dressing for conflict
Two factors influence your communication in conflict situations:
1. how hard you push for your agenda
2. how much attention you give to relationships.
These two factors result in 5 different conflict styles:
Cooperating, Harmonising, Directing, Avoiding, Compromising.
Christine Lagarde owning her space
And using her scarf and body language to expand her territory
In this post I’ll focus on the overuse of harmonising and learning to increase the use of directing in your conflict management.
DIRECTING: high focus on your agenda, low focus on the relationship. You: control, assert, insist, compete, control, demand, defeat.
HARMONISING: low focus on your agenda, high focus on the relationship. You: agree, go along with, give in, affirm.
No one style is the best response for all situations of conflict, because what is helpful in one situations won’t be in another. Harmonizing is a helpful conflict style when you want to bring kindness and comfort into the relationship. Because you only place medium value on your own agenda, you give in easily to speed up the decision-making process. However, there are times when your agenda, your project, your pay increase are important and you don’t want to give in. Where the only wise response is Directing because your agenda really has to take priority.
Case Study one. A kindergarten teacher was exhausted by parents daily complaining and frustrated by her inability to stop this time-draining behaviour. She often felt bullied.
Case study 2. A corporate manager’s phone conversations with a male client left her feeling frustrated and undervalued because he dominated every call and was frustrated when this continued in their face to face meeting. She was an expert in her field, yet had been talked down to and her opinions not valued.
Both women’s:
GOAL was to be perceived as clear, confident experts
CLOTHING CHOICES were light coloured, lacy tops and light coloured trousers.
CREATED MIS-ALIGNMENT between internal goal and external impression
LEARNT TO SUCCESSFULLY align goals and visual communication.
The changes we made: adding a jacket, a protective third layer provided visual weight and immediate visual authority. Even though both women initially felt a jacket was overdressed, they realised it help them communicate as directors not harmonisers. And acknowledged the jacket tripled their perceived confidence level. The same happened when the white lacy top to changed to plain navy.
Their KEY LEARNING?
Visual weight through a third layer or authoritative color adds confidence.
Ms Tordoni’s jacket adds a protective third layer
Dressing to prioritise your agenda
1. Dress directive
Confidence is our ability to know that we can successfully deal with life’s challenges. We humans are visual and dressing to be seen, heard and valued, means people see a confident woman before you open our mouth. Don’t dress like a harmoniser if you today is your big day and you need impact and influence.
2. Dress for visibility
Most of of us operate with one dominant conflict style in our repertoire. Strengths that through years of overuse have morphed into a weakness and has now become your comfort zone. Stepping out of your comfort zone and communicating another side of your personality takes time and practise till it feels authentic. Don’t hide your directive personality behind clothing that makes you look like a little grey mouse, even if others on your team do so. Dress for confidence, visibility and influence even if you need to fake it till you make it!
3. Set boundaries
Olympic athletes have coaches who help them visualize winning. Studies have show that visualising your success is the most important factor in actually achieving it. Dressing intentionally to set boundaries helps you visualise actually communicating impact and influence. When you open your closet in the morning, set your intention on visually and verbally aligning your message to make your agenda a priority.
There will be times when you want to be a harmonier and prioritise the relationship. And times when it is essential to push your agenda through. allow yourself time to reflect and ask yourself’ “ What do I need t prioritise today?”