A Systems Approach to CONFLICT MANAGEMENT - school district administration

School Administrator, March, 1996 by Lyle J. Kirtman, Maxine Minkoff

For most people, conflict engenders a negative image. Whether operating within the family structure, a social situation, or the workplace, people see conflict as divisive, and tend to avoid it.

Conflict, however, is not inherently bad. Within the school organization, it is to be expected. There always will be disagreements about whether to put more money into curriculum or into building maintenance; about the need for classroom aides and the ideal class size.

Managed well, these conflicts lead to healthy, constructive dialogue.

Early Attention

By dealing with conflict at early stages, it remains manageable. People can gain a better understanding about one another and the issues at hand. Provided with skills to help them work toward agreement, the conflict can lead to better organizational paradigms.

Many school districts, for example, have become painfully divided over the inclusion of special-needs students into the regular classroom. Regular teachers have felt "dumped on," special education teachers attacked for "pawning off their students." Left alone, this conflict intensifies, eventually pitting parents and teachers against one another.

Much of this could be avoided with early discussions among the teachers, clarification of all students' needs, agreement on the support needed for successful integration, and the development of a process endorsed by both special education and regular education teachers. By managing conflict, additional conflict is prevented.

The best resolution to a conflict situation is a win-win solution.

Furthermore, conflicts often are symptoms, not causes, of organizational problems. If a school system is fraught with teacher strikes, tensions between teachers and parents, or fights among students, this is symptomatic of broader and deeper organizational problems that must be dealt with systemically if they are to be dealt with effectively.

Perhaps most importantly, to manage conflicts in schools, it is necessary to understand the interrelationships in the school system and how behavior at one level of the school hierarchy, or between levels, ripples throughout the entire system.

For example, look at how a school committee handles conflict with the superintendent and how the superintendent in turn deals with his or her administrative team. Patterns of behavior established at one level of the school organization have serious implications for resolving conflicts at other levels.

Unless conflict is looked at systemically and these patterns are acknowledged, specific disagreements may be resolved, but the underlying issues will continue, and new, symptomatic conflicts will emerge.

Systematic Approach

We propose the following seven-step systems approach to analyze and act upon conflict that emerges in a districtwide or school-based program or initiative:

No. 1: Review how the organization's vision is impacted by the conflict, and what steps need to be taken to get them into alignment.

No. 2: Identify the formal and informal leadership of the initiative, and how it is affected by the conflict.

No. 3: Identify key participants and their roles in this situation.

No. 4: Develop a strategy to modify the organizational processes and procedures affected by the initiative so they are in line with the organization's vision.

No. 5: Determine how the culture and history of the system impacts on the initiative and either fuels or mitigates the conflict.

No. 6: Decide on an implementation plan that factors in the first five steps.

No. 7: Establish a monitoring and evaluation process.

A school district could apply this process to defuse potential conflict in any initiative. What follows is an illustration of how this can be done, using the budget process as an example.

Budget Conflicts

When we speak of conflict in a school system, all roads lead to the budget process. As school budgets shrink, the budget process becomes the battlefield.

A suburban school system in Massachusetts recently applied this seven-step process to revise their budget process in a manner that increased the focus on educational goals, outcomes, and student achievement.

The school system decided to break the budget paradigm of separate camps battling for their distinct piece of the pie. Almost universally the tension between school systems and their surrounding municipalities creates many short- and long-term problems. Instead of staying within this paradigm, the district's school committee, finance committee, selectmen, superintendent, town manager, and their senior staffs met with facilitators to work through the seven steps.

At each stage of the process the potential for conflict and the breakdown of trust existed. An agreed-upon vision of the budget process never had existed among the three town boards. No one in school administration or in town government had faith that the budget could meet both town and school needs. The schools and the town competed for minimal resources. Town departments competed with each other.