5 Ways to Breathe Life into Workplace Conflicts: People are People

One of my better accidental discoveries as a parent was that sometimes things went better with my child if, in the midst of a situation that looked to be spiraling out of control, I took a deep breath and tried for just one second to think of things I hadn’t already been thinking.   (Had one of us forgotten to eat?  Had something nasty from yesterday leaked into today?  Was there something hiding below the surface that was expressing itself badly?)  Sometimes that intake of breath was more prayer than anything else–an invitation to the Spirit to come and help out a mama and her baby before one of them said or did something truly stupid.

This turns out to be a lovely way to deal with workplace situations that look to be spiraling out of control, too.  In the space of a single deep breath, all sorts of life can breathe itself into the situation.  Options suddenly appear out of nowhere, energy to smile suddenly generates itself, and generous words to speak suddenly crash in on one.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to suggest five thoughts it might be useful to think in such moments: five ways of reframing a situation that take no more time than a deep breath and that nonetheless create a mental space for solutions to present themselves.

Just after I was invited to begin this blog, I started asking all my friends and relatives about workplace ethics issues they’d encountered.  What sorts of things would they want help thinking through, if they had their own personal professional ethicist in their pocket?

I didn’t have any particular expectations, but that didn’t stop me from being surprised at what my friends and family answered: they overwhelmingly responded with interpersonal difficulties at work.  The situations they described hinged not on conflicting moral goods or conflicting interpretations of laws or policies or even conflicting laws or policies.

They hinged on conflicts with people.

This shouldn’t have been all that surprising to me.  Think about the first thing you say about your day when you come home after work.  You arrive at home, and your roommate or your parent or your spouse or your child asks, “How was your day?”

Okay, actually, think about the second thing, after that initial gratuitous one-word offering.  (“Fine.” “Terrible.” “Great.” “Long.”)  When you start actually talking about your day, how often do you talk about a math problem or a research hurdle or new office furniture, and how often do you start talking about an interaction with a person?

And it shouldn’t have been all that surprising that interpersonal conflicts constitute the majority of troubling situations at work, because the easiest thing in the world to forget is that the people with whom you and I work are, in fact, people.

That is to say, they are persons, with children and parents and spouses and high-minded ideals and minds in the gutter and nice shoes and bad teeth and strong backs and pre-cancerous lymph nodes and wives that are leaving them and ex-boyfriends that are getting out of jail and children who are running Olympic qualifiers next weekend and children who, if they’re very lucky, might learn to walk some day.

While this sounds too spectacularly obvious to need saying, it seems to need saying all the same: workplace interactions that preserve the integrity and dignity of the persons involved tend to go way, way better than those that don’t.

Workplace interactions that replace persons with production units or job-performing-robots tend to go badly.

Workplace interactions that replace persons with walking embodiments of cultural or political conflicts tend to go badly.

Workplace interactions that replace persons with the categories to which they may or may not belong or with categories that don’t even exist tend to go badly.

Workplace interactions that replace persons with sabotage engines pre-programmed to repeat every negative workplace interaction I’ve ever had tend to go badly.

Workplace interactions that replace persons with automatons who mindlessly and yet somehow culpably act the way I expect them to tend to go badly.

The easiest thing in the world, in the midst of a conflict with a person, is to call to mind all the negative interactions you’ve had with that person, or to relive all the anxious moments this person caused you, or mentally to heap on that person all the insults someone “like that” (whatever “that” you may come up with) deserves.  It is amazing how much mental time and energy you can expend intentionally generating and perpetuating conflict by thinking about everything except the personhood of the person in front of you.

What if, in the space of a single deep breath, you could radically change the outcome of the conflict simply by reminding yourself, “I am dealing with a person (or with people) here”?