December 8, 2022
Business Relationships Are Like Tangled Holiday Lights
In any organization, relationships with stakeholders are vital to promoting goodwill, trust, and support while enhancing performance. However, like any connection, these relationships can have ups and downs. Sometimes, things can go wrong, leading to frustration, disappointment, and harm to both people and the organization. Business relationships can become a complex web of positive and negative experiences, including memories, joy, anger, expectations, trust, distrust, wins, and failures. If the organization does not resolve negative feelings, they can escalate into conflicts that affect productivity and performance, characterized by resentment or out-of-control anger. As with tangled holiday lights, it can be challenging to identify where the mess begins and ends in business relationships. The start of a conflict may differ for each person involved, as each person has a different interpretation of what caused the conflict.
Furthermore, addressing broken or missing light bulbs in tangled holiday lights is essential. Keeping the bulbs intact while untangling the lights is crucial, as too many broken lights can make the string unusable. In our analogy of business relationships, functional lights represent individuals’ durability, while broken lights indicate vulnerabilities. A business relationship comprises individuals with exposures that could create an unresolvable situation if strained due to negativity, which could weaken the community. Untangling holiday lights provides practical and essential lessons for organizations to manage and resolve conflicts. Effective conflict resolution begins with identifying the beginning of the conflict for each party and accommodating and acknowledging contributing factors. Organizations can then adopt Kilmann’s conflict mode instrument, focusing on the collaborative conflict management style, to create a unified team and safeguard the community imperative in corporate success. Untangling the lights, competing, accommodating, and compromising cannot be avoided, as the holiday requires the lights. Similarly, the collaborative style is the most effective conflict management approach to untangle the mess and create a viable solution for everyone involved. After that, conflict resolution techniques such as mediation, negotiation, arbitration, mutual decision-making, and alternate dispute resolution systems (ADR) can be effective.
Amanda is the Marketing Director at Wilke CPAs & Advisors, LLP