# 26 - The 3 Conflict Styles You Need for Follow Through

Episode 26

Hey there, Friends. It's Rick Lewis once again with The Follow Through Formula Podcast. This is me following through on another day of talking about how you can take consistent action on what matters most. This is the place where you get daily inspiration to stay focused on what matters.  

I've got a story for you today. I've got a lot of them from my stage and street performing days. Many years ago, I was contacted from a city named Fort St. John's, a town in the far north of British Columbia where I was living at the time. I was contacted by the Fort St. John Oil Men's Association about an event that they were planning. What they needed was entertainment for five hundred association members, oilfield and rig workers. They had a winter celebration every year where all the oil field and rig workers would come together and have this banquet. That sounded great to me. A contract got signed, and before I knew it, I was bouncing way up north on a little prop plane to this small, snowy town where the sun shines for about six hours a day in the winter months because it's so far north.

My performance was scheduled to take place at a local high school on a stage that was at one end of the cafeteria/gymnasium after the group's celebration dinner. I was shown around backstage, which was behind an old red velvet curtain. I set up my show props, juggling props and unicycle and such.

I was standing behind this old red velvet curtain after dinner when the announcement was made that it was time for the evening's entertainment. I was getting excited, as I usually do before the start of a show. I was looking forward to entertaining these guys. It might have been 99% men in the room, and they were full of energy and excited and very vocally engage—until the emcee ask them to put their hands together for juggler Rick Lewis.

The curtains opened to complete silence and stares. No one had bothered to mention to me that the only form of entertainment that had been provided to these men in the previous twenty years of the banquet had involved a boombox and a person of the opposite sex trained in the slow and methodic removal of various pieces of clothing. When that curtain open, first there was silence and this long stare, and then the loud booing of the crowd filled the entire auditorium. I stood there as these five hundred men jeered, wondering what would happen next. But I didn't have to wonder for long, because from half way to the back of the hall, one of the men picked up a spoon from next to his plate and threw it up on the stage, where it landed with a ping on the wooden flooring where I was standing.

There was a pause, and a moment later several hundred more spoons were launched into the air like shrapnel from an exploding bomb. The spoons came clattering onto the stage, and then all the men went silent, waiting to see what I was going to do. This story is about conflict and how we manage conflict successfully in our lives so that we can actually follow through on what matters most. Our lives are full of moments that are like this. Obviously not this dramatic. But we're faced with a choice between crumbling under the pressure of a challenging circumstance or rising to the occasion with an appropriate response.

I remember my heart pounding, my mind racing, looking for some option, some way to proceed. I knew that if I panicked in the face of their taunt, I wouldn't have any chance of being able to proceed with the show. When it comes to conflict, I hate it. I hate any kind of conflict or confrontation, and my default mode is to avoid it at all costs. But that just wasn't an option here. I had no more than a few seconds to communicate what I had to offer them or lose the audience for good.

I stared out at the crowd as the tension was peaking. They were waiting to see how I was going to react to this big protest of theirs. I was young at this time, my show was quite acrobatic, so, channeling all the adrenaline that was coursing through my body, I suddenly sprang into the air and performed a full backflip. Have you ever seen anyone who's standing perfectly straight and still suddenly catapult their body into the air, do a back flip and land back on their feet? It's pretty surprising! And it's not an easy thing to do. It takes some concentration. But it wasn't the first time I had ever done a backflip, and I had so much adrenaline in my body that it was no problem at all for me to pull this off. I did the backflip, and then I stood there looking back at the crowd. Silence…. And then the entire room erupted into applause and cheers. I earned their respect in that moment and was able to successfully complete a performance that went wonderfully.

You can probably remember times in your life when the creative tension of a situation or a situation of great necessity drew forth the best that you have to offer, or maybe a way of working in that circumstance that isn't your ordinary default. When it comes to conflict, being able to switch to an alternative conflict style than the one we usually default to is very important. I'm going to talk about this more in a second.

But first I will complete my story. Every one of those oil field workers left there smiling, laughing, slapping each other on the back in a spirit of having had a great time. It’s a great feeling when dicey situations work out! But I had to stretch outside of a comfort zone in terms of a conflict style to facilitate that result.

Here's what you need to know about conflict styles. There are three basic conflict styles that almost everyone defaults to on a consistent basis, avoiding the other two, when conflict is present. The first one that a third of people default to is the avoider. That’s me. If conflict is present, I'm going find a way, if at all possible, to steer around it, pretend I don't see the tension in the air, pretend there's nothing that has to be worked out, and try to deny and move on and not even acknowledged that there's any potential for conflict going on.

The second style is the accommodator. This person will acknowledge the conflict but then respond in an adaptive way. The accommodator is the person who notices there's tension in the air. They'll often insert themselves in a situation where two other people are potentially in conflict, and they'll try to rescue the situation and make it all good between everybody. They want to make sure that there's communication and everyone hears each other, and no one gets too bent out of shape. The accommodator is the one who is going to tiptoe around an office tyrant, doing their best to make everything smooth in advance so nothing sets them off. The accommodator is also trying to avoid conflict, but they don't do it by denying or steering away from it. They do it by moving right into it and trying to make everything okay for everybody.

You can probably already guess what the third conflict style is. It is the competitor. This is the one who is going to win at all costs, no matter what. If we get into a challenging conversation or some kind of argument or disagreement, I may listen to you utter half a sentence, then I'm going to interrupt you and point out why you're not seeing things correctly. I will tell you why my point of view is superior or more accurate, why my decisions are the ones that we're going to go with because I know better. When there's a conflict situation, their whole MO is, “I'm gonna win here. I'm going to prevail. “

Avoiding, accommodating, and competing are the three styles. Take a moment and reflect on what your conflict style might be. What do you default to when there's conflict at play? Do you avoid it? Do you make everything nice and good between yourself and everybody else by accommodating? Or do you dominate the situation and compete to win?

None of these conflict styles are problematic. In fact, to follow through in life in circumstances that are challenging, we need access to all three off these conflicts styles. Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to just let something go and let it blow over. There are things that happen that likely will not come up again, or things are so small they aren’t worth fighting over. Many things are not worth getting bent out of shape about or making a fuss about. Sometimes the ability to avoid conflict is a strength. It's a tool you need.

The second conflict style, accommodating, is about being sensitive to other people's point of view, their perspective, their needs, and being willing to listen to other people before you make a decision or before you come down heavy on whatever you've already concluded is the right or best thing. In some circumstances accommodating is definitely warranted.

And then thirdly, we all need to have access to the ability to just stand up and hold the line. “Well, I've heard all points of view and I'm considering your opinion. But my final decision is this.” Or, “This is the way I see it. Here's what I need.” Or, as the leader of our department or our organization, “This is my call, and I'm sticking with it.”

Where the problem comes in, and where we can get derailed with the ability to follow through, is when we only have access to one style. If we're always avoiding and we can't stand up for our point of view, that's going to be a severe hindrance to us. Similarly, if we're always competing and always have to win or get our way, if we can't listen to other people and work on a team, or if we can't just let things go sometimes, then that's going to be an impediment to follow through as well. We need to be able to step into any one of these conflict styles as they are warranted and needed under different circumstances.  

I had the happy accident of all the adrenaline in my body supporting me to step into an alternative conflict style, which was to compete, or to win in that standoff between me and the audience by displaying an alpha type move up on stage and it worked. And life is like that. We've got to be able to flex and move and show up in a variety of ways if we want to be able to follow through. So that's my story for today about the three conflict styles you need to be able to access in order to follow through successfully. There you go. This has been Episode 26 of The Follow Through Formula Podcast. I'm Rick Lewis and I'll be back tomorrow