Non-Violent Approaches to Conflict Resolution Dr. Joby Taylor

Conflict Resolution -- Non-Violent Approaches

Today Dr. Joby Taylor was the guest speaker at a well-publicized seminar for human relations professionals; the topic for today was how to help solve conflicts in the workplace. Taylor was raised in Oklahoma in a town with eight Native American Nations, where conflict interfered with the normal workings of the community on many occasions. As a young man he set his sights on better ways to solve conflicts. Taylor has Peace Corps experience in Africa and he has worked for many years with the Shriver Center's "Shriver Peaceworker Program." Taylor's topic in today's seminar: "Peace is not just an absence of war."

Reaction to Taylor's Speech

In my life the topic of peace has always related to the conclusion of a war in some faraway place. There was the end of World War II that I studied in high school -- which ended in Europe when the Germans finally surrendered and in Japan when America dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Other wars have come and gone and "peace" was supposedly the end result.

While Taylor defined peace in his speech as the "presence and pursuit of wholeness and happiness" he cautioned that peace is not an embrace of rich idealism and it is not "pie-in-the-sky" either. Lofty phrases and smiles -- and bumper stickers with white doves -- won't achieve anything of substance, he insisted. Peace is much deeper than that. To begin with, achieving a sense of peace means arriving at an acceptance that to truly commit to change one must have the courage to try something bold in one's life and professional position.

The thing that a good listener hears when Taylor is speaking -- even though he may not utter the exact words -- is that peace begins in one's heart. The skill required to bring peace into the heart is being able to push away negative thoughts and being able to forgive someone for something rude that was done. The very act of forgiveness is a plus for one's mental health.

Human relations departments should teach employees that each of us have the potential to "approach conflicts thoughtfully" and become problem solvers, he explained. Yes, a company or a school or an agency does need interventions from time to time. Professional mediators are often called in to resolve union issues with management. But building a sense of peace in one's community, on a job site, in a school, means bridging serious differences between cultures, ethnicities, socioeconomic experiences and genders too.

Using Taylor's formula, a human relations leader in a big corporation could help employees achieve a sense of peace by helping diverse individuals learn to communicate. Take a situation in which there is tension between two cultures in the customer service department. One of the cultures represented is Asian (two employees are from Cambodia and one from Vietnam), and the other culture in this unit is African-American (two women and one man from Boston). Apparently there have not been any loud flare-ups or confrontations, but there is a constant sense of tension in this department. There has been a shooting in the community that got a lot of publicity and added to the workplace tension: a Laotian teenager is accused of shooting a young African-American girl in a drive-by attack, and it has added to the tension in the workplace between Asians and African-Americans.