Conflict Management training in LucerneBefore proposing a compromise, have you checked each person's priorities?
Faced with two incompatible demands, a manager may immediately look for a middle ground. But how useful is that compromise if nobody has checked what actually matters to each person?
1. What the literature establishes: opposing interests can be overestimated
Leigh Thompson and Reid Hastie (1990, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) show that participants in experimental negotiations can misperceive their counterparts' interests and overlook compatible interests. In particular, they approach negotiation with a fixed-pie assumption: whatever one person gains must be lost by the other. For managers, this suggests distinguishing demonstrated incompatibility from opposition that has merely been assumed.
2. A mechanism: understanding priorities rather than guessing them
Adam D. Galinsky, William W. Maddux, Debra Gilin and Judith B. White (2008, Psychological Science) distinguish cognitive perspective taking from emotional empathy in experimental negotiations. Their findings suggest that considering another person's viewpoint and interests can help uncover mutually beneficial agreements, while empathy does not produce the same effects. Understanding why a demand matters is therefore not equivalent to sharing the emotion behind it.
3. The premature conclusion: every conflict must conceal a win-win solution
These studies do not demonstrate that all interests can be reconciled. A genuinely indivisible resource, a safety requirement or a contractual commitment may restrict the available arrangements. The aim is to check the scope for negotiation before requesting concessions, not to promise satisfaction for everyone. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limits: taking someone's perspective does not mean knowing it
Negotiation experiments simplify situations: the issues and options are generally more clearly bounded than in an ongoing working relationship. They do not establish that asking about priorities will resolve a conflict shaped by hierarchical dependence or fear of retaliation. In practice, an assumed priority must remain a hypothesis to be confirmed, rather than becoming an explanation imposed on the other person.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide settings where short communication channels and close relationships, particularly in family-run businesses, may create the impression that everyone's priorities are already known. In a hypothetical hotel example, a scheduling dispute might reflect not two competing preferences for working hours, but a need for personal predictability and a need to cover guest arrivals. Within SHR's conflict management programme, one possible exercise is to record the demand, the assumed priority and the priority confirmed by the other person separately, then formulate an option that takes both parties into account. Across the next three disagreements handled, the manager can check how many priorities were actually confirmed before a compromise was proposed; this indicator measures a practice, not conflict resolution. To go further: explore the Conflict Management training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Conflict Management in Lucerne
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