My Path: Conflict Resolution, National and Work-based
One of my first ever blog posts was about voting (published November 3, 2018). Why?
I’ve been helping people register & learn more about voting since before I was old enough to vote. At 17, I volunteered with the NY Public Interest Research Group to register homeless people living in Queens. Until I started volunteering, I didn’t know that homeless people could vote - I had never really thought about it.
So every year I encourage people I know to vote. I’ve transformed my husband and at least one of my best friends from sometimes-voters to every-year voters. My husband, who has the advantage of living with me so he has fewer chances to ignore me, votes in ALL the elections with me. And now our almost-19-year-old son does too.
And yes, I said “every year.” In most places across the U.S., there are elections every year. Local elections often have a deeper impact on people’s daily lives than national elections - consider issues like school funding, traffic conditions, whether your street corner has a stop sign on it. Zoning regulations governing what businesses are allowed to show up where. All things decided (in whole or in part) by town/city, county, and state officials.
What does this have to do with our conflict resolution work?
Here are 3 ways my political experiences connect to the kind of conflict resolution work we do now:
The Obvious
Voting is an easy way to resolve conflicts. Majority rules. We know this - it’s something we’re all accustomed to. In the U.S., perhaps because of our political system, most schoolchildren experience voting in low-stakes ways throughout our childhoods. Everyone gets this.
Can you use voting to resolve workplace conflicts? Unlikely… but in some situations possible. It depends on the conflict.
The Only-Slightly-Less-Obvious
How we run our communities and our country is often reflected in how we run our organizations. Why is co-leadership so rare in business? Has the country ever had co-presidents?
Less flippantly, the whole majority-rules thing is part and parcel of a mentality that strength leads - and thus people or ideas that may appear weak wind up losing out - in elections, in promotions, in developmental details, in who gets a raise when.
Sometimes decision-making and conflict-resolution processes that appear to be improvements aren’t truly improvements. When a primary election is decided by caucus, for example, there is not a simple vote - there is a discussion that seeks to build consensus. This sounds like an improvement in that it creates dialogue, but, in practice too few people have the time to commit to caucusing. Those who already have privilege (like only needing to work one job, or not having a full-time job at all and otherwise able to live comfortable) get to invest the time in the caucus, and others don’t. Those who are already well-informed participate, and those less-informed don’t - even though the decisions made by elected officials affect everyone.
The More Personal Side
In the same vein as my early volunteering, I worked for eight years at a Planned Parenthood affiliate. While I was then lucky enough to be paid to continue to work on nonpartisan voter engagement work (one year overseeing a volunteer effort to register over 200 voters across just four counties), I also began to experience more internal and external conflicts of various types.
Some of the internal issues were simply a product of working in the same organization for eight years - you just don’t notice or experience as much when you’re only employed for two years, or a summer!
There were other internal issues at this particular organization as well. Sometimes nonprofits - just like for-profits - internalize the power struggles while actively working against them. This can result in a toxic workplace with double standards or white-centric customs and processes.
I remember vividly deciding to simply duplicate a coworker’s duties so I could avoid collaborating with them. This was after I had raised an incident that I interpreted as deeply disrespectful with my supervisor, who then dictated to me the terms of how I ought to be working with that person. It made sense at the time to agree to the terms presented, but I had no connection with the terms or encouragement to attempt to understand the other person’s perspective. So, I just did the work I needed that she was supposed to have been responsible for.
That’s where mediation would have made a difference.
Sitting with my coworker and reckoning with our different approaches to work situations could have changed the way we worked together, for the better of the organization.
Takeaways
Voting is an expression of how we believe our communities should be - the types of leaders we want to see in charge, the types of policies that we think are best. My favorite thing about voting? Everyone gets a vote. And every vote counts.
While voting is an expedient way to make decisions for a group of over 342 million people, it does not make sense in small groups where people know each other and need to work together to achieve the mission. In fact, “majority rules” can be deeply demoralizing by discounting the experiences of the minority.
Mediation represents a humane way to empower people to create their own best paths forward. And mediation skills are helpful for everyone to navigate interpersonal relationships, everyday low-level conflicts, and navigating team dynamics - at work and in volunteer and community situations.