Although most people know from personal experience that the two win-lose methods of conflict resolution carry a high risk of damaging relationships and reducing organizational effectiveness, these continue to be the methods of choice for most leaders. While there may be a number of explanations for this, two seem most probable: people have had little or no personal experience with any other approach to conflict resolution, and, in the minds of most people, having the greatest influence is equated with possessing the most power.
Most children were brought up in families in which one or both parents administered frequent and liberal doses of rewards and punishments to make their kids do what the adult decided they should do. A well-known nationwide study of violence in families found that 80 percent of the parents said they used ordinary means of physical punishment, such as spanking and slapping. Nearly 30 percent of the parents had committed a violent act against their children for which they could have been arrested for assault! Likewise, in schools, rewards and punishments have always been the principal tools teachers have used to get “discipline” in the classroom. That practice hasn’t changed much for several hundred years, which is a source of some amazement to me. This means that by the time youngsters are ready to move into adulthood, very few have been exposed to any other model of ¬adult-¬child conflict resolution except the one in which adults use power to enforce obedience.
So, children get little opportunity to experience relationships with adults who use non-power methods. All they experience is coercion and domination. Even if you ask youngsters, as I have, why authority and power failed to make them comply to teachers’ and parents’ demands, with amazing frequency they reply, “I guess they should have used more.”
No wonder nine out of ten people who have come to our leadership training workshops over the past fifty years are so surprised to learn that there actually is a workable alternative to win-lose methods. And no wonder these leaders express such disbelief when confronted with the idea that they lose influence when they use power. In fact, some of them enroll in our program expecting to be taught how to use their power more cleverly or more wisely—never expecting to be taught not to use it at all.