Walking the Talk: Collaborating and Thriving in an Adversarial Culture

By John P. Glaser

Robert Quinn
Deep Change (1996).

Years of cultural conditioning have trained us to respond to conflict from a "closed" perspective in which we are either competitive or self-protective against the possibility that others will exploit us. This habit can be problematical for transformational leaders who recognize that it is easier to get their own needs met when someone is not actively opposing their efforts.

It is possible to nurture habits of collaboration in a traditionally adversarial world by finding ways for the system and its key actors to foster an "open flow of information" that encourages more productive responses to conflict and a reframing of customary organizational interactions and functions. There are specific habits and behaviors that can be mindfully cultivated by organizational leaders in order to ensure that they are maximizing their ability to collaborate without worsening the risks of exploitation by those who are more inclined to compete.

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This is the stuff of sensational headlines and the fodder for "Monday morning quarterbacks." Everyone loves a great battle, with winners and losers–heroes and goats. These are the predicaments that test the mettle of a leader, and generally these inevitable, and often unanticipated "opportunities" make the difference between success and failure of his or her leadership. And as high as these stakes may be, many leaders allow the culture to program their responses to conflict, rather than following their own beliefs, values, and goals.

Many of us in our "enlightenment" understand these dynamics and resolve to behave differently. But it is the nature of our basic survival instincts as well as our culture that we have a tendency to behave defensively and competitively, even when we profess or aspire to do otherwise. This phenomenon has been characterized by Argyris (1993) as Model I behavior. He asserts that most leaders aspire to being capable learners and to having their organizations learn effectively. However, many of our systems and our actions serve to inhibit learning. We have the capacity to prevent many of the disasters that ultimately enfold us, and yet we often tend to overlook the data when more compelling organizational objectives come along. I have adapted the following "governing values" of that defensive Model I Behavior from Argyris, as well as from Hargrove (1995):

2. Maximize winning by advocating my positions.
3. Suppress negative feelings (avoid vulnerability).
4. Seek unilateral control of self and others.
5. Perform (avoid looking bad).

Argyris and Schon (1974) developed this concept as "mystery and mastery" because it has the fundamental effect of keeping information hidden in order to gain the greatest possible advantage. The trouble is, of course, that, when information is not accessible, collaboration or cooperation is less likely. We often model this phenomenon in our conflict workshops by asking participants to think of a conflict-laden situation from their own experience that didn’t go well and by asking them to describe the attitudes, behaviors, and characteristics that contributed to the negativity. The following descriptors are typical of what participants submit:

These "closed" qualities are characteristic of Model I behavior, and anyone is susceptible to them if they haven’t thoughtfully and methodically cultivated a different way of acting that promotes a greater degree of openness. In fact, those closed behaviors are habits that will die hard even when efforts are made to instill different values.

We found a great example of this in a public sector client that had asked us to support their labor relationship. They had been struggling with the effects of a dramatic restructuring in which they were striving to become a flatter and leaner, team-based organization in order to ensure their competitiveness in an industry that has been seeing some strong pressures to privatize. They quickly discovered that their labor relationship was inconsistent with the collaborative structures they had implemented, and the conflict in the labor relationship was threatening to undermine the entire organizational restructuring effort. Regular interactions between the union leadership and top management were often highly adversarial. The union was perceived by management as continuing to engage in provocative confrontations with management and its governing body, and management was seen by the union as continuing to cling to unilateral power. Even after a successful intervention in which the habits triggering those perceptions were acknowledged and commitments were put in place to ensure that partnering could become a reality, there has been some backsliding as each party wrestles with efforts to keep their behavioral agreements. Rather than describing the behavior openly and rationally when it occurs, both sides tend to operate in an action-reaction cycle that spins them back into those old power based habit patterns. It is not uncommon for those whose dominant conflict style is competitive, or "win-lose," with a high degree of concern for personal goals and minimal concern for the relationship, to seek to cultivate a strategy that is more "synergistic" or collaborative (Hall, 1969) and (Blake and Mouton, 1965). However, it takes great mindfulness to keep those old, grooved behaviors from taking over. The antidote is to focus on a set of strategies that by design are intended to maximize the focus on achieving personal goals, as well as maintaining the relationship. Those strategies seem counter-intuitive to anyone who has become habituated by our adversarial culture. They are based on an ability and willingness to open up to become vulnerable, and to develop strategies of inquiry that lead to discovery of effective ways of satisfying, not only your own interests, but those of "the other party" as well.

1. Creating shared meaning (relatedness).

2. Balancing advocacy and inquiry; informed choices.

3. Vigilant monitoring to detect and correct error.

4. Maintaining and inspiring joint commitment to the cause.

5. Learning (being good allows me to look good).

The focus of Model II theories is on the development of mechanisms for reflection and improvement. This concept has resonated through the work of Senge (1990) and other popular leadership writers and has evolved along with the disciplines of personal and organizational learning. Argyris describes the impact of Model I behavior as producing a "limited learning system." The effect is one in which individual and organizational development is impeded. When it does occur, it is generally single-loop learning (Figure 1), which is based on incremental improvement or doing the same thing better.

While any kind of continuous improvement is generally desirable, the development of a "learning system" occurs when there is a genuinely open flow of information with behaviors that ensure that there will be an authentic causal analysis of what can be improved in the system. This is the "double loop-learning" that is illustrated in Figure 1 below. Single loop learning focuses on doing the same thing better. Double loop learning involves reframing to consider whether a completely different approach will produce a more satisfactory outcome. For example, I used to spend many hours in single loop learning about how best to trap or otherwise attempt to rid my yard of the gophers who were eating our vegetables. Eventually I engaged in double loop learning to reframe the search to protecting the vegetable garden, rather than eliminating the gophers. I ended up installing underground fences which produced a better outcome that included leaving the gophers in peace. On an individual level, this necessarily involves cultivating an ability to learn to do new things, generally by creating shared meaning around the data (what’s happening or what already happened) in order to "reframe" the situation by rethinking the context that led to the outcomes that will be changed.

This requires implementing habits and practices in which the members of the organization get together regularly for reflection and learning. In these instances, the leader, who must fill the role of "learner in chief" for the organization, should model the expectation that everyone will expect to emerge from these sessions seeing the world differently. As Schrock-Shenk (1999) describes it, this means learning to move from "self absorption to recognition" of a broader perspective and more diverse set of organizational needs.

Another of our clients is a public-sector utility with an organizational culture that stresses the high task orientation of their engineering function. A new general manager recognized the need to attend to the people functions of the organization. Much time and effort was devoted to the development of a leadership vision that would have everyone who served in a leadership capacity focus on what the collective leadership should look like. Predictably, they have discovered that old habits die hard, and they have needed to engage in ongoing reflective conversations analyzing the extent to which they are making the desired transformations from an authoritarian to a collaborative culture. The general manager modeled the learning that was expected by asking the rest of the managers and supervisors: How am I doing in implementing our desired vision? What should I be doing differently? What support do you need in order to do your part in helping us to become the more collaborative organization that we aspire to be? He has also made it clear that he genuinely intends to act on the result, and that he expects similar questions to be asked of line employees throughout the organization.

In this context, there are several closely related strategies to ensure that a willingness to collaborate does not inadvertently cause the collaborator to be exploited. The first strategy is to attempt to demonstrate the mutual interdependence between the parties, that is showing the potential "exploiters" that their interests will be better met through collaboration, rather than competition. The second strategy is to know what each party will do if a collaborative agreement cannot be reached. Fisher and Ury (1981) dubbed this the "Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement" (BATNA), and it protects against accepting an unfavorable solution and passing up one that is better than what would happen if there were no agreement.

For example, a city was meeting with an important developer (who also operated the largest mall in town) and a major retail tenant to attempt to reach an agreement on a design dispute. The planning commission was unanimously opposed to the developer’s current plan, and the city council was likely to vote 3 to 2 on an appeal, with the outcome in doubt about which way that vote would fall. We started the meeting by naming this likely scenario of what would happen if our collaborative efforts failed, and the city staff acknowledged that the retailer could take the desirable project and it’s revenues to a nearby city. We also discussed the likelihood that the fates of the developer and the city would be inextricably linked regardless of the outcome of this issue, and that it would be a far more efficient and effective process if we could decide together how to resolve the dispute.

Both the developer and the tenant were feeling the pressure of their own planning and construction timelines, and they were tempted to end the negotiations on the design and to take their considerable economic and political clout directly to the city council. But they agreed that their longer-term relationship interests were, in fact, better met by continuing to work with staff, and an outcome was reached that was acceptable to everyone. The same openness and rationality that can make someone feel weak or vulnerable can also serve as a strength to keep power players in the conversation and working toward collaborative outcomes.

A third technique for protecting against untrustworthy behavior is to negotiate compliance-prone agreements with built-in accountability. We often hesitate to ask for assurances out of fear that a request for protection in an agreement undermines trust. In fact, assurances can actually build the trust because they ensure that agreements will be kept. That’s the reason that banks expect their loans to be secured with real property. Similarly, in negotiating a landmark labor-management agreement in an organization that had been characterized by a mistrustful labor relationship over time, we built specific commitments into the agreement on when the parties would meet to renegotiate if the projections or assumptions that drove the agreement proved to be inaccurate. This ensured that neither party nor their skeptical constituencies needed to worry about whether the others would keep the spirit of the pact and went a long way to improve the trust.

This provides a critical insight for anyone who aspires to become more collaborative and less adversarial in his or her approach to conflict and communication. This involves mindfully responding to conflict and positionalism in oneself or others by thoughtfully inquiring into the nature of the interests that are motivating each of the parties to the issue and thoughtfully analyzing any positions to discover the interests that lie beneath. A reflective analysis of the interests or underlying motivations should lead like a red carpet to a set of options that show promise of elegantly, or at least acceptably, meeting all of the needs.

This means cultivating a personal approach to conflict that allows us to remain open and vulnerable, despite the fact that the natural, genetically transmitted response would otherwise bring us to fight or to flee. This involves developing mindful habits that perform the function of keeping us rational, or maintaining a detached distance when we’re communicating in situations that would otherwise be likely to pull us into an adversarial spiral.

The process of inquiry reflects a conscious commitment to actively seek out the data that enables the parties in conflict to create shared meaning rather than to advocate positions based on differing perspectives and assumptions about the nature of the world. It also allows individuals to engage in double-loop learning in order to reframe the conflict in a way that causes the "reframer" to approach the conflict more productively. Individuals who tend to have a high task/low people focus need to cultivate positive inquiry behaviors that will provide the information that is needed for effective learning. This can involve retraining your ear to listen more deeply to conflict for a different kind of meaning, just as it is possible to learn to listen to a certain kind of music, for example jazz, classical, or rock and roll with the finely tuned ear of an expert. Figure 3 below summarizes what inquiry behaviors look like from both positional and collaborative perspectives.

This means that when we most feel like defecting from an interaction and fighting (or fleeing) we most need to stay in the conversation and dig (or inquire) for the perspective of our apparent antagonists. When I am asked to mediate or assist in workplace conflicts, my primary task is to create a "safe" container that de-escalates the situation enough that people can stay in the conversation and absorb one another’s perspective without defensiveness or blame. Sometimes that involves specialized ground rules. In one case, we had a self-professed "hothead," who admitted that he had a tendency to stomp off in anger when the group was in conflict. We created a ground rule that stipulated that anyone could get up and leave the room to "cool off," but everyone would pledge to come back to the group until the situation was resolved. He never needed to leave, but the ground rule gave him the safety net he needed to commit to the conversation.

John P. Glaser, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership at the University of La Verne, and is senior partner in Glaser and Associates, an organizational consulting firm focusing on all aspects of workplace relationships. John has worked with a wide variety of organizations throughout the United States and Canada. His degrees include a B.A. from Stanford University, an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an Ed.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Glaser can be contacted by email at jandcglaser@compuserve.com or jpglaser@prodigy.net