You will be able to name your most-used conflict mode and the price you pay for using it too often.
When Wei Jie did the activity from lesson 5.1, Five ways people handle conflict, and when each one fits, he listed five conflicts from the past year. Four of them he had handled by competing. The fifth, a disagreement with his own director, Karen, he had avoided for three months.
That pattern is common. Almost everyone has a default, a mode they reach for before they have thought about the situation. Many people have two: one for people below or level with them, another for people above. Wei Jie competed downwards and sideways, and avoided upwards.
Most people lean on one or two modes because of habit, not because those modes fit the situations they face. Your default usually formed early, from your family, your schooling, your first managers and what worked for you before. Someone who grew up in a household where raising your voice got results may compete by reflex. Someone who learned that disagreement upset people may avoid or accommodate without noticing.
A default is not a flaw. It is often a strength that worked somewhere. The problem is that it fires whether or not it fits, and every mode has a price when you use it too often.
The quickest way to find yours is to look at the five conflicts from your lesson 5.1 activity. If one mode shows up three or more times, that is probably your default. If you are not sure, ask someone who has worked with you for a while. They usually know.
Over-avoiding lets problems grow. The issue you did not raise in January is still there in April, now with three months of extra history and resentment attached. People who avoid too much often describe a pattern: things build up quietly, then come out all at once over something small. The person most surprised by the outburst is often the one who had it.
Wei Jie's three months of avoiding Karen were about his team's budget. He thought it was too small for the number of stores, but raising it felt like criticising her. By the time he finally said something, two of his supervisors had resigned and he was angry in a way that made the conversation much harder than it needed to be.
Over-accommodating teaches other people that your needs are optional. If you always give way, colleagues learn, without meaning any harm, that your preferences can be ignored. Requests drift towards you because you never say no. Eventually you feel taken for granted, and you are partly right, though you also taught them. Module 7 covers saying no and setting boundaries for exactly this.
Over-competing wins arguments and loses cooperation. People who are regularly overruled stop offering ideas, stop warning you about problems, and agree in meetings while doing their own thing afterwards. That is what happened with Wei Jie's roster dispute. He won the meeting and lost a month of the store manager's goodwill.
The hidden cost is information. If people do not think you will listen, they stop telling you things. Over-competing managers are often the last to hear bad news.
Over-compromising looks fair and is often lazy. Splitting the difference is quick, but it can mean that neither side gets what it actually needed. If marketing needs a launch in March and operations needs stock to arrive first, a February compromise leaves marketing short of time and operations short of stock. Some differences deserve a proper solution, and splitting them only hides the problem for a few weeks.
It is tempting to conclude that collaborating is the answer to everything, since it aims to meet everyone's needs. But collaborating takes time and energy. You have to surface what each side needs, explore options, and often have more than one conversation. Using it on whether the team lunch is at a hawker centre or a restaurant is a waste of everyone's afternoon.
People who over-collaborate tend to be slow to decide and can exhaust colleagues who just want an answer. In a team with a lot of small decisions, that adds up. Collaborating is the right tool for important issues where both sides' needs matter. On minor issues, a quick compromise or simply accommodating is often kinder.
Knowing your default is useful only if you then do something different at least once. Choose one upcoming situation where your default would be the wrong fit, and plan to use a different mode on purpose.
Wei Jie chose the budget conversation he had been avoiding with Karen. It was important to both of them, so he decided to try collaborating instead of either avoiding it further or turning up angry and competing. He would bring the numbers, ask what constraints she was under, and look for a solution together. Lesson 5.3, Conflict in Singapore workplaces: hierarchy, face and indirect signals, helped him plan how to raise it.
In the activity below you name your own default mode, one recent cost of overusing it, and one situation this month where you will try a different mode.
Write your default mode, one recent cost of overusing it, and one situation this month where you will try a different mode.
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