From Conflict to Collaboration: A School Leader’s Guide to Unleashing Conflict’s Problem-Solving Power

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:14] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Robert Fiersen and Dr. Seth Weitzman. Dr. Fearson has served as an assistant principal, principal, deputy superintendent, and superintendent of schools, and he is currently a professor at Manhattanville College. Dr. Seth Weitzman served three decades as a school building administrator, including 27 years as a middle school principal, and he's held leadership positions in professional associations and professional learning networks for school administrators at the district, county, and state levels, and he's currently an adjunct professor in the educational leadership department at Mercy College.

[00:46]

And we're here today to talk about their book, From Conflict to Collaboration, a school leader's guide to unleashing conflict's problem-solving power.

[00:55] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:58] SPEAKER_01:

Rob and Seth, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Nice to be here. We're very excited to talk about this because it's a constant issue in the background and sometimes conflict doesn't stay in the background and it really comes to the foreground. And I just love the way you've framed some of the thinking about conflict. I wonder if we could start just kind of with the big picture. If you could kind of position conflict for us in the larger world of school leadership, what role does it play and how should we think about it big picture?

[01:27] SPEAKER_02:

There are some studies that indicate that conflict plays a giant role in the day-to-day practice of school leaders. For example, 20% to 40% of a school leader's time can be absorbed by dealing with conflict at one time or another. You know, it's not terribly unexpected. You have so many stakeholders, so many different constituencies, so many competing interests and ideas and different people come back and forth. It's not totally unexpected. The kind of ironic thing is that in terms of leadership preparation, very little time, if any, is spent on preparing people to deal with conflict.

[02:01]

So they wind up on the job really having to learn how to deal with conflict. And as you mentioned, one of the first impulses is to kind of ignore it. But conflict does not go away. Unresolved conflict festers and becomes worse.

[02:15] SPEAKER_00:

And on a personal level, you mentioned in my bio that I served in the leadership capacity, working with school leaders, principals at the local county and state level here in New York. And something I noticed was, so we would be at a meeting together Maybe there would be a break for lunch or we'd get together afterwards. And when I listened to principals talk about their jobs, actually complain about their jobs, we all have complaints about our jobs after all. I would listen to the discussion. It was about strife between teachers, for example, or between teachers and school leaders or school leaders and school boards. Parents and teachers, et cetera, et cetera.

[03:03]

And I noticed that there was a common theme. I think it's something that disturbs school leaders, something that they don't know how to deal with. As Rob points out, we haven't been trained. after all. And then we found as we searched the topic that there's not a lot of information from the field of education. But if you look into the world of business and organizational psychology, there actually is a wealth of research to guide us.

[03:35] SPEAKER_01:

Let's talk a little bit about the verbs. I was impressed with your discussion of kind of our action words for talking about conflict and what we do with it. We often use words like, I need to manage conflict. I need to resolve conflict. I need to get this conflict to simmer down. But you actually have the different recommendation for what we see as our verb in dealing with conflict.

[03:56]

Tell us a little bit about that.

[03:58] SPEAKER_02:

Well, we see it as there are kind of three basic strategies, approaches to dealing with conflict. And we call them the three A's because they all begin with the letter A. The first one is avoidance, which is probably the first go-to strategy that people have. And that includes only looking at the minor issues rather than the big things, picking up the low-hanging fruit rather than the larger issues, condescending to the conflict, trying to make it go away, placating people, etc. Then there's a kind of aggressive approach to this. This is the kind of approach where you say, hey, I'm the principal or I'm the school leader, and this is the way it's got to be.

[04:33]

And You do various things to make it happen using the tools of leadership to enforce compliance. Neither of those is satisfactory in the long run for dealing with deep-rooted conflicts. As we talked about before, they only kind of fester and they become larger until they become like a tsunami that overwhelms you. What we suggest is a third approach, which is addressing conflict. taking conflict as a normal activity something just happens in this course of human interaction and working to harness it actually not just to solve the conflict that's before you but to build your capacity of your school or school district to address future conflicts and that's basically the substance of our book is to provide strategies both for leaders to personally implement for themselves as well as strategies that can help grow their schools to become more what we call conflict agile organizations.

[05:29] SPEAKER_01:

I like that. Talk to us a little bit about the volatility angle, because you talk early in the book about going from conflict volatility to conflict agility and not trying to avoid conflict, not trying to ignore it, not trying to you know, just kind of yell at people to knock it off and make it go away, but to actually deal with it deftly. What does conflict agility mean and how does that relate to the idea of volatility from conflict?

[05:51] SPEAKER_00:

First of all, we see conflict agility, it's a muscle to us. And just like going to the gym, the more you use the muscle, it becomes toned. On the other hand, if you don't use the muscle, it atrophies, right? And I'll speak from personal experience on the job as a principal. The way that I approached conflict changed my practice more than anything in the last five or 10 years. It's these lessons that I learned about how to or harness conflict, not to dismiss it, ignore it, suppress it, but rather in an honest and respectful way to kind of use conflict

[06:46]

the collaborative process as a way to understand each other, move forward and solve problems. And I found after exercising this muscle with staff more and more year after year, that we were able to take on substantive issues that we would not have been able to approach in the past. There would have been this kind of knee-jerk resistance to change that's familiar to any practicing principle. But we became, I think, pretty good at collaborative problem solving in spite of the differences.

[07:24] SPEAKER_02:

One of the things that happens too is I think as school leaders is we internalize all this stuff and we take it very personally. Many of us see conflict as a personal failure. I didn't do something right. I made a mistake somewhere. I led us down the wrong path. And that's why this conflict has occurred.

[07:39]

And instead what we kind of do is turn that on its head and say, you know, conflict can be something for good, believe it or not. It can actually enhance the way the school grows and the things that it can do for students and the whole school community. So we kind of turn that model on its head and say, take advantage sometimes of the conflicts as they appear to you and use them to develop a consensus, to develop better programs, to develop more impact on students.

[08:05] SPEAKER_01:

That makes a lot of sense because we think of conflict as being a bad thing that's the result of people doing bad things. But if I think about some of the thorniest conflicts I dealt with as a principal, often nobody's doing anything bad. It's just that people want different good things or even want the same good thing. They're just thinking about it differently. There's talking past each other and not on the same page. So talk to us a little bit about what that can look like for conflict to be productive, for it to be a good thing if we handle it with agility and build that capacity.

[08:37]

What are some of the positives that can happen and how does that unfold for this to be generative, for this to be positive?

[08:42] SPEAKER_02:

Going with the metaphor of a muscle, the more you exercise this problem-solving ability, the more that people join together and harness their interests to produce good work, the greater confidence build. And it becomes kind of a virtuous cycle because success breeds success. So we handle this issue. We dispatch that. We see the results. We can now tackle something else.

[09:05]

So that's part one. The second thing is that our approach also builds a framework for doing these things. We use, for example, some of the strategies of design thinking to develop a framework, a structure for people approaching these problems systematically so they can get to the underlying issues. Seth is very fond of saying that a mentor of his once mentioned as a piece of advice, remember, the issue is not always the issue. And that's very true in conflict situations, that what people present to you is not necessarily what really is going on underneath. And so our book talks about getting underneath those ideas.

[09:41]

What are the values and beliefs or fact sets that you talked about that are different? They need to be exposed to the air, given some sunlight so they can grow together.

[09:50] SPEAKER_00:

So there are dozens and dozens of strategies that we offer in our book and this framework that Rob mentions, design thinking that we borrow from the field of engineering. actually. But you start with growing trust, which, you know, doesn't break any new ground in leadership theory. We all know that it starts with that foundation and strategies, resolving differences without dissension. It's always amazing to me that, you know, you and I, Justin, it's not enough to disagree with each other, but a lot of people feel, you know, Well, I have to put you down, too, also, because we disagree. So obviously, I'm smart.

[10:33]

You're not. I'm a good person. You're not a good person. You know, that's the approach that people take. And we think that that has to change. And again, you know, we suggest particular strategy.

[10:45]

I'll tell you one. This is how I started in school, actually, after researching great figures in the field of conflict remediation, like Mandela, for example, and how was he able to transform his country. So I started here with the faculty, and it's very simple. Ten minutes at the beginning of faculty meetings, I started with a protocol that I called for the good of the order, or we later called it for the good of the community. And people could raise issues that they saw in the school. As long as they were widespread issues, it couldn't be your personal problem.

[11:31]

And as long as we were all part of the solution, it wasn't pointing fingers. Okay, this is a problem. Now you go solve. And I wash my hands of it. So teacher might raise their hand and say, this is a middle school, of course, in the spring. So spring has sprung.

[11:48]

We've noticed changes in the behavior in the hallway. It's And then together, we would figure out what we all needed to do to take this on. And it's kind of, you know, a contained issue, but the skills of trusting each other, of all being a part of the solution, of not starting by playing the blame game. It developed a level of trust and then it grew from there.

[12:19] SPEAKER_02:

One of the things I think that we also talk about a great deal in the book and do when we work with other school leaders is using yourself as an instrument and really refining your own conflict agility skills. The level of emotionality in conflict is tremendously high and emotionality clouds judgment. Emotionality breeds kind of impulsive behavior. So part of what we do is work on strategies for developing that kind of the ability to kind of reflect on one's own strategies, one's own behavior in times of conflict, and be able to be able to use that as a strategic kind of approach. So you can control the level of emotionality you have, and therefore you kind of dissuade people from becoming a personal argument, thus against them. We also add a lot of times that one word can change a lot.

[13:07]

When you say yes, but takes the conversation in one direction. But when you say yes, and it takes the conversation in an entirely different direction, because you admit that we can do something together rather than work on opposite sides of the fence.

[13:21] SPEAKER_01:

Rob and Seth, why do you think this is so difficult for us in schools? Why are the stakes so high? And why are things so tense in so many of the conflicts that come up, you know, especially if we're talking about the kind of, you know, not just an angry parent who needs to be placated, but you know, something that we really need to work through as a school, why do the stakes get so high? And why do people get so worked up and have so much difficulty working together to work through things?

[13:43] SPEAKER_00:

That's a great question. And we think about that a lot. And we suggest some reasons in our book. There are many, but some of the ones that I favor include, if I go to the doctor with a fever, my doctor here in New York, I think you're in Arizona, if you went to the doctor with the same fever, they would probably administer the same tests and probably the treatment would be more or less the same as well. There's a standard of care, more or less, in medicine that doesn't exist in education. So who has all the right answers?

[14:24]

We all think that we do, but that's subject debate. And another one that I think is just so basic that it's overlooked, you mentioned it before, is parents advocate for their children as well they should. And professionals feel like we are well-trained. We got into this in the first place because we love and care for children. children. So children are worth fighting for in a way.

[14:56]

And I don't say that in a way that I'm trying to be provocative here, but we care about kids. That's a subject for debate. Are we doing the best for them? I want to add one topic here that we haven't touched on. It's interesting to us that We wrote the manuscript for the book. We pressed send and submitted it to our editor for review two years ago, maybe a little less than two years ago.

[15:26]

But the controversy in schools has mushroomed since that point in time. When we wrote the book, we were really thinking about these kind of day-to-day school operation kind of conflict. But now, of course... You look at the headlines of newspapers, book banning, CRT, etc.

[15:48]

And I'm not saying that I know these are all controversial issues. That's the point, actually, that controversy in schools has exacerbated. and reached a political fever. Rob was a history major and we sometimes talk about, you know, how far back do you have to go in US history to find a time that's similarly high emotion? Maybe you have to go back to school desegregation in the 70s or so, Brown versus Board of Education in 54. You have to go back a long time.

[16:28]

We're at this period of peak conflict now.

[16:32] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned operational issues. You know, it's easy to recall dealing with things like teachers complaining about kids running in the hall or things that are kind of local to us that we can work out as a school community. But we're also dealing with societal level conflicts, culture war conflicts, especially in our suburban schools. We're seeing those become really battlegrounds for different cultural issues. Let's talk if we could a little bit about the understanding process and the kind of design thinking and prototyping process, because I know that's a lot of the specific guidance you provide in the book.

[17:09]

So if we've recognized an issue, we're bringing all of our skills to bear on that issue. Take us through the process of understanding the issue and designing solutions.

[17:18] SPEAKER_02:

So design thinking is an approach that developed from engineering. And it was particularly designed to tackle what's called wicked problems, which is those kinds of issues that don't have obvious solutions. We're tinkering around the edges or just moving a couple of parts around are going to change. And there are many approaches to it. Common one says it has five stages, five steps. And perhaps the most important one, particularly in the time of polarization that we're currently living in, is stage one, which is empathy.

[17:50]

And empathy is designed, obviously, to know what it's like to be in someone else's shoes. That's a clear developmental issue for all kids. They need to learn what it's like for someone else to understand someone else's experience. It's also important for adults. In order to really resolve these kinds of deep rooted conflicts, you really need to understand what the other side, the other opinions are thinking, feeling, doing, and saying. And so the strategies in empathy really involve getting into really tackling that environment.

[18:22]

Much like a detective, actually much like an anthropologist who's trying to understand another culture. So empathy is stage one. When you have a good understanding, and this is done in a group format so that everyone involved participates in the problem solve. When you have that stage two is defining the problem. We mentioned before, the issue is not always the issue, and that's very true. We spend a lot of time sometimes chasing our tails.

[18:46]

We think we fixed something, but we really haven't fixed it at all. We fixed something tangential to it with something superficial. So stage two is really defining the issue and figuring out exactly what is happening here. Why is this such a deep-seated conflict? Stage three becomes very creative. Stage three is what we call ideation, which is free-form thinking.

[19:05]

You know, there are expressions like thinking within the box. And then, of course, counterposed to that is thinking outside the box. We have a different perspective on it. We say thinking without a box at all. Let your ideas roam, because even in the most crazy idea, sometimes is the germ of something that can really take root and be part of the solution. So stage three is this ideation.

[19:26]

Step four is now that we've got some ideas on the table, we test them. We do very quick and rapid tests. Piloting is a phrase that schools often use. And we do this and kind of quickly to see which ones have the most opportunity to make a difference. That stage four is prototyping. And the last stage is deciding on a final idea.

[19:45]

But we don't stop there. We test, we assess, we reevaluate, and we go back when necessary. The process actually is what we call iterative, which means that at any stage, you can go back to a previous stage. Maybe I didn't define the question right. Maybe I need more of an understanding of what's about. Maybe we always have to go all the way back to the empathy part to really get what people are thinking and what really troubles them.

[20:08]

And in the end, that kind of intensive, communicative, collaborative work produces stronger solutions because everybody has been through this together and produces something that you can assess. Did we do it? Did we not do it? And that's basically design thinking in a 90-second nutshell. But we believe that this process can be taught. And the other part of this is that it's not so crazy, it's not so intricate that it can't be adopted and adapted on a larger scale.

[20:39] SPEAKER_01:

One thing I wanted to ask about, especially around the idea of iteration and prototyping and trying things and see how they go, is the challenge of delayed results and the risk of assessing results too early. Because I can think of many situations in which people who didn't want something to happen would claim too early in the process that it wasn't working. We always have to have a certain amount of patience to see something through to get through the learning curve and not call something a failure too early. Any advice or any wisdom to share for leaders who are trying to help people slog through that kind of implementation curve and kind of deal with that messy middle of where we're still trying to figure out, is this going to work? Do we need to power through a little bit longer?

[21:20] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, that's a tough question that you're asking. There's a tightrope that you walk, right? And you can fall off either side of the tightrope, as you state. You know, you're starting a new curriculum, instructional strategy. You do have to give it time as people, as teachers become more adept, as they adapt the process and learn and grow into it. That's part of the challenge.

[21:50]

On the other hand, we've had this experience. I'm sure every practicing principal has. You're on a curriculum development committee. They reach some decisions that are promulgated, and then everybody on the committee shakes hands and wishes each other a good life, and that's the end of the committee's work. What we learn from design thinking, as Rob explained, is there needs to be formative assessment that you need to...

[22:26]

rather quickly, but not too quickly, take a look at any innovation, any initiative, and evaluate to see how it's going. So there's a tightrope that you walk.

[22:39] SPEAKER_02:

I think this is one of the real challenges of leadership. And one of the responsibilities of leadership is to set that agenda that makes it clear to people what the timeframe is. And a good part of that is related to transparency. When I was a superintendent, One of the things I discussed with the board very often was that the traditional school year, whatever it is, that 10 month frame, whether it's August through May, June, whether it's September through June, whatever it is, the traditional school year doesn't really correspond well to the time it takes for an innovation to take root and be assessed. So we have to be able to kind of suspend this belief for a moment or two and say, I got to give it time. I need benchmarks along the way because we certainly don't want to chase our tails and have costs that are necessary.

[23:26]

But at the same time, we have to give things time. That is part of setting the agenda for leadership. You have to be transparent about that. You need to make the timetable and the benchmarks clear to everyone so that we know whether we're on the right track. And I also believe, as many do, that belief follows practice. You have to give time for people to experience success or failure and make corrections before they'll come around in their beliefs and support something wholeheartedly.

[23:53]

So that element of time and giving people the safe space in which to do it is really a fundamental responsibility of the school leader.

[24:01] SPEAKER_01:

I like that. Just the kind of the setting the expectations. And, you know, sometimes we get into such a sales pitch for a change that we don't hype it up so that we set the expectation that this is going to immediately be better. We're immediately going to see results from this. You're going to love it. So it's going to be worth the effort.

[24:16]

And what turns out to be the case is that it's a lot of work and we don't have much success to show for it by the end of the school year. Like you said, the timeframes often don't really line up and there are different setbacks. I think that just realistic expectation setting of this is going to be hard for a while. This is going to look worse before it gets better, perhaps, especially as you said, with a curriculum adoption, we're not going to be good at it. At first, it's going to feel worse. We're going to say, hey, I don't know if this promised land is really out there.

[24:41]

Let's go back to Egypt. Just setting that expectation that this is going to be a journey. This is going to be a learning curve and setting an expectation for the amount of persistence that's going to be necessary. But I also loved what you said about setting some of those benchmarks so that we can know if we're headed in the right direction and not misinterpret expected difficulties as a sign that we should turn back.

[25:02] SPEAKER_02:

This is where critics are helpful, because we tend to get tunnel vision, that we're doing the right thing, we're going this track. And we also have confirmation bias all the time built into our thinking, which is that we look for facts that confirm what we think should happen. So the critics, and that's part of our process too, is to involve the critics. Critics can provide valuable feedback, a corrective feedback to that saying, hey, wait a minute, you missed this, you missed that. Take a look at this again. Let me go back to the timeframe issue for a moment and just talk about the fact that we don't have a magic answer to anything.

[25:38]

We don't have that, what is it called, the silver bullet. We don't have anything that's going to turn around things in an instant. What we have is a set of strategies and understandings that we can help school leaders understand that can help them in the long run to create a climate and a culture that's open to conflict, addressing conflict productively, accepting all views and encouraging people's participation in the problem-solving process. That takes time. It's not going to happen overnight. But we think, and we have examples, both from our own experience and from the world around us, that shows it can be done.

[26:14] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I have to say, I really hope this message makes its way into leadership preparation programs around the country. Because if I think about my own training as an administrator at the Danforth program at the University of Washington, we spent a lot of time on stuff like this. And it was some of the most valuable material pulling from some of the same sources that you talk about. But I really love the way you've pulled so much of this together in a deeply researched, but also not especially dense or long book, very easy to get through and very practical. So I hope that anyone who's involved with leadership preparation We'll take a very close look at this book. The title is From Conflict to Collaboration, A School Leader's Guide to Unleashing Conflict's Problem-Solving Power.

[26:52]

Rob and Seth, thank you so much for joining me today on Principal Center Radio.

[26:56] SPEAKER_02:

Thank you so much for having us. Thank you very much. Enjoyed it.

[26:58] Announcer:

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