Conflict Styles

"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results." Andrew Carnegie 

I’ve known for awhile now that my conflict style is mostly avoidant with a touch of compromising. This makes things a little hard when working in groups. Such as for our Digital Storytelling project we just completed, it was a little hard during the editing process to make everyone’s vision come completely alive. My first instinct is to include all the ideas and just make it work but with the constraints given there wasn’t a way to do it. Which put me in an uncomfortable position. I want everyone to be happy with the progress and I don’t want to have fights or disappointment for excluded material but it was just what needed to happen to fit in our five minute time limit. This whole process gave me an excellent opportunity to practice approaching things with a different conflict style which I desperately needed. Although I would love to argue that avoidant conflict style is by far superior to all the rest, I know that there are other styles that fit better in many situations. When they come up I can’t just pull aside and think “What style is best here?” Decisions need to be made and as peer mentors we’ll need to be able to quickly adapt for anything that could happen. Our class is an outline for what may happen next semester but there will always be surprises when dealing with students we don’t know well coming into it. Not only that but working with each other we need to be able to adapt to each others styles and make changes that will better our classes.