Managing Conflict: 50 Strategies for School Leaders

Citation

Goldwyn, S. (2011), "Managing Conflict: 50 Strategies for School Leaders", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 49 No. 1, pp. 98-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111102090

Leading in an era of accountability has become a reality for all school leaders. As states begin to explore policy changes such as Race to the Top, reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, changes in licensure requirements, and numerous other significant initiatives, school leaders are forced to engage in continuous school reform efforts. These reform efforts require leaders to have a deeper understanding of curriculum, data‐driven decision making, supervision of instruction, human resource issues, community and parental engagement, and fiscal issues. Most importantly, educational leaders must become change agents, facilitating change in classrooms, schools, and communities.

Facilitating change is extremely challenging, and is often tightly coupled with conflict. This conflict arises among students, parents, teachers, other administrators, and district level personnel. Dealing with change associated conflict can be a very difficult task that occupies a large portion of an educational leader's time. This conflict, together with the routine conflicts that school leaders deal with daily means that administrators “spend a substantial amount of time and energy mediating a variety of circumstances in which individual needs and organizational expectations clash” (p. 1). Without the proper strategies to managing conflict, educational leaders will constantly be leading in a culture of adversity. The book Managing Conflict: 50 Strategies for School Leaders by Stacey Edmonson, Julie Combs, and Sandra Harris takes this notion of conflict management to the practitioner level, providing us with 50 concrete, explicit strategies for managing conflict. This guide is based primarily on the authors' experiences as school leaders, and therefore takes a practical approach to what strategies look like in the field.

The book begins by exploring five different styles of conflict management: avoiding, accommodating, compromising, competing, and collaborating. Each of these five styles is cross‐tabulated on a spectrum of assertiveness (ranging from unassertive to assertive), and cooperativeness (ranging from uncooperative to cooperative). Placed on this spectrum, the style of avoidance is unassertive and uncooperative, an accommodating conflict manager is unassertive and cooperative, a compromising conflict manager is in the middle of both the assertive and cooperative spectrum, a competing conflict manager is assertive and uncooperative, and a collaborative conflict manager is assertive and cooperative. The authors of the book assert that while each of these styles has a concrete place on the spectrum, that each of these strategies can be useful and successful when applied to the appropriate situation.

Edmonson, Combs and Harris use this as an introduction to their book, arguing that conflict management moves beyond simply understanding these styles and how to apply them, and provide 50 additional strategies to use to manage conflict. These 50 strategies were chosen from the authors' experiences as school leaders, and are based on what they believe to be the most commonly used in the field. It is meant to serve as a resource for leaders to engage in conflict not as a survival mechanism, but rather as a way to foster growth among participants. Each strategy begins with a related quote from famous people. It then provides an overview of the strategy and how to implement the strategy. It concludes with a section for reflection, with several questions that practicing school leaders can answer that will help them to understand how and if they are currently implementing the given strategy. These questions also provide insight into the personal nature of the leader to help implement these strategies. For each strategy, there is a final key point that summarizes the major concept for each strategy.

The 50 strategies are organized into three sections: “Understanding conflict strategies,” “Developing proactive strategies,” and “Fine‐tuning your skills.” The idea behind the sections is to provide an understanding of basic repertoire of conflict management strategies in section one, to develop these strategies more deeply by understanding more proactive strategies in part two, and in section three examining more complicated strategies that “fine‐tune” the skills addressed in sections one and two.

Section One: “Understanding conflict strategies” provides 17 strategies that are the basics of conflict management. These strategies include “Learn who to trust,” “Agree when to disagree,” “Know when to compromise,” “Know when to implement a temporary fix,” “Find the facts,” and “Know when to go to battle,” among others. These strategies provide gentle reminders to school leaders to take them back to the basic strategies to begin their conflict management. This section is extremely for beginning school leaders, or school leaders who begin to implement more complicated strategies without forgetting the beginning steps necessary to resolve conflict in a positive manner. This is further illustrated by the reflection questions at the end of each strategy. For example, one question is (p. 20) “When was the last time that you led a collaborative effort in managing conflict?” Questions like this remind current leaders the importance of reflecting on how often and the appropriate situations that this conflict management strategy is appropriate.

Section Two: “Developing proactive strategies,” provides more concrete and proactive strategies for leaders, that essentially provide the next steps in conflict management. These 14 strategies include examples such as “Do what you say you will do,” “Use policy,” “Put principles before personalities,” and “Find common ground.” While section one provided foundational strategies that could be applied to many situations, these strategies tend to be more situation specific. While each of the fourteen strategies can be applied to many different situations, the section includes questions such as (p. 64) “Is there ever a time when an honest, sincere answer is not the best approach?” focusing on the appropriateness of using each of the strategies.

The final section, “Fine‐tuning your conflict management skills,” includes 19 strategies that are meant to encourage continued growth in the area of conflict management. Some of these strategies are “Invite difference,” “Be a role model,” and “Master the art of apology.” These conflict management strategies are significantly more complex than earlier strategies offered throughout the book, and are clearly for the more developed leader. These strategies offer an overall approach to change and dealing with adversity, and focus on the positive elements of conflict.

This book provides an easy‐to‐reference, toolbox for the leader struggling with ongoing issues of conflict in school. While it is not grounded in current research and relies heavily on the authors' personal experiences and perceptions, it provides a useful resource for current school administrators. Although many of the strategies seem common or implied in an administrator's daily work, it provides a necessary reminder that these strategies are necessary and relevant to all practicing school leaders. The highlight of the book is the set of reflection questions at the end of each strategy. These questions are thought provoking and force administrators to think reflectively and concretely about their own personal management styles and how it relates to their current practices. This book is best suited for practitioners rather than researchers and scholars in the field. It is experientially based, and more of a reference rather than a theoretical approach to conflict management.