This week’s conflict resolution tip is about the importance of seeking collaboration.
When making decisions that are going to affect other people, whether it be the workplace or our personal lives, can you do your best to seek collaboration? Can you open up a space for conversation — a dialogue that allows for others to have input in decisions that will ultimately affect them? When decisions that affect people are mandated from the top, and people lose a sense of agency or control in the ability to dictate the way their life is going to go, whether it be at work or in personal life, they will typically get very defensive and will likely be unhappy with the decision-making process. This is especially true when the outcomes of those decisions are not favorable or in line with their expectations or goals.
If you come at decision-making from a collaborative perspective, then you open up a space for people to give their input, exercise their agency, and to feel they have some power in the situation. While not everyone can be the decision-maker, you can still open up space for collaboration and a sharing of ideas. If you do open up that space, even when you feel that someone else’s input is not going to be effective or there will be challenges with it, you can still genuinely consider their ideas and validate the proposer. You can present challenges to them and ask them if they have solutions to the challenges you foresee with their ideas, but do what you can to make it a collaborative process.
Being in collaboration rather than being in control is much more likely to lead to a life of peace rather than a life of conflict. It is fine to be the one who makes the final decision in the end, but the more consideration and collaboration you can get from those who will be affected by those decisions, the better for the relationship, the dynamic, and the culture in general.
