Skills for Conflict Managers

Short course in conflict management: basic skills
Advanced abilities and tactics in conflict management
Advanced conflict assessment tools

Advanced Abilities and Tactics for Conflict Management

Abilities. An "advanced" list of abilities required for collaborative negotiation may appear daunting. Refining old skills and learning new ones is a life-long endeavor.

• Ability to listen

• Ability to distinguish between interests and positions

• Ability to elicit interests from others

• Ability to convey cooperative expectations

• Ability to model cooperative behaviors

• Ability to state and explain one's own needs and expectations

• Ability to be open to creative solutions

• Ability to create a pool of possible solutions

• Ability to integrate options for solutions

• Ability to negatively reinforce unnecessary competition

• Ability to forgive and permit others to save face

• Ability to differentiate among types of issues and to match responses to issues

• Ability to set criteria for solutions

• Ability to deal with difficult people

• Ability to analyze the problem from the other’s perspective

• Ability to check perceptions without unilaterally acting on one’s own beliefs

• Ability to differentiate emotional from substantive issues

• Ability to adapt to the style of other disputants

• Ability to act "as if" the other party is negotiating collaboratively

Tactics. Some specific tactics related to the abilities listed above include:

• Listen in order to defuse emotion

• Listen for facts

• Paraphrase and validate emotions

• Paraphrase substantive content

• Ask "How" and "What" questions

• Make "I" statements

• Know one's own BATNA

• State needs clearly

• Ignore positions and negative attacks

• Identify interests

• Reframe statements into mutually solvable issues

• Identify issues

• Identify commonalities

• Establish objective criteria for solutions

• Establish ground rules for negotiation

• Set the agenda for formal negotiation

• Brainstorm or use other strategies to generate options