Lecture

We shouldn’t have been surprised. He had done it several times before. In fact, less than forty-eight hours before at a church elders’ meeting on Saturday night, Stan had been on the losing side of a vote. It seemed clear to the rest of us. He was not the type to shout or kick over a chair and slam the door while leaving. No, Stan used a more effective tactic. He merely dropped into deadpan silence for the rest of the meeting leaving us to guess what would happen next. By this time, all challenge had been taken out of that guesswork, because as expected, Stan delivered his written resignation from the board to the church office first thing Monday morning: terse, cold, just the right touch of self-pity for so frequently finding himself in the minority. The document finds its way into the file with those which had come before. We’re talking about leadership as conflict management or the leader as conflict manager.

Let me stay with my story here just putting it in context here in lecture number 10. It was my duty as pastor to follow through, to invent some redemptive solution to keep Stan in the family and convince him to retract his resignation. This went on for several years until finally when Stan’s name would have been scheduled to appear on a congregational ballot to continue his seat on the board, the nominating committee, quite aware of the problem, prayerfully deleted his name. You can guess what happened next. At the congregational meeting, someone offered the nomination from the floor, and Stan was back on the ballot. But he wasn’t elected. And when the secretary announced the results, he and his wife quietly got up, left the building, and left the church.

This vignette hardly described what we commonly think of when we hear the word conflict. We see two faces scarcely twelve inches apart, simultaneously shouting at the top of their lungs, neither listening to the other. Or perhaps we see church members at a congregational meeting rising to threaten some kind of pullout if a certain pastor isn’t hired or fired or in some other way dealt with for what they perceive to be adequate reasons. Paul said it well in 1 Corinthians 11:18. “I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you. And to some extent, I believe it.”

William Willimon, the very popular dean of the chapel at Duke University, reminds us that the word conflict comes from the Latin fligere, meaning literally “to strike together.” Whenever two or more people pursue mutually exclusive goals or whenever one person’s needs collide with another’s, conflict results. If there were no conflict or if there were no effort among humans to fulfill ideas, goals, or desires, there would be no conflict.

Let’s recognize that conflict and disagreement are not the same. Indeed, Stan did disagree with the other members of the board, but the situation could easily have been handled without any degree of conflict. Yet in the American Civil War, teenage farm boys on both sides killed each other without any personal disagreement and probably very little understanding of the issues at stake. Conflict is perhaps better described than defined. Usually it includes other values and ideas, or perhaps power and resources are involved. One thing is clear in Willimon’s description which I read just a moment ago: two or more people must be involved to have conflict. We’re not dealing here with our own intrapersonal conflicts.

What are some leadership assumptions about conflict? This is an important place to start. My research for this study surfaced an amazing discovery. Very few leadership books, secular or Christian, have adequately dealt with the subject of conflict management. Even my own Feeding and Leading, to which I’ve referred frequently in this study, leaves the subject virtually untouched. I attempted to atone for that by collaborating with a friend and colleague, Sam Canine, in producing Communication and Conflict Management. That’s a course in the ITS series which you have seen and maybe have even taken, and the title of a book published by Broadman Press in 1992. As our title indicates, Sam and I see the issues of communication and conflict management as inseparably related. Conflicts are rarely isolated. They arise from some kind of previous episode which may or may not have been connected with the same person or issue. Furthermore, the conflict episode includes at least three dimensions which form a grid or process for understanding the present conflict: input, throughput, and output. In other words, what comes before, what’s going on now, and what will result. So the extent of communication, maybe I should say the context of communication, forms an assumption regarding conflict management. We could talk about a multitude of assumptions, but I want to narrow our focus on this chapter or in this study to just five.

First, conflict is inevitable where people are interested and involved. That’s sort of what Willimon was getting at a moment ago. If you’d ask a member of a Young Life staff whether she wants team leaders in her arena of ministry to be interested and involved, she would probably doubt the sincerity of your question. Of course! Every Christian leader wants people to be interested and involved. Yet many Christian leaders fear conflict because they view it from a negative perspective. Now let me turn that axiom around. We could say when leaders do not see conflict in an organization, they have reason to doubt that people are seriously concerned about the organization’s effectiveness. In my leadership classes, some students are astounded when I tell them they don’t need to fear conflict because it’s inevitable. In other words, fearing it won’t help. It’s going to come one way or another.

A second assumption is that conflict accelerates as change accelerates. Change throws people off stride. It confuses them. It makes them nervous. They wonder whether the organization is headed in the right direction. And in a day like ours when institutional loyalty flows at a very low ebb, many organizational members are suspicious under normal circumstances. They get very jumpy when change accelerates. In a helpful booklet Van Auken even links change and conflict in the title of his chapter on that subject and points out the causes of team conflict. He says

One primary source of interpersonal or team conflict is lack of goal assimilation. The seeds of conflict are sown whenever team members fail to internalize ministry goals and own them. In the absence of shared goals, team members have little basis for consensus and compromise. The second major source of team conflict stems from lack of sub-optimization: the team’s unwillingness to make sacrifices on behalf of the larger organization. When team members are willing to put the organization’s needs ahead of team needs, most conflicts can be diffused.

We might say, when they are willing to put team needs ahead of individual needs, it’s an even better situation yet. Conflict is inevitable. Conflict accelerates as change accelerates. Conflict is not inherently destructive or constructive. Sometimes leaders label people unspiritual or abnormal when conflict results, and on rare occasions, that may be true. Nevertheless, when such an attitude prevails in leadership, people in conflict tend to perceive themselves as abnormal or out of order, a posture which does not lend itself toward conflict resolution.

We already know that conflict is inevitable and that it can be linked to some announcement of change, so we should be prepared to recognize that positive results can occur when two people interested in the ministry we lead have strongly differing viewpoints on an important issue.

Warren Bennis claims it’s often just a matter of perception, the way people look at things. People see things differently, and therefore, they react differently. And we wonder why they don’t see them the same way, or more often we wonder why they don’t see them as we do. The climate of the organization, set well before specific conflicts emerge, makes possible or impossible, facilitates or hinders the resolving of conflict. That’s something we need to recognize and act upon. Let’s get back to Stan. If Stan had a less dismal history of interacting negatively and reacting badly, his disagreements on the board could have had a constructive result. But even now I must admit that we learned a great deal about how to handle disgruntled church leaders, although at the time it didn’t seem like much of a positive outcome.

Another assumption is that conflict is best handled by diplomacy and negotiation. Here we must bring up the term confrontation. It should be obvious that neither diplomacy nor negotiation imply walking away from the problem nor pretending that it does not exist. Conflict resolution experts have come up with the least effective and the most effective patterns for handling conflict. And you can see how they each place negotiation either early or late in the process. Now listen, the least effective pattern is confronting, forcing, withdrawal, smoothing, and compromise. The most effective is confronting, smoothing, compromise, forcing, and withdrawal. Whether or not one agrees with either pattern, one thing seems clear. Confrontation has to take place early in the game. We affirm the person, but we confront the issue.

Another assumption is that conflict resolution can be taught. How often this question arises and how common is the answer. Leadership is learned behavior. Creativity is learned behavior. Conflict resolution is learned behavior. The second two are simply subcategories of the first, but they’re no less important. Remember Henry Kissinger? He offers us an international model. Sent by several presidents to several countries of the world over the past twenty or tenty-five years, Kissinger employs processes of diplomacy and mediation to resolve conflicts. Jimmy Carter would be another example of that. Whether they learned this from books or whether Kissinger learned it in faculty meetings at Harvard, I can only guess. But he certainly did learn it, because conflict resolution can be taught.

Let’s move on to talk about leadership strategies for handling conflict. I’ll stay with my story. Let’s get back to Monday morning, the day my secretary called one more time about Stan’s resignation. As I faced this conflict situation, remember my basic assumptions, the next thing I have to do is to employ a leadership strategy which diffuses the current crisis so that I can mediate a satisfactory solution. One thing I know for sure, I must do nothing that escalates the problem. Now how might I escalate the problem? I could label Stan a quitter, call him a loser, criticize him for being stubborn or inflexible either to his face, or worse, even behind his back. I could dump the problem. I’m not chairman of the board. But I know full well the elders are expecting me to handle this as I have each previous episode. I know what you’re thinking. If Stan is so much trouble, why not accept his resignation this time and forget it? Believe me, I was tempted more than once. But I try to practice a team leadership style which is constantly redemptive whenever possible. I’ve already indicated the time arrived when we had to think more of the congregation than of Stan, but he desperately needed to learn how to work with colleagues in groups. And I wanted to give him every opportunity to mature toward that level. I don’t know if he ever will. Maybe he has by now. But it was my job not to say you’re acting childishly. We can’t have you on the board anymore. First of all, I didn’t have that authority. Second, that’s a bad leadership style.

McIntosh talks about three types of conflict: interpersonal (conflict with people), intrapersonal (conflict with ourselves, which we’re not dealing with in our study), and substantive (conflict over issues). He goes on to observe that “substantive conflict generates interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict. Disagreement on issues often degenerates into conflict between people.” Indeed it does. I’ve already indicated we would not deal with intrapersonal, so we won’t do that. Interpersonal and substantive flow together. So I’m not going to try to separate them as we talked about the roles that the leader takes and the leadership strategies for handling conflict.

Confrontation, we’ve talked about this earlier but it needs expansion here as an actual strategy. If we fail to confront either issues or people in conflict situations, we face three major dangers in Christian organizations: disintegration of resources, dysfunction of objectives, and disassociation of relationships. Any or all of them could happen. Leaders utilize confrontation strategy not because they enjoy it, I suppose. Some do. I certainly don’t. But I utilize it to avoid those three negative outcomes. When we carry out confrontation in the spirit of Matthew 18:15–20, it begins the alleviation of conflict, or certainly it can.

The book of Philemon also shows us that confrontation is a biblical behavior, though notice how gently Paul makes his case in verses 8 through 11. Habecker claims confrontation is one of the least glamorous and most difficult facets of leadership. It is, however, one of leadership’s most necessary and important responsibilities. Failure to confront produces negative results for both persons and the organization. Only as the art of confrontation is carried out under the divine leadership of the Holy Spirit will the kind of personal and organizational results desired by leaders be accomplished.

Compromise as a strategy, I remember the very day. If I could draw, I could draw a picture of the setting. I remember the day I engaged in a minor public confrontation with a student in a classroom after I suggested that compromise is often a positive concept. His background had led him to conclude that compromise was a dirty word which indicated weakness, vacillation, or even surrendering one’s convictions. Certainly there are times we should not compromise, when we’re debating basic orthodox theology such as the deity of Christ and the resurrection. But in conflict resolution, compromise is a tactic. And it’s a good word, and it’s a strategy. Remember Schmuck and Runkel? In dealing with educational organization, they talk a lot about the shortage of money in a secondary school which leads to inadequate resources for two teachers. And they describe compromise this way. Sometimes both parties can agree to give up a little, now that’s compromise. In this particular illustration they write about the English teacher agrees to get new books for only one course. The science teacher agrees to get new equipment for only one course. And principals and schools and departments avoid the conflict by making the allocation. So rather than everybody getting what they want or one person getting it all and somebody else getting none, as we’ll talk about in just a moment, they agree to compromise.

Working through is a terminology important in conflict management. The concept of process is essential to every aspect of leadership. Rarely do leaders deal with events which come and go in a flash. Conflict resolution obviously requires process, sometimes a long working through issues or personality differences. And the leader must solicit the cooperation of both parties in joint solution seeking. When the leader is one of the parties, as in the case study with Stan, you have to throw off dogmatism and approach the conflict episode with a commitment to finding a solution. In other words, Stan wasn’t just mad at the elders, he was mad at me. So I had the problem of trying to compromise and negotiate an interpersonal conflict of which I was one of the parties. We waste a great deal of kingdom-building time and energy by insisting on the correctness of our own opinions.

And that alone is a posture which rarely leads to conflict resolution. Furthermore, notice how working through an issue is so vastly different from either attacking or withdrawing. When we attack, we punish people. We hurt them for their role in the conflict. And the result is often one or both parties being diminished or overpowered. Interestingly, the same result comes from withdrawal. When we let the other take whatever he or she wants in a very real sense, both parties are still diminished, still overpowered even though it may seem like a victory for the taker.

Teaching is a factor here. Teaching is a strategy. Experienced managers may be surprised by the inclusion of this concept as a tactic for handling conflict, but follow my logic. If conflict resolution is learned behavior, if conflict resolution requires the cooperative efforts of both parties, if conflict resolution demands a process in which two or more people must cooperate, surely it stands to reason that in any organization, people must be taught how to handle conflict. Now one could do that in seminars during periods of peace and harmony. That would be good. But there’s nothing like an actual conflict situation to provide a glorious teachable moment. As the leader wears the hats, especially of both conflict manager and instructor, gently, lovingly, patiently, we explain to people what is happening and why. We warn how they can inflame the conflict rather than resolve it. The variety of strategies takes shape in a model, and there are numerous models. It’s not particularly useful on a tape to talk about a visual model, and so I won’t do that. Let me just say that when we move from the lowest possible level, which is a lose-lose situation called withdrawing, when both parties withdraw nothing is achieved. They both go away saying, “I don’t care anymore about it.” When both parties agree, we have a win-win situation. And we get from lose-lose to win-win by working through negotiation and mediation, in other words, by compromise. That’s how we get there, and that’s what we need to do.

When we have one person taking, we have a win-lose position. This competition element in virtually every athletic event is demonstrated commonly. Just a few days before I’m offering this study, the Detroit Lions score a last-minute surprise upset over San Francisco 49ers at the Silverdome. The ecstasy and exuberance of the hometown crowd must have been matched by the agony and deflation of 49er fans around the country. At the time, Detroit was a losing team and San Francisco very much a winning team. But that’s the way it is in competition. Somebody wins and somebody loses. But team ministry in Christian organizations is not competition. It’s not intramural, and it’s not interorganizational.

The opposite situation, where one person gives and the other takes, or when one person gives so the other can take, is a lose-win pattern. Wait a minute. Aren’t we to turn the other cheek? If someone asks for a jacket, don’t we give them our shirt as well? To be sure, the spirit of biblical humility certainly favors giving over taking, but the posture does not facilitate team ministry. Somebody is still losing. Even when they choose to lose, they’re still losing. And in this case, the winner who takes all in the competition walks away no better a person for it and certainly no more a member of the team. My example here is a battered wife who says anything to keep the peace, anything to keep him from hitting me again, anything to keep him away from the kids. She refuses to leave. She refuses to press charges. She suffers in silence. Meanwhile, the husband’s behavior worsens. And ultimately everybody in the family pays the price for her willingness to suffer and to give. Please notice that leaders must accept the responsibility to protect people from themselves. A good conflict manager pushes people away from these extremes of giving and taking and toward compromise and working through trying to get close to that win-win.

Agreeing, how do we get to that win-win position? Let’s admit that we rarely ring the bell going all the way up. The process is clear. Working through the issues, negotiating and mediating, if we get halfway there, we’re much better off than if we don’t get anywhere at all. Van Auken says circumstances for constructive compromise are ripe when team members are so sold out to ministry goals that they are willing to make implementation concessions to achieve these goals. Compromise that does not jeopardize the ultimate ministry mission will be welcomed under these circumstances.

Leadership behavior that reduces conflict, one of course is participatory leadership. Maybe we should begin on the other side of the coin. Let me back up. How do leaders exacerbate conflict? Sometimes through insecurity which demonstrates itself in the inability to make decisions, an eagerness to please everybody, an unwillingness to acknowledge conflict, there’s nothing wrong here. That’s the old withdrawing pattern. Or sometimes they hide behind a framework of the bureaucracy inviting anyone who doesn’t fit into the system to leave. In an organization which practices administrative dominance over decision making, that’s bureaucracy, leaders at lower levels may not have opportunity to practice conflict resolution. They don’t have the authority to negotiate compromise.

That’s enough of the negative side. What leadership behaviors serve the reduction of conflict? I have already named one. It’s worth naming again, participatory or team leadership. I have written so much on this subject and taught so much about it, I introduced it here again with reluctance. Nevertheless, it provides an absolutely essential ingredient in the overall environment we spoke of earlier which lends itself to conflict reduction and resolution. Part of it has to do with the way we use the authority of leadership. Listen to Larry Richards.

Essentially the authority of leaders today is a moral authority, a freedom of action extended to them by God to influence the people of God, to respond to Christ’s moral authority. Since even Jesus was careful never to claim a coercive authority over persons who are free moral agents, mere humans in spiritual leadership must be even more careful not to claim such an authority. It is right and proper for secular governments to demand and compel obedience, but it is not now and never has been right for those in spiritual leadership to attempt to compel a response which to be meaningful must be free, amen and amen.

Leadership behavior that reduces conflict, participatory leadership, and effective leadership, make no mistake about it. Many people holding leadership positions are ill-qualified for those positions and are more likely to create conflict than solve it. In one sense, leaders are defined by who they are as we focus on spiritual character and God’s gift and calling. But in another sense, a very important sense, what they do is very important. The famous five fundamental leadership practices offered by Kouzes and Posner fit in here. Leaders challenge the process. They’re always asking how to do something better. Leaders inspire a shared vision. The key word is shared, not vertical and downward but shared. Leaders enable others to act. Often we call this empowering, but it means the same thing. One can only empower by giving away portions of his own authority and influence to others.

Leaders model the way, we’ll deal with this in a later study; but you can see immediately how the modeling role of peacemaker sets the stage for conflict resolution. And leaders encourage the heart. All truly Christian leadership begins with heart attitude. Team leaders invest time encouraging the hearts of people. And then when they face conflict episodes, they have credibility as negotiators. Participatory leadership, effective leadership, celebrative leadership, not celibate, celebrative. Conflict often surfaces in the dark and dreary failure of an organization. Discouraged people will more likely be drawn into conflict episodes than encouraged people.

And we encourage people by rewarding their individual achievements and celebrating team accomplishments. Vulnerable leadership, in the process of conflict resolution we make mistakes. Particularly leaders who have little experience or training in this process will stumble and face the potential of a worsening situation. And then we recognize that transparency and vulnerability is very important.

And finally is communicative leadership. I have often been accused of erring on the side of saying too much to my staff and to others in the organization, and I plead guilty. Having served in organizations which operated on that CIA need to know principle, in other words, nobody knows anything except what pertains specifically to them, I determined early on in my ministry that my leadership style would neither look bureaucratic or secretive or military, nor would it be any of those. Kathleen Edwards engaged in a massive study which investigated factors that affect the quality of board executive relationships in non-profit organizations. And her findings should make us all sit up and take notice. She concludes that successful non-adversarial relationships are found in the following situations: 1) when chief executives are skilled at educating and developing their boards and assumed responsibility to do so, 2) when chief executives understood the importance of cultivating directors as a means of developing personal relationships with them, 3) when board members provided chief executives with strong and consistent support, 4) when board chairs understood their own roles, 5) when communication systems were open, candid, and free-flowing, and 6) when there were high levels of trust, respect, and positive reward among all participants.

What should we conclude? That the potential for conflict resolution resides squarely in the quality of the leader and the environment of the organization he or she directs. You can improve in conflict management skills. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s inevitable. Don’t run away from it. It can bring good benefits to you and your ministry. Learn how to do it. Leadership is learned behavior. Creativity is learned behavior. Conflict management is learned behavior. Just as important as consensus is to decision making in team leadership, so compromise is to conflict management. It is not a dirty word. It is the way that it needs to be done, and it is the way that the biblical leaders we observe in the book of Acts did it on a regular basis. Check out Acts 15.