Getting along.

Conflict between people isn’t just inevitable, it’s pervasive. People have distinct, incongruent motivations and expectations, so conflict is the default state of any relationship. And that’s okay. Getting along isn’t about eliminating conflict. It’s about managing conflict so that everyone involved is satisfied. But sometimes when someone’s not satisfied, things get out of control, emotions take over, and a conflict ripens into a dispute. Disputes hurt. They distract and discourage, and dampen the same-team feelings that facilitate cooperation. So how do you deal with disputes?

The law is [ostensibly] designed to regulate conflict and resolve disputes. But in business, the law never offers an optimal outcome because the transaction cost is so high, both in time and expense. What’s worse, legal remedies are inadequate to fully redress the emotional component of a dispute, which, when you think about, it where all the caring about the outcome actually happens. Plenty of litigants in legal disputes remain bitter long after a case is settled, even if they’ve won. If that’s true, is the dispute actually resolved?

People are not primarily rational. They’re emotional. Emotions don’t yield to systemic remedies. Emotions are subjective and personal, and the emotional layer of a dispute can only be resolved with particularity. The law will never be able to do this. But you can. At least you can try.

First, try to understand the root of the negative emotions surrounding the dispute. Is there some core concern that isn’t being addressed in the person who’s aggrieved? By core concern, I mean those perceptions we get from others that validate our identity. They include appreciation, affiliation, autonomy, status, and role (I’m borrowing this framework of concerns from Beyond Reason, an excellent book on negotiation). People want to feel that others appreciate their value and contribution, they want to feel connected, they want to feel like they have control and discretion, they want to feel respected, and they want to feel like they have purpose. Start with yourself. Can you pinpoint any area where you aren’t being validated from the others involved? You might have to dig a bit. Your core concerns rarely manifest themselves directly. Work your way down from the top: what are you asking for in the dispute? What interests are you trying to protect or advance? How do those interests reinforce your core concerns? Try to answer those same questions about everyone involved. If you can dissect the dispute into everyone’s demands, their interests, and their core concerns, you can start to get a picture of what full resolution looks like.

Once you have a working map of the dispute, look for opportunities to reinforce each person’s core concerns and build on that. If you find the areas where people need validation and satisfy them, you can lower the emotional barriers to reconciliation. If you are one of the aggrieved people, you may have to put your own feelings aside to get things started. If you can’t, find someone to mediate, either someone who’s known and respected by everyone involved, or a professional counselor or mediator (Protip: most lawyers suck at this). It’s messy, but sorting out the emotional layer of a dispute can get you back to a place where you can manage the conflict, play nice, and move on.

 

You need help.

Ok, you’re awesome and you know it, (at least when you’re in a good mood). It seems like people just know to ask you for help or information, because if you don’t know the answer, you know how to find it. Maybe it’s always been that way. Friends, family, classmates, coworkers, have looked to you to save them when they’ve thrown their hands up. Those people have done you a huge favor. They’ve trained you to be self-sufficient, which is critical if you want to do anything worth doing, including starting and running your own business. But, in your role as the perennial go-to person, you may have developed a blind spot to an important truth that, without correction, will dilute and limit your ability to be awesome and do big things. The truth is: you need help. Lots of it.

Self-sufficiency teaches you to indulge pride in your abilities. Appreciating the things you can do is fine, but when your identity is too tied up in what you are capable of, it can make asking for help when you need it feel like failure. That’s crap. You don’t have to prove the worth of your abilities in every challenge you meet. Give someone else an opportunity to shine. They may have a lot more practice at tackling that type of challenge than you do, and they’re probably happy to help. Benefit from their experience and find a way to compensate them for their effort.

It can be hard to rely on other people when you’re good at figuring things out for yourself. But it’s absolutely imperative if you want to make an impact. You are one person, with a sustainable max of twenty conscious hours in a day. Even if you have the capacity to master anything, it’s dreadfully inefficient to be your own resident expert on everything. You’ll end up spending more time finding information than applying it. That’s acceptable if you’re pursuing a hobby, but if you are trying to make something meaningful, you need to commit as much time as you can to creating value.

So go get help. You need it.