Defence worst form of attack

The key to minimising conflict in the workplace and maximising productivity is to not become defensive, says Jim Tamm, former California judge and author of Radical Collaboration.

"The absolute single most important thing that an individual can do to be more effective when they're trying to either build relationships or resolve conflict is to stay non-defensive," he says.

Tamm has worked with the US space agency, NASA, and the United Nations on conflict resolution and says our defensiveness is an unconscious behaviour which must be overcome.

"People are realising how crucial it is that they be skilful in building collaboration because it's just impossible to thrive today if you don't have good collaborative relationship skills."

Tamm is on a speaking tour of New Zealand and says labour-focussed employment laws make it even more imperative to resolve conflict in the workplace.

"If you've got someone that's not able to do what they're suppose to be doing and they can't get along with other people and you can't get rid of them then you're stuck," says Tamm. "It certainly exacerbates the dysfunctional relationships."

The small size of most New Zealand workplaces means that everybody has to meet a lot of needs from a lot of different people and conflict with employees is that much more destructive.

"If you've only got 10 people in your organisation, if you shuffle somebody off to the side because they are not good at getting along with other people, you've lost 10 per cent of your workforce."

Tamm says that rather than shuffle them off to the side, you need to deal with the relationship issues. Organisations which deal with issues in a collaborative and healthy manner he calls 'green zone'. The others are 'red zone'.

"A 'red zone' organisation has a much more caustic, combative, adversarial, hostile type of working relationships. Organisations that don't have collaborative capital are not nearly as successful."

In order to navigate through conflict and build rather than detract from the working relationships, Tamm says it is paramount to fight defensiveness.

"When we get defensive, we're not defending ourselves from other people. That's what most people think we're doing. What in fact we're doing is we're defending ourselves from painful feelings that are inside of us that we don't want to feel."

He says these fears are based around our own feelings about our significance, competence and likeability.

"Say somebody feels that they're not very significant or competent and that's painful for them to feel that way so they would behave in a way that lets them not feel that. So they might get critical of other people so they don't have to focus on themselves."

Other defence mechanisms might be to shut down emotionally and go numb or become confused. Tamm says we must identify our own symptoms of defensiveness and overcome it.

"Create an early warning system that tips them off when they're getting defensive and then come up with an action plan. The early warning system is basically understanding what their behaviour is when they get defensive."

He says most of us are not skilful enough or aware enough to realise the underlying fear that we're trying to avoid but we can recognise the defensive behaviour.

"If I know that one of my signs of defensiveness is to always want to be right or flood other people with information and I'm in conversation with Bob and I notice that I've gone on for 10 minutes now and I'm just hammering him to say he's wrong and I'm right and I keep burying him with information, the alarm bells ought to go off in my head."

Tamm says that most labour disputes are not actually about employment issues but rather relationship issues. Our defensive mechanisms are often to blame.

"What you have is a whole bunch of people who are feeling very combative and trying to beat each other rather than focussing on getting their underlying interests met."

Tamm offers five skills to help people not only stay out of employment court but create smooth running organisations. They are collaborative intention, truthfulness, self-accountability, self-awareness and interest-based problem solving and negotiating.

Collaborative intention means that we focus on mutual gains and give each other mutual support to stay in the 'green zone'.

"Most of us say we want to be very collaborative but then as soon as we start feeling vulnerable we start feeling defensive and we get rigid in our thinking and we become lousy problem solvers."

The second skill is truthfulness.

"The amount of trust in an organisation is often directly related to the amount of truth that's being told."

Tamm says to create an atmosphere where people feel safe enough to tell you the truth.

"You have to be able to tell the king that he's not wearing any clothes."

Self-accountability means that we are accountable for the choices we make whether they are through action or non-action.

"I've had so many people come before me as a judge saying: 'well, your honour, they just didn't give me any choice. They made me do it.' That's just utter nonsense. Most of us don't have a gun to our head."

We are accountable for both the intended and unintended consequences of our action or non-action. Tamm says there is no get-out-of-jail-free card.

"A lot of people think that if something doesn't turn out the way they intended it to then they shouldn't be held responsible for it. Other people judge us by our behaviours even though we judge ourselves by our intentions."

Tamm says our self-awareness must be utilised to detect our own defensiveness.

"Defensiveness is pretty much a human condition. I've seen it at every level of the organisation. It is an absolute poison pill to effective working relationships."

In order to avoid a negative spiral, he says we must recognise our own defensiveness quickly and put in place a very specific action plan to deal with it.

"Any relationship, even really good ones, if it has any liveliness to it, it's going to have some conflict in it," says Tamm.

"So, if you're not skilful in solving problems, there is going to be a drag on the relationship which makes things worse."

Lowering defences

* Increase awareness. Identify how you behave when you are becoming defensive.

* Come up with an action plan. Admit your defensiveness. Take a walk, take deep breaths, splash some water on your face and slow down physiology.

* Pay attention to negative self-talk. Turn that into positive self-talk.

* Moderate defensive behaviour. Find out what your particular signs of defensiveness are, such as demanding to be right, and come up with moderating behaviour.