How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 132

• Is it difficult for you to see differences as opportunities for joint
gain - that is, as opportunities to learn or solve problems?
Although conflict situations often involve threatening or
unproductive aspects, approaching all such situations with
pessimism can prevent you from seeing collaborative
possibilities and thus deprive you of the mutual gains and
satisfactions that accompany successful collaboration.
• Are your employees uncommitted to your decisions or policies?
Perhaps their concerns are not being incorporated into those
decisions or policies.
Compromising
Uses
• When goals are moderately important but not worth the effort or
the potential disruption involved in using more assertive modes
• When two opponents with equal power are strongly committed
to mutually exclusive goals - as in labor-management bargaining
• To achieve temporary settlement of complex issues
• To arrive at an expedient solution under time pressure
• As a backup mode when collaboration or competition fails
Questions to Ask
You may wish to ask yourself:
• Do you find yourself too sensitive or embarrassed to be effective
in some bargaining situations?
• Do you sometimes find it difficult to make concessions? Without
this safety valve, you may have trouble gracefully getting out of
mutually destructive arguments, power struggles, and so on.
Of the five modes described in the matrix, only the strategy
employing collaboration as a mode of conflict management breaks
free of the win-lose paradigm. It has become almost habitual to fall
back on the win-win alternative, but this was not the authors'

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