9.3 – Constructive Group Conflict

Groups may use conflict as a strategy for enhancing performance through continuous improvement and learning. Recognizing the benefits of conflict and using them as part of the team’s process can enhance group performance. Conflict can uncover barriers to collaboration that changes in behavior can remove. It can also foster better decisions because it makes group members consider the perspectives of others and even helps them see things in new and innovative ways.

Addressing conflict can increase group cohesion by engaging members in discussions about important issues. Group members may feel more valued when they know they are contributing to something vital to the group’s success. Conflict can reveal assumptions that may not apply in the current situation and thus allow the group to agree on a new course. It can also draw attention to norms that have developed without the explicit agreement of group members and create the opportunity to endorse or discard them.

GENERATING CONSTRUCTIVE CONFLICT

Group members and others can follow a few guidelines for encouraging constructive conflict. First, they can start by explicitly calling for it as something that will help improve the group’s performance. This helps people view conflict as acceptable and can thus free them to speak up.

Groups can lower the emotional intensity of any conflict be establishing clear guidelines for how to express disagreements and challenge colleagues. One helpful norm is to focus on the task-related element of a conflict rather than criticizing the traits of particular individuals. Another is to emphasize common goals and shared commitments, which can keep conflict in perspective and prevent it from overwhelming the group’s efforts.

“Effective feedback is not praise or criticism.  It is carefully chosen language and actions that propel the learner forward.” Reggie Routman

CREATING LISTENABLE MESSAGES

A big part of giving productive feedback is to create constructive feedback messages that people can hear. Below are some tips for creating productive messages for feedback.

Some of the listening challenges we all face would be diminished if speakers created listenable messages. Listenable messages are messages that are tailored to be comprehended by the listener (Rubin, 1993). While most of our communication is in an “oral style,” meaning spoken and intended to be heard, we sometimes create messages that are unnecessarily complex in ways that impede comprehension. Listenable messages can be contrasted with most written messages, which are meant to be read.

The way we visually process written communication is different from the way we process orally delivered and aurally received language. Aside from processing written and spoken messages differently, we also speak and write differently. This becomes a problem for listening when conventions of written language get transferred into oral messages. You may have witnessed or experienced this difficulty if you have ever tried or watched someone else try to orally deliver a message that was written to be read, not spoken. For example, when students in my classes try to deliver a direct quote from one of their research sources or speak verbatim a dictionary definition of a word, they inevitably have fluency hiccups in the form of unintended pauses or verbal trip-ups that interfere with their ability to deliver the content. These hiccups consequently make the message difficult for the audience to receive and comprehend. Remember back to the different between speech and thought rate, the more hiccups you have delivering your message, the more likely it is that the person listening to you will get distracted.

The strategies for becoming an active listener discussed earlier in chapter 3 will also help you mentally repair or restructure a message to make it more listenable. As a speaker, in order to adapt your message to a listening audience and to help facilitate the listening process, you can use the following strategies to create more listenable messages:

• Use shorter, actively worded sentences.
• Use I-Statements instead of You-Statements (“I want to show you…”).
• Use lists or other organizational constructions like problem-solution, pro-con, or compare-contrast.
• Use transitions and other markers that help a listener navigate your message (time markers like “today”; order indicators like “first, second, third”; previews like “I have two things I’d like to say about that”; and reviews like “So, basically I feel like we should vacation at the lake instead of the beach because…”).
• Use examples relevant to you and your listener’s actual experiences.

Below is a wonderful 5 minute video from The Way We Work TED series about The Secret to Giving Great Feedback.   They provide a fantastic 4 part process that is brain centered for giving feedback in any difficult conversation.

 

“The key to effective feedback lies in our intention, not our method. Your intentions must be about helping others, not just yourself.” unknown

THE ART OF GIVING FEEDBACK

The ability to give effective feedback benefits oneself and others. Whether in professional or personal contexts, positive verbal and nonverbal feedback can boost others’ confidence, and negative feedback, when delivered constructively, can provide important perception checking and lead to improvements. Of course, negative feedback that is not delivered competently can lead to communication difficulties that can affect a person’s self-esteem and self-efficacy.

It is likely that you will be asked at some point to give feedback to another person in a personal, academic, professional, or civic context. As schools, companies, and organizations have moved toward more team-based environments over the past twenty years, peer evaluations are now commonly used to help assess  performance. I, for example, am evaluated every year by my students, and my two faculty directors. I also evaluate my faculty and teaching assistants and peers yearly. Since it’s important for us to know how to give competent and relevant feedback, and since the feedback can be useful for the self-improvement of the receiver, many students are asked to complete peer evaluations verbally and/or in writing for classmates after they deliver a speech or work on a project together. The key to good feedback is to offer constructive criticism, which consists of comments that are specific and descriptive enough for the receiver to apply them for the purpose of self-improvement. The following are guidelines for giving feedback.

When giving feedback to others

1. Be specific and descriptive. I often see a lack of specific comments when it comes to feedback on speech delivery. Students write things like “Eye contact” on a peer comment sheet, but neither the student nor I know what to do with the comment. While a comment like “Good eye contact” or “Not enough eye contact” is more specific, it’s not descriptive enough to make it useful. What would be best is “Good consistent eye contact with the audience during your introduction. Eye contact with the audience diminished when you seemed less confident in what you were presenting in the last 3 slides of your powerpoint.”
2. Be positive. If you are delivering your feedback in writing, pretend that you are speaking directly to the person and write it the same way. Comments like “Stop fidgeting” or “Get more sources” wouldn’t likely come out during verbal feedback, because we know they sound too harsh. The same tone, however, can be communicated through written feedback. Instead, make comments that are framed in such a way as to avoid defensiveness or hurt feelings.
3. Be constructive. Although we want to be positive in our feedback, comments like “Good job” aren’t constructive, because a communicator can’t actually take that comment and do something with it. A comment like “You were able to explain our company’s new marketing strategy in a way that even I, as an engineer, could make sense of. The part about our new crisis communication plan wasn’t as clear. Perhaps you could break it down the same way you did the marketing strategy to make it clearer for people like me who are outside the public relations department.” This statement is positively framed, specific, and constructive because the speaker can continue to build on the positively reviewed skill by applying it to another part of the speech that was identified as a place for improvement.
4. Be realistic. Comments like “Don’t be nervous” aren’t constructive or realistic. Instead, you could say, “I know the first speech is tough, but remember that we’re all in the same situation and we’re all here to learn. I tried the breathing exercises discussed in the book and they helped calm my nerves. Maybe they’ll work for you, too?” I’ve also had students make comments like “Your accent made it difficult for me to understand you,” which could be true but may signal a need for more listening effort since we all technically have accents, and changing them, if possible at all, would take considerable time and effort.
5. Be relevant. Feedback should be relevant to the assignment, task, and/or context. I’ve had students give feedback like “Rad nail polish” and “Nice smile,” which although meant as compliments are not relevant in formal feedback unless you’re a fashion consultant or a dentist.

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” Bill Gates

THE ART OF RECEIVING FEEDBACK

I have never met someone that was born with a love of receiving feedback. I have however, met plenty of people who have learned to love receiving feedback. Receiving feedback is a wonderful way to truly learn about yourself and grow into the person you want to be.

Joe Hrisch helps us all see The Joy of Getting Feedback in his Ted Talk below.

Material in this chapter has been adapted from “Communication in the Real World” is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0