Fight, Flight or Make It Right

Whenever you're in conflict, whenever you're facing strong differences of opinion or dealing with a challenging office bully, you usually have an additional level of conflict layered on top. This second conflict is an internal one, a personal decision about how to handle the situation, as you're torn between fighting it out, or withdrawing, or continuing to invest energy in an attempt to resolve the conflict.

The decision isn't simple, and often the angst over which approach to take produces as much pain as the conflict itself. Some factors to consider include:

1. Prior relationship. Are there cooperative bonds between you, a feeling of kinship, a prior history of cooperation and trust? The stronger the personal bonds, the more likely that you'll be able to find a constructive path forward. With no prior relationship, or a history of failure and misunderstandings, a pattern of escalating conflict is more likely.
2. The nature of the conflict. Is the conflict about things that are happening here and now? About a specific concrete issue? A here-now-this conflict is much easier to solve constructively than one about principles, history, ideologies, personalities, groups - about things that transcend time or space. When a dispute starts to focus on personalities or group members rather than specific actions, it quickly becomes unproductive. It's easier to deal with "the coffee pot is being left empty" than with "Bob is lazy, sloppy and selfish."
3. The size of the conflict. This is about beliefs, about how much we hope to gain, and how much we fear we might lose. We may be on opposite sides of an issue, or, we may be quite closely aligned on what we want yet have different ideas on how to get there. Either way, if the perceived differences are very large, the chance of things taking a constructive path is small.

4. The characteristics of the people in the conflict. Are you dealing with a soldier or a diplomat? Is your arch nemesis one who displays aggression, and values competition and victory above all? Or do they continually seek to understand, and clarify, and build relationships in the pursuit of mutual satisfaction? And, realizing that it takes two to tango, consider your own nature - are you aggresive and defensive, or do you seek partnership and collaboration? Can you bring different skills to this conflict that might minimize the effects of the others' personality and style?

In all cases, the core of the decision comes down to a comparison of value and effort. Is the value to be gained from successfully resolving this conflict worth the effort? If it is, do you fight or do you try to make it right, do you act the soldier or act the diplomat? Alternately, if the effort seems bigger than the perceived value, it makes perfect sense to consider withdrawing from the situation and focus your energies elsewhere.

Sometimes you need to stay and fight, sometimes you can work cooperatively together to make it right, and sometimes you just need to get the hell out of there.