Conflict resolution is one of the elements of leadership that fly under the radar. If a leader is good at this then they can engage with conflict early before patterns escalate and get set. Solutions may be strategic or structural but as the issues can range from conflict within the individual, between two individuals, within a team, or across multiple teams this means the solutions scale from micro to macro. There can be smaller and smaller microscopic impulses within one person that conflict and there are contemporary global issues causing conflict across the world. Human technology now takes objects and people into space and there are intentions yet to be realised of returning to the moon and establishing settlements on mars. What will interplanetary conflict resolution look like? Or indeed as humanities empire spreads across our solar system or even further afield. We have seen the rise and fall of empires and civilisations many times before and the attendant descent into conflict that results from this cycle.
These issues are going to be mostly in the future as the number of people who have traveled to outer space is still very small so I will also reflect on my own personal experiences of leadership and conflict.
Leadership and conflict resolution are affected by the structure one is participating in as well as the personal qualities of the individuals involved.
In my professional role I am part of a team managing just under 400 volunteers while I myself am managed within a corporate structure containing 175 roles. In my personal life I have experience of volunteering within both community and professional committees as well as in transformational festivals in structures that resemble anarcho-syndicalism.
The professional structure I work within has a high premium on being fluent in storytelling and oral ability. Often I will preemptively banter with groups of volunteers rather than let them lead the conversation due to experiences early in my volunteer management experience of interactions getting out of hands and unhealthy conflict resulting. Another tactic I use when something has gone wrong is to declare that there appears to have been some miscommunication. The intention of this is to remove responsibility from any one individual and provide a platform to begin the communication again, hopefully more effectively. Within the volunteer committees I’ve experienced issues seem to arise mostly from the low level of resources versus the vision of what we would like to achieve. Success in this realm has been from dividing up responsibilities as evenly as possible across the group and ensuring that at least 3 people will work together on the organisation of any one event. When there have been issues I have had success in identifying the most experienced, connected, and open individual on the team which has helped me in moving forward in very short time frames to secure resources from above our committee to avoid disaster.
Within the transformation festival context where I was also engaging in volunteer management responsibilities the issues we faced were once again resourcing and also the context of everyone being a volunteer and then dealing with a person who arrived for their volunteer shift but was too drunk to be able to meet the minimum standards of their responsibilities. The decision to send him away from his shift was the correct one but fraught within the festival context.
My style is focused on gathering as much contextual information as possible and then removing the onus on the source of the conflict to instead look at the issue as structural that we can all play a part in resolving. My listening skills while always being further developed are already quite strong. My ability to combine multiple concepts into short statements or questions of great clarity is one of my individual strengths. One of my toolbox questions when I sense someone is being overwhelmed in the way they are speaking is to seek the answer to the question “What would you like to achieve?” which then allows me to understand if they want to move forward in a particular direction, if there has been a miscommunication, or if they just want listening.
What I would like to work on is knowing when my ability to generate a lot of ideas is useful and when it should be held in check. A better understanding of the norms of corporate, federal, and educational institution structures would be helpful as previous to the last 5 years, in which I experienced all three, I exclusively worked for not for profit youth arts organisations or as a sole trader but I imagine this will mostly come from further experience rather than formal study.