When Goliaths Clash: Book Reviews
What Role is Conflict Playing in Your Association?
By Jamie A. Notter
It's been a long time coming for a good book on this topic. The inability to deal with conflict, particularly at the senior executive level, has been needlessly draining time, energy and money from organizations for some time. Howard Guttman's When Goliaths Clash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization finally provides a solid description both of the ways that conflict eats away at the effectiveness of organizations and the actions executives can take to resolve conflict and begin to reverse the damage.
Guttman is a management consultant who apparently focuses his practice on the alignment of senior teams. The book is based on his work, and useful examples from real clients (who were not afraid to use their names) to help ground the lessons he teaches.
This book provides a one-stop shop for concepts around conflict resolution. It talks about the anatomy of conflict (differing interests or perceptions), styles of conflict (non-assertive, assertive, or agressive), and reactions to conflict (play victim, leave, change yourself, or confront). Guttman also writes extensively about teams, since that is where he sees the destructive impact of conflict. His analysis also includes a helpful exploration of the four stages of group development - form, storm, norm, and perform.
The "storming" stage, for instance, is where conflict emerges, and unless a group can successfully resolve the conflict, it stays stuck in that stage and never gets to the "performing" stage. Guttman provides real-world examples of executive teams using conflict management techniques to reach the "performing" stage.
The last section of the book gets practical, exploring the skills needed to successfully manage conflict and, therefore, build high-performing executive teams. This chapter accurately identifies the range of skills necessary to manage conflict, from listening actively to providing feedback to others to connecting emotionally to others during a conflict. Guttman even adds an excellent chapter on "e-conflict", or how the best qualities of e-mail (quick, easy, global, and personally detached) can contribute to creating and exacerbating some very destructive conflict.
These topics are classics in the conflict resolution field and have been integrated into training programs for years. But Guttman's coverage of the concepts is well done, although the direct applicability of the lessons as he presents them is questionable. Specifically, in his examples, he is consulting directly with the teams in question, and in some cases the individual executives have the benefit of coaching when developing the skills. Simply reading the book will not adequately prepare you to practice these skills. The book is, however, an excellent starting point. It can help you as an executive better understand how you, your team, and your association deal with conflict. The book may not be a complete road map for change, but it will give you the tools and concepts you need to do to your initial assessment of the likely high toll that conflict is taking on your organization.