February 12, 2024 Leadership, Opinion No comments
Quick thoughts on Conflict Resolution Styles
Hopefully a short post. As always opinions are mine.
I always figured dealing with conflict was something you just…did. You know, no need for fancy theories or structured approaches. Recently I was asked what my conflict resolution style is and how it matches to style of other people. So I did a bit of research, I mean, in a lazy way:
Andriy: > Give brief list of conflict resolution styles as bullet points:
Gemini: > Absolutely! Here’s a brief list of the most common conflict resolution styles:
- Accommodating: Prioritizing the needs of others over your own and seeking to maintain harmony.
- Avoiding: Sidestepping or postponing dealing with the conflict.
- Compromising: Finding a middle ground; each party gives up something to find a solution.
- Competing: Focused on winning and advancing your own needs above all else.
- Collaborating: Working together to find a solution that fully satisfies everyone’s needs as much as possible.
Andriy: > What’s the origin of these conflict resolution styles?
Gemini: > The primary origin of the framework for these conflict resolution styles comes from the work of Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann in the 1970s.
Ok. That kind of makes sense and I have a hunch I have read about those at some point in my life. Now I have an exercise for you, which I’m doing myself along the way as well. I promise it will get more interesting:
- Determine your own conflict resolution style by either taking a quiz online or by just thinking through those. I’m kind of combination of Collaborating, Compromizing, and a bit of Competing with complete intolerance to Avoiding style.
- Now try to determine the styles of people you have to deal with, say collegues at work or people in your personal life. For myself, I created kind of a map of few of the stakeholders at work.
- Now try to think of pros and cons of each of the styles and how they might impact you, other person, or what would be the best situation to use a style. Yeah, internet has lots of these, and I generated some stuff below, but it is more interesting to think about this while having context of yourself or others you know. Think of maybe 2-3 people, not to overwhelm yourself.
- Now the fun part: mix and match yourself to these people and recall how your interactions where with them. For myself I found that:
- We spend to much time in “analysis-paralysis” when another person is collaborating as much as I am.
- There is a lot more compromizing on my side when dealing with a competing or avoiding person, which is probably detremental for me and leaves a bit of resentment.
- Things get solved very quickly with an accomodating person, but then do I lose some of my credit with them just because they haven’t spoken?
- … and many more…
Andriy: > Add one pro, one con, and one recommendation under each conflict resolution style bullet point.
Gemini: > Absolutely! Here’s the list expanded with a pro, con, and recommendation for each style:
- Accommodating:
- Pro: Maintains relationships and reduces tension.
- Con: Can lead to neglecting your own needs.
- Recommendation: Use strategically in low-stakes situations or when preserving harmony is crucial.
- Avoiding:
- Pro: Allows time to cool down and gather your thoughts.
- Con: Doesn’t actually resolve the conflict, which can build resentment.
- Recommendation: Employ only as a temporary measure, ensuring you return to address the issue later.
- Compromising:
- Pro: Can lead to finding a quick and somewhat fair solution.
- Con: May limit creativity and not fully address everyone’s concerns.
- Recommendation: Best when finding a temporary fix or when issues are of moderate importance.
- Competing:
- Pro: Can be useful when immediate, decisive action is needed.
- Con: Damages relationships and may not lead to the best long-term solution.
- Recommendation: Reserve for emergencies or when power dynamics are heavily imbalanced.
- Collaborating:
- Pro: Leads to solutions that genuinely satisfy everyone involved.
- Con: Can be time-consuming and requires everyone to be fully invested.
- Recommendation: Aim for this style whenever possible, especially for high-stakes conflicts or building deep trust.
This self-invented exercise helped me realize I need to be more mindful of the situation when handling conflict. I should explore styles that feel less natural, like strategically using avoidance when emotions are high – as long as I remember to revisit the issue later or that occasionally I need to compromize less in favor of achieveing better quality.
What are your thoughts?
On Mentorship
October 4, 2023 Leadership, Opinion, Personal 2 comments
Ever watched a martial arts movie? There is always a Sensei behind the main character – usually a much more experienced, older, and wiser person willing to share their knowledge. Career, life, or software engineering isn’t exactly the same (maybe metaphorically?), but in the very same way, it is always a great idea to be inspired by and learn things from someone who has already been through the journey you are embarking on.
I don’t think I can give justice to the topic of mentorship holistically (go search the internet for that or ask Bard to generate bullet points for you), though I can share my own experiences. In part this is what mentorship is all about, see if there is anything for you below:
In my early career back in Ukraine I was lucky to get direct exposure to our clients from the USA as this helped with my English but I was also lucky to work with talented and highly energetic technical leader and a Microsoft MVP (most-valuable-professional). He was a lot of inspiration for me and probably was the reason for starting this blog and effectively jump-starting my career (tech blogging was very popular back in ~2010). Moving through my career I met many engineers who were highly skilled, had diverse technical backgrounds (think software for Ferrary F1, or for British military, or high frequency trading, or nuclear energy, etc). So I tried to challenge myself to learn from them. Very specifically, one of the annual goals I had in 2016 was “Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.” I might not have been exceptionally successful in achieving that particular goal but at least I learned to appreciate that others know cool things I don’t. Once I moved to work for big tech (Amazon & now Google) I normally tried to maintain “official” mentorship relationship(s) via internal mentorship programs/platforms.
My experience with “official” mentors so far has been mixed. As always, it all depends on the person and how two of us connect, but in all of the cases mentors have always provided something of a value to me. It was never-ever time wasted. At the very least, a mentor will help you get an outsider perspective on you situation and answer your questions from different perspective other than your manager might. There is no guarantee that you will agree to what they say or that their recommendations will be ideally applicable to you but it is your job to work through those and figure out the best you can get out additional point of view.
I worked with few of my mentors on my promotions. It is always great to get a mentor one or two levels higher as they have a lot more understanding of what it takes to get promoted to the next level and they might actually be part of promo review process for that level. In fact, I feel like I got a lot of information from one of my mentors I otherwise wouldn’t be able to get from my manager.
Other than promotions, the other area I worked on with my mentors was understanding of my next career moves. For instance, one good advise I got was to always get most out of any situation before making any radical decisions. At the same time, I also got “never moving fish is a dead fish” and other types of advise, all of which have had their impact on me.
Third area of engagmeent with my mentors was in building vision/strategy and presenting it to leadership. A very specific advise (and, maybe, a bit weird) was to actually visualize that I’m that leader I’m going to present the strategy to and try to understand what would that leader pay attention to when listening to the presentation. I was actually asked to role play during mentorship discussion, which felt really weird, but I wouldn’t have tried this if I didn’t have this “weird” mentor.
I know that I’ve been a bit of an inspiration for some engineers in the past and this realization was a great source of energy for myself as well as a motivation to self-improve further. Regretfully I’ve lost a lot of drive to be an example or an inspiration to others. I’ve also find it more difficult to be inspired by someone. Don’t take me wrong, not that there are not enough great people around (if anything, my collegues are one of the best and truly remarkable people), it is probably just me getting older and grumpy. In a way I miss those times but on a higher note writing this blog post helped me recall good times I had and motivate myself to be a more active individual in this regard. I currently have a mentee and keep in touch with few former collegues which whom I exchange career advise.
Looking back at my past mentorship relationships I can confidently say that they helped me. Go ahead and get yourself a mentor and if you have the opportunity, don’t hesitate and take a moment to teach someone something you know, chances are you might benefit in the process as well.
