Ideas should be open to examination.

Why I Name What People Protect

Self-scored conflict style inventories have a long history, including Blake and Mouton (1964), Thomas and Kilmann (1974), Rahim (1983), and Robert (2003), whose survey is described in Chapter 3. The five responses named here, the statements, and the interpretation are the author’s own and are not drawn from those instruments.

When I first studied these older models, I was grateful for them. They showed that people meet conflict in different ways, and that simple insight has helped many teams. I still honor that work. Over time, though, the labels began to trouble me. Each one sounded like a verdict on a person, and most of them carried a quiet judgment, even when no one intended it.

I noticed it first in myself. Once I learned the word ‘competing,’ I began to see certain colleagues through it. If I am honest, I came to despise the people the label described. They seemed pushy to me, more interested in winning than in listening. They were trying to move a problem that had been stuck too long, or to make sure a hard decision was fair before the moment passed. What I had called competing was often a deep care for fairness and for getting things done. The label had taught me to resent the very people who were willing to carry the weight of a decision.

I never liked the word ‘avoidant.’ It makes a person sound as if they lack courage, and it is almost always said about someone who is not in the room. Yet the people I have known who hold back are often the most careful people in a group. They are reading the room. They are asking whether it is safe to speak, whether this is the right time, and whether the relationship can bear what needs to be said. Some of them learned, in places far harder than a staff meeting, that speaking too soon can cost you your place. What looks like avoiding is often protecting, and it deserves respect before it receives correction.

‘Accommodating’ troubled me in a different way. It can make a person sound as if they simply give in. The people I have seen yield most often are frequently the ones holding a group together. They care about the relationship enough to set their own wishes aside for a while. There is a real risk here, because they can disappear inside other people’s comfort. The motive, though, is often love.

I chose not to make ‘compromising’ one of my five. Compromise can be wise, and I have made many compromises in my own life. But the word says that each side should give up part of what matters to them. It describes where a conflict may end, not what a person is reaching for when the tension begins. When I listened to people in the middle of conflict, I more often heard a need for clarity. What exactly is being decided? What are the facts? What happens next? That need had no name of its own, so I gave it one.

Even ‘collaborating,’ the style most people are proud to claim, carried a cost. It was so often taught as the best style that everyone else in the room seemed to be standing one step lower. A framework that ranks people before it understands them makes conflict harder to hold.

So I began with a different question. Instead of asking what kind of person someone is in conflict, I asked what they are trying to protect. That question turned labels into needs, and needs can be spoken about with dignity. The five responses in this survey grew from it.

Excerpt from Belonging That Can Hold the Truth by Dr. Radar Onguetou.