comfortable having a difficult conversation. Perhaps the situation is one involving widely divergent viewpoints, strong emotions, and questions of identity. Mediating and facilitating conversations and contexts like this are at once challenging and gratifying for me. 

At times, I mediate these conflicts to arrive at a mutual resolution. But other times, I will simply facilitate a conversation so that parties have a better understanding of each other and to reduce demonization and dehumanization. Some tools that can help leaders navigate an ever-more pluralistic and diverse society are as follows:

CONFLICT RESILIENCE

“Conflict resilience” is the capacity to sit with very intense conflict, listen with generosity and courage, and also assert your own perspective with authenticity and grace. It is not about softening your viewpoint, but it is about finding a way to share your viewpoint so that you're maximizing the chance that it lands with your intended audience. Conflict resilience is an absolutely essential leadership skill and one that is in short supply. I served on the faculty of Harvard Law School for more than 20 years where I founded and directed Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

One noticeable shift over those two decades was the reduction in many students’ ability to sit with discomfort in the face of difference. Indeed, over my 2 decades on the faculty, I noticed less and less of an interest on the part of students to engage constructively and genuinely with people on the other side of the political divide. This observation at Harvard Law School reflects broader societal trends as well as trends in our media climate.

There are many reasons for that. Part of it is our ability to curate our own social media and groups, where we don't have to hear things that we disagree with. We have the ability to deselect disagreement. Another reason is the misconception that the way to lean into conflict is to yell and scream. And since many people don’t want to do that, they simply avoid conflict altogether. But avoidance over the long term means problems don’t get solved. And, even more worrisome, it leads to the kind of demonization and dehumanization that we are seeing at a rapidly growing pace in American society today.  

Conflict resilience isn’t just about leaning into a conflict and expressing one’s viewpoint in a way that others can actually hear. It is also about being able to listen and be curious about the perspective of others. Conflict resilience, then, is both a mindset and a set of skills. The mindset: re-orienting one’s attitude toward conflict, being open to asserting one’s viewpoint with authenticity, and listening with generosity and grace. The skillset: the performative words and actions that put mindset to action.

My professional work focuses on both: cultivating a mindset for conflict resilience and then training and coaching the skills, tools, and practice that make it happen in the real world. Cultivating the skills is hard work. It doesn’t come to most of us naturally. And all too often, people don’t take the time to learn them, meaning that they either avoid or they blunder through clumsily doing damage along the way.

In the world of media, these conflict resilience skills are essential. Conflict is inevitable. But how we handle that conflict makes all the difference.

BUILDING CONTAINERS AND PROCESSES

Building individual and collective conflict resilience skills matters. But then, to bring people together to work things out, it’s important to be able to build low-risk containers for people to do it. This is part of the facilitation and mediation work that I do. Especially in this media environment, knowing that there is somebody who can bring people together, can hold the space, create ground rules and help people work out some kind of resolution, is vital and central to my work. I’ve worked in incredibly contentious conflicts – from nasty disputes between school boards and unions to corporate conflicts to painful divides in the Catholic Church and historic enmities in Israel and Palestine.

Designing a set of processes and protocols that can handle conflicts when they arise is essential. 

Especially in such a polarized media environment, we know for certain that there are going to be conflicts that are going to be highly emotional, or there's going to be really big calls to cut off a host or for a particular brand to pull out of a particular program. That's predictable. But what we don't have in place necessarily in a lot of contexts is an agreed upon set of protocols about how we can come together before we go to that extreme.  And then, when something happens, we find ourselves under the gun with pressure to eliminate a host or cancel a program. Things would be different if a process for working it out had already been in place before the event.  

And so, what we really must do is design systems and processes for managing conflict. Forget the nuclear button. What if we had the equivalent of the nuclear hotline where we could pick up the phone and have the Soviet premier on the other side. I help people set up the process equivalent of the nuclear hotline. Think about a direct line where you connect with somebody who is going to walk you through the steps. This is the central work of my textbook Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes (2d. Ed., 2019).

Let me give you an example. I've done some work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has thousands of employees and a set of very predictable kinds of conflicts that come up there. One particular predictable conflict relates to credit for authorship when a research paper gets published. Whose name gets listed first, who's going to go second, third, fourth, matters in the world of science. And it can be the source of enormous conflict that can hold up important work, hurt relationships, and literally hold back scientific process if not handled well.

Imagine a system, however, where researchers get together in advance, agree on the criteria that they will use to determine authorship credit, and then monitor that as the work is happening with the help of facilitation. In the end, it avoids conflict, manages cost, and can mean real lives because research gets out without the cost of time, emotions, and relationships that conflict brings.  

MORE ON BEING CONFLICT READY

To be conflict ready, you want to have three things in place.

1. You want to be sure that your team has some skills and training in conflict resilience

2. You want to have systems and protocols for handling differences that have already been agreed upon and that people accept. Having this committed process establishes a level of trust in the ability of that process to deliver results.

3. You want to make sure that you have a stable of reliable, neutral, and trusted people who can facilitate and mediate conflict when it comes up.

The work I do helps to build all three:

I offer workshops on conflict management, difficult conversations, active listening, negotiation, and mediation. I tailor them to client needs and do them in-person and, since March 2020, online. Building these conflict resilience skills is preventive medicine to conflict gone wild. In many contexts, my training workshops turn into one-on-one and group coaching, especially in contexts where a manager may need a helping hand navigating complex and highly emotional relationships. But then, in many contexts, I help organizations build the “containers” – the processes and protocols for handling differences when they arise. And, finally, when parties are in need of a facilitator, I am there to help guide conversations and mediate conflicts.

The media landscape in this moment of intense political polarization is fraught with landmines. 

Building a team that is conflict resilient and conflict ready can make the difference in ensuring you avoid the landmines that can knock you from your game and build the brand, reputation, and customer base you need.