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Guest Blog: Brian Kruckenberg
Brian Kruckenberg is the Life Group’s pastor at our Mesa Campus. He writes…
Capitalizing on Conflict
Whenever you get a group of people together to do anything, one thing is certain: there will be conflict. As a leader, you have to become effective at dealing with conflict, or as I have begun to think about it, you must learn to capitalize on it. No more “conflict management,” okay? And, let’s be clear: conflict in and of itself is not bad. Conflict can lead to innovation and breakthrough. Non-constructive conflict is what we most often think of when we hear the word “conflict” and that’s the junk we need to overcome as leaders.
Here are some quick thoughts for you to ponder and comment on:
- Vision and passion trump most non-constructive conflict. If you cast a strong vision, write it down and reinforce it, group members who want to be negative will be run over by the vision.
- You must uncover the real reason behind the conflict. Often the stated issue isn’t really the issue at all. You must dig deep as a leader but to dig deep requires trust.
- Once you’ve found the real issue, you have to be willing to confront it. Again, if you don’t have trust, this is difficult to do. But, to be an effective leader, you have to ask the hard questions.
- Which brings me to this: ask questions. One of the best ways to confront conflict is to ask the right questions. You’ll get a lot farther by helping people uncover a potential problem area in their life than by showing them the problem yourself. Help them discover it.
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I think this is a very crucial realization to anyone in ministry or relationships (i.e., all of us).
Conflict is certainly not strictly a negative thing. In fact, it can be a positive one depending upon the response, communication and efforts to “capitalize” on it. As you very eloquently stated, conflict is inevitable because teams, or even marriages for that matter, are comprised of two or more individuals who are very used to thinking and acting in independent manners but in limited, singular mindsets. So disagreements or “discussions” will arise sooner or later if the individuals actually care about growth or spiritual progression, which is certainly not a bad thing (having two people who don’t care at all is infinitely worse).
The beauty of conflict, if handled in the right manner and communicated efficiently, is that it necessitates change, which invariably leads to growth, be it personal, communal, spiritual, etc.
Plus, it certainly removes any notion of complacency from our ministry or relationships, :).
JG - wouldn’t it be awesome if we all embraced conflict and instead of asking ourselves how to avoid it we started seeing conflict as the way to innovate and grow. Jesus did this all of the time. He approached a situation, illustrated how the situation (action, behavior, etc.) deviated from the life He was calling people to live, and then showed His followers how to change.
We must learn to see conflict as a catalyst for positive change and not a hinderance to a cohesive team.
Brian,
I think most people, myself included from time to time, would genuinely like to be prepared to embrace conflict whenever it arises however conflict rarely occurs when we expect it to (though I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation of events where we thought, “Oh this is going to get interesting”).
I think embracing and avoiding conflict actually coincide with one another but it depends upon the perspective and climate of the conflict and the people involved. If we find ourselves in a disagreement or heated debate we certainly want to avoid an angry or violent conflict, that’s a no brainer…and yet what this really means is that we really want the conflict to involve a healthy, safe and communication-filled arena where ideas can be shared, contemplated and then ultimately lead to growth. Thus, we want to avoid negative conflict and embrace a positive one. I feel this kind of embracing/avoiding perspective is really two sides of the same coin. It’s just really hard to do.
I think the part where negative avoidance comes into play is when individuals are either ashamed to speak up (don’t feel qualified or don’t know what people will think about them), scared to speak up (usually a hostile atmosphere is responsible for this) or don’t care enough about the topic or team to feel properly motivated (it won’t make a difference, why should I care?).
I suppose, Brian, that it can come down to fight or flight, but instead of positively engaging in a calm and respected “fight” of ideas, we often fly to a safer, less challenging place and escape what we perceive to be as threatening.
And to all of us, Jesus is and can be incredibly threatening when we read His words in regards to how calls us to live–and how we’re doing.
I am a lifegroup leader here in Edmond. This post was for me today. Good stuff. Great quotes!
“Vision and passion trump most non-constructive conflict…group members who want to be negative will be run over by the vision.”
“We must learn to see conflict as a catalyst for positive change and not a hinderance to a cohesive team.”
Thank you brian.
I like the phrase used by JG’s: ‘the beauty of conflict’. It changes the perspective. I think we need unusual collacations like this one. Our language is, more often than not, petrified: it is negative collocations that are always used with the word ‘conflict’. This in turn results in our perception of conflict as something that is always deconstructive, bad or negative. We need to remind ourselves of ‘the beauty of conflict.’
Similarly with complaining: “Complaining is always bad.” No, it isn’t. This view is too extreme.
Think about complaining this way. If I am a boss of a language school and a student comes to me to complain about the quality of the classes, etc. then I should be glad and grateful. The student wants to STAY in my school. A worse scenario would be if the student just left the school without saying anything - I lose the customer, I lose the money, and I don’t know why this happened.
We need to remind ourseves of the “the beauty of complaining” as well.
Thanks Brian.