Resolving Disagreements - and staying neutral

Resolving Workplace Conflict - Small disagreements

Since this seems to be my topic for the month – why not talk about what I teach. 

Most conflict is minor – a misunderstanding, a tiff, a disagreement, something easily resolved through conversation.  Yet, we seem to be so about “zero tolerance” that no matter how small we react as though it were major.

What I teach is how to listen neutrally, try to learn the different sides of the story – and that’s very hard to do since the tendency in all of us is to believe the first person’s story – so that means we tend to believe the person making the accusation without taking into account that what we are hearing is their perception, often distorted, frequently exaggerated to convince us, but only one side of the story.

Unless the allegation is egregious (a felony – rape, murder, drug usage on site, etc.) most of the time the proper way to resolve it is to bring the parties together and help them work it out.  Technically, this is called mediation.

Sometimes there is too much anger or pain and you make the decision to first separate them and act as a go-between trying to help each side calm down and gain some perspective – this is called conciliation. 

At some point you feel comfortable asking them to meet face to face.  At that point, you move from conciliator to mediator and help them resolve it.  I teach how to do this!

If you are successful mediating they can go back to work and inform their allies (teams) that all is well.  You have now avoided tension among groups of people, as well as the protagonists themselves.

See the value?

This is so much better than playing judge and jury and “arbitrating” the dispute.  No one is happy when you make the decision for them.  You have now added to the polarization of the people that are allies with each of the parties.

All managers and all HR professionals ought to be taught how to do a neutral investigation, and mediation and arbitration.  This can be accomplished in a one day training with lots of practice.

Neutrality

As I said, it is so easy to believe the first person coming in the door.  Here are a few other biases that we all have and need to fight against.  This is from an article “58 Cognitive biases that screw up everything we do” by Drake Baer and Gus Lubin, in Business Insider.

Affect heuristic:           The way you feel filters the way you interpret the world – for example, if you are hungry your focus will be on food and other things coming your way might be ignored.

Anchoring bias:           Going against the norm, the example is that you are better off in a negotiation if you make the first offer.

Confirmation bias:       We tend to listen only to the information that confirms our preconceptions.  (This is my point about how hard it is to be neutral.)

Observer-expectancy effect:   Looking for a result, you only see those things that confirm that result and never notice, or deny those that don’t.

Bias blind spots:          Failure to recognize your cognitive biases is a bias in itself.

Galatea Effect:            Where people succeed or underperform depending on their self-perception – in other words where they think they should.

Inter-group bias:          To view people in our group differently from how we see someone in another group.

Negativity bias:            The tendency to put more emphasis on negative experiences rather than positive ones.  People with this bias feel that “bad is stronger than good” – this is also where it becomes easier to believe the bad about people than it is to believe the good.

Ostrich effect:              Sticking your head in the sand rather than paying attention to dangerous or negative information.

Planning fallacy:          the tendency to underestimate how much time it will take to complete the task

Selective perception:   allowing our expectations to influence how we perceive the world.

Neutral Investigations/Evaluations

Neutral Investigations/Evaluations

I’ve counseled and written about this issue numerous times.  So often well-intended people, thinking they are being neutral wind up only considering evidence that supports either the allegation, or their personal point of view.  This is human nature.

I’ve always believed that this was true in subjective areas, such as whether someone is telling the truth or lying, or if they sexually harassed someone, or inadvertently insulted them.  Eye witness identification is a classic example of how wrong people can be when they think they know the person who was responsible for the crime.  Research has shown, over and over again, that eye witness identification is extremely faulty and subject to all sorts of influences.

HR and legal evaluations often go about their investigation looking solely for evidence that supports allegations – and refuse to listen to those that would refute it.  I’ve read many reports which argue that the person trying to give evidence on the other side is either “denying” or “lying.”  

The other day I attended a lecture by a brilliant presenter, Dr. Itiel Dror who is a world renowned neuroscientist and a leading expert on cognitive bias in expert testimony in the criminal justice system. 

Among the many things he said:

·       There is lots of research that says your cognitive bias affects your conclusions.  If you change the scenario (for example give them two sets of the same person’s fingerprints to be compared to a third set – but in case A saying that the person was found guilty and in case B saying that they knew the person was not guilty) the fingerprint t experts (with many years of experience) will find differently.  In case A they will see a match, whereas in case B they will determine that the two prints are dissimilar 

·       Motivation influences visi9al perception – he showed us a few examples which I am unable to copy here – but looked at one way they mean one thing and another way a different object.  You’ve all see the vase and the people example – he showed two others.

·       There is also confirmation bias – confirming a point of view – which is what I’ve mentioned above.  Disconfirming information is ignored.

·       He says seasoned experts minimize cognitive contamination – in the same way we protect against physical contamination.  In their desire to get to the pure information, they protect themselves against other information coming in.

In pure research we try to avoid contamination and reduce the experimental design to clean out as many variables as possible.   Dr. Dror suggests that when a case is given to a forensic expert, it should be given with as little additional information as possible.   

He drew a quadrant:

                                                  Relevant                           Not Relevant

         

Biasing                            

           Non-Biasing

And he suggested that experts be given only the information that is both relevant and non-biasing.  They must be blind to irrelevant information.  If necessary, there could be sequential unmasking of information.

Now, unfortunately, this is not entirely possible in our workplace evaluations of an allegation of misconduct – but we should strive to be as neutral and un-biasing as possible.  If the person interviewing the complainant doesn’t give other than the very basic information to an evaluator, without suggesting that the complainant was believable or not, or had other incidents, or that there were other complaints against the alleged perpetrator than at least we reduce some of the bias.

It is also critically important to know your own prejudices.  We all have them – the more aware and honest with yourself you are the less likely you are to pre-judge based on them.  It is so important to be as neutral as humanly possible when doing evaluations and investigations.