Peg Pickering Everywhere One Goes

Peg Pickering

Everywhere one goes these days, stress is mounting. Even in the grocery store parking lot, people get out of their cars and start yelling at each other because they just went for the same parking place. It is bad enough when such confrontations occur by a shopping center, much worse when happening at work. Unfortunately, conflict is a major problem here, as well. By some estimates, managing conflict consumes between 30% and 40% of a manager's time. Since they spend so much time dealing with conflict, they need to become competent conflict managers. Conflict is also becoming more complex as organizations become diverse and global. For instance, 85% of the newest entrants in the American workforce come from groups external to the traditional economic pools. Likewise, in Asia Pacific, Australia follows only Israel and the OPEC Arab region in its population's ethnic diversity. Understanding and managing diversity is therefore becoming critical to the success of modern organizations. Unless they recently had a course in conflict management in school or their company sent them for training, many managers are not equipped to deal with such conflict and need support in this area. In her book Managing Conflict, Peg Pickering promises to provide the "critical concepts and principles to work in your life," by reversing such internal pressures and making conflict a positive, rather than a negative behavior. The important thing to remember, stresses Pickering, is that conflict need not be negative. In fact, it can be used for positive purposes only if both parties keep control of their end of the situation. Then benefits gained can include: 1) Increased motivation 2) Enhanced problem/solution identification; 3) Group cohesiveness; 4) Reality adjustment; 5) Increased knowledge/skill; 6)Enhanced creativity and 7) Contribution to goal attainment and incentive for growth.

In order to transform the negative use of conflict into the positive, Pickering develops and explains five important competencies: 1. Understand the critical ingredients for collaborative thinking; 2. Align responsibilities to the needs of others; 3. Build into daily interactions the practices necessary for support; 4. Have conflict resolution skills and negotiation skills to resolve various types of challenges and 5. Anger is always negative and destructive. There are four success factors to begin developing these personal tools and systems and dealing with tensions and pressures: Personal responsibility for one's own learning and skill development; Flexibility of style; Ability to listen and provide feedback on what is heard; and a positive attitude toward change.

Pickering then proceeds to discuss the types of conflicts (internal, interpersonal, retaliate, dominate, isolate and cooperate); ways to identify the conflict stages (everyday concerns and disputes, more significant challenges, and overt battles; conflict management styles (collaboration, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising) and what personality traits influence them; constructive management style; importance of communication; emotional aspect; the intervention team and, for good measure, how to deal with an angry customer.

In summary of the 115 pages, there are good and bad approaches to solving conflict in an organization. Pursuing the wrong method or ignoring the matter (if it is "a more significant challenge), can make it escalate and cause considerable problems in a department or even for the company as a whole. Therefore, the manager has to recognize how he or she is presently addressing such issues and change to a more advantageous approach if necessary.

As Pickering states, "Whether the issue is boardroom planning or conflict on the production line, to be an effective conflict manager, you must develop a deliberate decision-making process around company goals." The most effective way of handling conflict is for the manager to set an open and honest climate for discussion, where the participants feel that they are sharing equally. The manager must also actively listen to words and body language, take time to step back and review the problem, separate fact from opinion, focus on the problem not the people involved to make sure there is no bias, determine what are the causes of the conflict, and lead from strength instead of taking a passive, manipulative or aggressive approach.

SHAPE

These three pages above summarized and essentially said all that was in the book. It is a sad situation to think that this book is on a second printing. If managers are using this type of formulaic, "self-help," book to help them, at what level are our organizations? I would hope that just by looking at what is written above, that a typical manager could fill in the words and know exactly what Pickering was expressing. For example, should a manager be domineering when solving a conflict? Yet, perhaps I give managers too much credit. Maybe they need something like this to analyze their conflict management style; they will not do it on their own. At the end of each chapter, Pickering offers a personal survey for the reader to fill out about him/herself. I also had to show one of the "graphics," to convey the complexity of this book.

All that I could find out about Pickering was a blurb on the back page that said she is a consultant who runs workshops around the United States. I thought that this may be a vanity press, but I am wrong. Career Press, the publisher, was founded in 1985 as a niche publisher of targeted career directories. It boasts an active, strong-selling backlist of nearly 300 titles spanning careers, personal finance, business management, study skills, and leisure pursuits and its philosophy is to publish the highest-quality books on topics most needed in the marketplace, written by established, credentialed, media-savvy professionals... And then promote and publicize them full force. The publicizing it does: Pickering's book is listed with numerous book publishing companies.

As Career Press notes, such easy-to-read books are helpful to people who want to make positive changes. From a positive standpoint, Pickering's book does capture the important elements of conflict management, so if someone wants a five-minute quick read overview, here it is.

I went to Amazon and did a search for "conflict management" and found that Pickering's book is one of many of these self-help, formula-type books on the topic. Even the one by Harvard Business Review is written in this very informal and brief way. None of these appear to give good examples (Pickering gives none) of the type of difficult conflicts that can occur in a work situation. Reading about what to do is one thing, but actually applying those skills is another. Examples are always helpful for readers.