This week I spent much time reflecting and applying one of the concepts I learned about in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Conflict Resolution training. The training focused on healthy conflict (and how this is productive and allows for the sharing of ideas, and people and organizations to move forward), and high conflict (where forward progress ceases to happen due to binary thinking, emotional responses, and a failure to collaborate). The job of leadership is to recognize when people are in high-conflict situations, engage their rational, intellectual brains, and begin healthy conflict resolution.
One of the frames this training used to think about healthy vs. high conflict was a metaphor of an elephant (the emotional way of thinking) and a rider (the rational viewpoint). In healthy conflict, the elephant and the rider are in-synch and working together. In high-conflict situations, the elephant is running rampant, and the rider can not tame the elephant for productive conversation and decisions to happen. A rider with no elephant may be robotic and not be growing and learning because they are not challenged enough with the passion for pursuing difficult decisions with heart and empathy. My job, as a leader, is to hear concerns and emotional responses, and then find ways to activate reasoning to make conversations about concerns productive. Change is constant. In higher education right now, there are lots of changes—a change in student engagement due to COVID, changes in questioning the value of a degree, changes in media and marketing strategies to recruit and retain students, and changes in course scheduling/offerings—just to name a few. Within universities and schools within universities, there are operation changes, academic policy changes, faculty and staffing changes, and degree requirement changes that faculty are often faced with. Education should be about continuous improvement and constant learning, and both improvement and learning require change. With change often comes conflict, and this can be healthy conflict or high conflict depending on how change is approached and how it is reflected upon. In my leadership role, I am learning that people handle change differently. Some are resistant to any change and prefer the way things were before. Others approach change with skepticism, allowing change but questioning the purpose and reasoning for changes. Still, others readily move towards change with complete acceptance. If all three different ways to handle change can reach a state of healthy conflict, an organization will move forward as a stronger unit. If, however, one of the ways of handling change is not represented, then an organization can still move forward, but may not do so in a healthy way. I relate this to when I was pursuing my educational leadership doctorate, and the idea that you need people that are ready to jump on board with you, and it’s nice to be surrounded by the “yes” crowd, but there are other times when deep contemplative thought exercises are required for the right decision to be made—and for these types of decisions you need your resistors to poke holes in thinking and challenge you to think in different ways. Right now, as a leader, I think I have resistors, skeptics, and my “yes” crowd. I am still learning how to have all groups work together, assuming everyone’s intent is the same (a better learning experience for students). I am also still learning the best way to help individuals accept their emotional responses and move towards thinking rationally from multiple viewpoints and perspectives about change. Engaging others in reflective processing after a change occurs needs to start being a part of my practice, and I’m trying to figure out how often and where this best fits. Should reflective processing happen before, during, and after a change? Is it dependent on the type of change? Is reflective processing more productive at different points for specific types of changes?
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AuthorKristina Scott Archives
February 2023
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