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Communication Tips

Creating Collaboration

In most workplace and personal conflicts, collaboration is the most productive strategy. This takes energy, cooperation and time, but the results are well worth the investment.

Collaboration-building techniques:

1. Make sure the other person shares his or her needs and objectives. Understanding each other's needs and objectives is essential to successful collaboration. Explain yours and ask for theirs.

2. Stimulate information sharing. Signal your intent to collaborate by being open and honest. Explain that you want them to understand your position fully, and ask them to share information with you. Remind them that you are more likely to be able to help if you understand the situation more clearly.

3. Offer many alternatives. Signal your intent to find new and better ways to resolve the conflict by voicing many options and make it clear that you are not attached to any one option, but simply want to find a solution that works for all. Your behavior will encourage the other person to do the same.

4. Insist on a collaborative process before discussing solutions. If the other person presses for a commitment before engaging in open information sharing and joint problem-solving efforts, refocus the process. Explain that you are not ready to consider offers until we explore the problem more carefully.

5. Refuse to interact when emotions are high. Heated approaches to conflict lead to hasty solutions, not cooperative problem solving. When things get too hot, simply say you don't want to work on the conflict because emotions may get in the way. In most cases, your emotional leadership will bring the other person around. Remember, it takes patience to manage emotions.

6. Take a creative problem-solving approach. When you get the other person to agree to collaborate, remember that you need to work together to understand the issue better, and then to generate creative alternatives. Only when you have some real insights into the issue and some better alternatives should you switch gears and worry about which solution to adopt.

FORMAT:

Step 1. Explore the issue. Exactly what is the issue from each of your perspectives? Have either of you overlooked aspects of the issue, exaggerated the issue, or confused one issue for another? When you both commit to discussing and thinking about the issue itself, you often find new and better ways to look at it.

Step 2. Create lots of options. Since you are in conflict, you must have competing views of how to resolve the issue. Disagreement tends to cement these views, blinding you to alternatives. But are there other ways of thinking about the issue or the solution that might lead to competitive ways to solve it? Can you think of three more viable options? When you work together to create a solution, you can often come up with new options that give both parties better outcomes and are also better for the relationship between them.

Step 3. Agree to implement the best option. Collaboration ends when both parties feel they have discovered a resolution to their issue. When everyone agrees on a new and better approach, then you are ready to resolve the conflict for the benefit of all.

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