There are books I return to again and again, for reference, to give to clients, and to spark my own thinking about resolving conflict. These five books belong on every freelancer’s bookshelf because they speak to the creative spirit, are practical even while artful, and offer a transformative power between their covers.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

This book will speak to the soul of every creative freelancer. The husband and wife team, one a psychologist and the other a philharmonic conductor, share moving and hopeful stories and simple mindsets for facing difficulties and finding possibility in them. I’ve read this book multiple times and it still makes me laugh, cry, and think deeply about relationships at work and home. Everyone I’ve given it to has read it, then gone out and purchased copies to give as gifts.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Doug Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen

These authors have taken a big subject–difficult conversations at home and work–and distilled it down to a digestible set of approaches for preparing and having the important conversations that are a source of stress in our lives. After their first encounter with the book’s wisdom, most people tell me there are more gems in it than they can digest in one read, so it’s perfect as an occasional reference after you’ve finished reading. I recommend it as joint reading for a long car ride with your partner.

Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way

by Rick Carson

Now considered a self-help classic, this book takes you on a journey through a different kind of conflict: your inner conflict with yourself. Filled with wonderful line drawings to supplement the text, it’s an unforgettable and fun little manual for, as the cover says, “banishing the nemesis within.”

Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation

by William Ury

Though this book’s sister and predecessor, Getting to Yes, is more famous, I think this is the better of the two because it’s specifically written to help you negotiate with tough clients you find stubborn, irritating, and adversarial. Ury’s a master at distilling complex theory and practice into bite-size methods that anyone can master and this book’s worth a periodic re-read.

People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts

by Robert Bolton

This book’s been through countless editions and re-issues because it’s a perennial favorite of folks all over the world. This communication handbook has a practical orientation that makes it immediately useable and his methods are tried and true. I’ve been told by many that his section on assertiveness is one of the best folks have ever read.

Do you have a favorite book on difficult conversations, negotiation or conflict resolution? Drop me a note and let me know all about it.

Keep the channels open,
Tammy

Dr. Tammy Lenski | Mediator, Executive Coach, Business Development Consultant
I Can’t Say That! | Lenski Strategic | BoDo Author | Creative Conversations

Do you have a client conflict or difficult situation question you’d like Tammy to address in a future post? Just drop her a line.

“He knows just how to press my buttons,” said a recent client. “He knows exactly what ticks me off…and he’s a master at it.”

Truth be told, people rarely press your buttons. It’s much more accurate to say that you pressed your own! Your conflict hot buttons say a whole lot more about you than they say about the other person because what bothers you doesn’t necessarily bother someone else. Here’s why:

You’re triggered in conflict—and feel like your buttons are being pushed—when another’s words or actions imply a threat to some part of your identity. Your identity is how you see yourself in the world and how you want others to view you. Common conflict hot buttons are:

• Competence: There’s an implied threat to your intelligence or your abilities. If you have this trigger, you have a heightened sensitivity to being slighted, judged, or insulted.
• Inclusion: There’s an implied threat to being included in a group or event. If you have this trigger, you have a heightened sensitivity to being excluded or set apart.
• Autonomy: There’s an implied threat to your independence or free will. If you have this trigger, you have a heightened sensitivity to being manipulated, tested, or “managed.”
• Worthiness: There’s an implied threat to your value as a human. If you have this trigger, you have a heightened sensitivity to being unappreciated, unloved, or under-valued.

And here’s the rub: The threat doesn’t have to be a real one. When you’ve got a strong trigger (and the theory is that we all have at least one strong one), you hear a threat even when that’s not the other person’s intention. And the implied threat sets your reactions in motion, preventing your better self from participating in the conflict conversation.

When you learn how to manage your own conflict hot buttons, you not only make use of the power you’ve already got, but you also take back the power you gave away when you made it the other person’s fault that you’re feeling irritated.

To begin wrangling your hot buttons into submission, start taking notice when you’re finding yourself frustrated or even mildly irritated with a client, colleague, or family member. Ask yourself, what’s the message I’m hearing in what they’re saying? Notice the trend in your answers and you’ll probably be able to uncover your primary hot button. And when you know it, you can begin to neutralize it and reduce its hold on you.

Keep the channels open,
Tammy

Dr. Tammy Lenski | Mediator, Executive Coach, Business Development Consultant
I Can’t Say That! | Lenski Strategic | BoDo Author | Creative Conversations

Do you have a client conflict or difficult situation question you’d like Tammy to address in a future post? Just drop her a line.

Imagine this: Your client has emailed with a request that’s not really part of the contract. Perhaps it’s not even the first time this has come up with this particular client. What will you say in your reply email?

While email has become an important business communication tool, it’s not a particularly effective vehicle for a conflict conversation yet. While email isn’t really creating new conflict, it does tend to exacerbate it. For instance, research has shown that:

• In email communication, we tend to share far less information about a topic than when we talk in person or by telephone. The resulting limited knowledge sharing can reduce understanding when we need it most.
• When information is shared electronically, it’s more likely to be exaggerated or altered. Difficult conversations are difficult enough without more exaggeration!
• Email negotiations are more likely to degenerate into an unpleasant exchange than face-to-face encounters, and more quickly. It appears that people are more willing to escalate conflict when conversing electronically than they are when they are physically together.
• Email is used more readily to make unpopular requests and avoid confronting in person (thus your client’s email request, right?) Using email to deal with unpleasant business from a distance is called the Coward’s Choice.
• Email can increase inadvertent prejudice for women and people of color by feeding a recipient’s preconceptions. “A misspelling in a black colleague’s e-mail may be seen as ignorance, whereas a similar error by a white colleague might be excused as a typo,” according to a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor.
• Email recipients tend to overestimate their ability to correctly decode feelings the sender was trying to convey. Researchers believe it’s because people are egocentric—we assume others experience stimuli the same way we do.

So, back to the email from your client. What’s the best response, in light of research and good conflict management practice?

Hello there, Client. I want to confirm I’ve received your request and I think I can best serve you and your project if we talk a bit more about it directly. If you’d like to suggest a time I call, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll plan ring you up later today. Looking forward to our chat,
You

And a last note. Have you heard for the “tweaking cc”? It’s the open copying of an email message to someone the sender believes has power over or influence on the recipient. A tweaking cc is a quick way to alienate the primary recipient. Find out why in my article, Beware the Tweaking CC.

Keep the channels open,
Tammy

Dr. Tammy Lenski | Mediator, Executive Coach, Business Development Consultant
I Can’t Say That! | Lenski Strategic | BoDo Author | Creative Conversations

Do you have a client conflict or difficult situation question you’d like Tammy to address in a future post? Just drop her a line.

What did you learn? I asked.

My grad students’ answers were variations on a theme: That preparation made all the difference. That the right kind of preparation made a huge difference. That thinking about it in new ways helped it unfold far more successfully. That they’d been missing opportunities by not preparing before their most difficult conversations.

It’s the end of a term and my students have just completed their major assignment for the course: To step up to a difficult conversation they’ve been avoiding, using approaches and skills I taught for effective chats with someone important to them…family member, friend, client, colleague. In class a few weeks ago, they each presented on their difficult conversations and what they learned from the experience. They were giddy with the good outcomes they’d achieved, even in conversations they’d anticipated might be a lost cause.

One approach we discussed during the course was the importance of preparing before picking up the phone or walking into the room. The amount of preparation depends to some degree on the depth and complexity of the conflict, but often 15-20 minutes of focused thought can make a huge difference. I usually recommend that people actually write out their preparatory thinking, because the act of typing or writing an idea forces your brain to move beyond the kind of “passing thought” that achieves little.

But what to think about? It’s not uncommon to catastrophize, considering all that could go wrong with the conversation. It’s far better to put your brain to work on something else, because catastrophizing causes you to avoid, to fear, and to make the situation more overblown that it need be. Here are some things worth your energy:.

Focus. Set one major goal for the conversation and keep it front and center. Try not to accomplish everything with one conversation, but keep the big picture in mind and have several smaller conversation if needed.

Choose the right kind of goal. It’s tempting to enter a difficult conversation with a variation of this goal in mind: “To get my client to ___ (pay me, get better with deadlines, communicate better, get clearer on their wishes…you fill in the blank). When you enter a conflict conversation with this kind of goal, you automatically set up an offense-defense dynamic because you’re entering with the intention to convince, strong-arm, plead, or change the other person. Instead, focus your initial conversation on learning only. What can you learn from your client that will help the two of you get back on track? When you bring only your good, innate curiosity to the conversation, then you enable effective goals like “to understand the situation from their eyes,” “to re-establish good communication,” and “to figure out where the confusion is lurking.”

Leave your debate team self behind. One major mistake is to work hard at convincing or making your case. It’s not really possible to try to learn and understand, as described above, while also trying to demonstrate to the other person why you’re view is right, best, valid, or wise. Let it go for now and you may be surprised by how much lighter you feel.

Be really clear about your own contribution to the problem. Contribution is not the same as fault and it’s much more effective to discuss the former than the latter. Discussing fault just invites defensiveness. Most conflict situations have contributions from both sides and your ability to say, “Here’s what I think I contributed to this” can help break the tension. Your contributions may be things like, “I should just have picked up the phone when I first sensed a bit of tension and I’ll be sure to do that in the future” or “That clause in the contract was less clear than it could have been and I regret not realizing that before now” or “I’m burning the candle at both ends to get this project done well and my stress is showing.”

Hold on lightly to your solutions. You may have some ideas for resolving the problem with your client, and that can be a good thing if you don’t get wedded to your own brilliance. The benefits of having a few ideas is that they can serve as starting places for problem solving when the conversation gets to that point. The dangers are that you introduce them far too soon and buy into your own ideas before you really know they’ll work for everyone involved. Beware of problem-solving before you’ve had the curiosity and learning conversation described above. When you’ve properly set the foundation you may be surprised to find out that your initial solutions are no longer relevant and better ideas suddenly appear on the horizon.

I have a free worksheet that’s designed to help with preparation for almost any kind of difficult conversation. Drop on by my site to get your own copy of Talking It Out in Ten.

Keep the channels open,
Tammy

Dr. Tammy Lenski | Mediator, Executive Coach, Business Development Consultant
I Can’t Say That! | Lenski Strategic | BoDo Author | Creative Conversations

Do you have a client conflict or difficult situation question you’d like Tammy to address in a future post? Just drop her a line.

Nip Client Conflict in the Bud: 3 Tips for Efficient Creatives

Put the words “client” and “conflict” into the same sentence and you can already feel the “ugh” that goes along for the ride. There’s nothing to sap your creative energy faster than a problem or tension with a client. The following three tips are designed to help you navigate tension with greater ease and encourage you to confront the tension before it flares to messy, project-halting conflict:

Deal with it early. It’s tempting to try to shrug off minor concerns, hoping they’ll dissipate or work themselves out. Sometimes they do. But the problem with this strategy is that when they don’t dissipate, they join other minor concerns to create real tension. And then it’s much harder to sort out. It’s a better use of time and creative energy to raise questions or check out concerns when you first experience tension or conflict, because it’s simpler, easier, and there’s less muck built up. Try saying something like, “It may be nothing, but I want to serve you well and so want to check out some concern I thought I read into your last message. Is something on your mind?”

Talk directly with the client. If your client has handlers, assistants or team members who play gatekeepers, the challenge for you is that all your client’s real thoughts get filtered through another mind and mouth. Like the game of telephone many of us played as children, the message gets more garbled as it’s filtered through each person. Whenever possible, try to get direct contact with the client when concerns arise. Try, “I really value you as a client and think it’s important to check in with you personally now and then. How do you think things are going?”

Pick up the phone. Email’s efficient in a lot of ways. But not so in conflict situations. Email can cause heightened tension due to misread cues, the “tweaking cc” (copying of an email message to someone you believe has power over or influence on the recipient), and a tendency for emailers to be less disclosing than on the telephone. When there’s tension, picking up the telephone is usually more effective and efficient. And the personal touch also signals you really care, which clients will appreciate. Try something like, “This seemed important enough that email wouldn’t do it justice and might take more of your time. Is this a convenient time for a quick chat about the project?”

Keep the channels open,
Tammy

Dr. Tammy Lenski | Mediator, Executive Coach, Business Development Consultant
I Can’t Say That! | Lenski Strategic | BoDo Author | Creative Conversations

Do you have a client conflict or difficult situation question you’d like Tammy to address in a future post? Just drop her a line.