Managing and Resolving a Conflict

There is a new director who just started working at my school. Within a month of his presence, he started to create some changes which to some teachers and principals are not important and worse he presented it in a very bossy way. As a school principal, I have to have a regular meeting with him with the other principals from other units. What I noticed, the other principals preferred to just follow whatever he instructed with almost no comments, but I showed a disagreement once when I thought a change sounded so unimportant. He showed dislikes and we started a silent war for quite some time.

Two strategies I have learned from this situation to manage or resolve a conflict:

1.       Avoiding confrontation to some extent has two impacts. First is the negative impact that it causes further communication becomes stiff. People who try to avoid confrontation tend to reduce creativity. They just prefer to listen and do not want to forward ideas. Second, the positive impact is that the communication can go on and business still runs.

2.       Learning from other principals who tend to follow, I try to do the same by accepting the changes. I try to put aside my dislikes and think positively by focusing on how the changes may result. What I think is good may not be ‘that’ good in its application. This attitude has brought a peace to the atmosphere of the team work as well as my own feeling.

I could have done those strategies by looking at the other principals, and when we had chance to discuss about it they advised me to do so and see for the result first. It may be in the long run, but whatever it may come up in the future at least we can go on with what we have at present time.

How Others and I Evaluate Me as a Communicator

There are similarities and differences in how I evaluate myself and how others do to me. I chose a colleague and my husband as the evaluators. The similarities, both of them agree to put me in group 1 or the ‘people-oriented’ group as my listening style which also the same as my own result. They also evaluate my verbal aggressiveness in the same moderate level although I have seven points’ lower score. The difference fall in the communication anxiety inventory level. They result in low level which means they consider me to be comfortable communicating in most situations and feel confident in anticipating it while I result in mild level. This surprised me because what others see me to be comfortable in most situations, as a matter of fact, I feel differently. My husband who has known me more than 20 years sees me as a confident person in encountering for a comfortable communication situation while deep down in my heart I do have a feeling of in confidence in communicating with others in certain situations.

The results of the evaluations give me two insights:

1.       There is always a ‘part’ of each individual which will not be recognized by others no matter how close they are. As what I got from the evaluation on me, the self-esteem (how I feel about myself) is not recognized by the people I meet and interact every day.  

2.       Although the result of my verbal aggressiveness is categorized in moderate level, I realize that my ability to argue has to be put as an alert to remind me to be careful when I deal with a difficult person or specifically difficult families in early childhood context.   

References

Rubin, R., Palmgreen, P., &Sypher, H. E. (Eds.) (2009). Communication research measures: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge.  Retrieved from http://mym.cdn.laureate-media.com

. Rubin, R. B., Rubin, A. M., Graham, E. E., Perse, E. M., & Seibold, D. R. (Eds.) (2009). Communication research measures II: A sourcebook. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://mym.cdn.laureate-media.com

Communicating with People from Different Culture

One of my neighbors has a principle that I think is unusual. All the females in the house have to wear long pants, long sleeved blouse or T-shirt and a veil on every single day, including their nanny. When they replace the nanny with a new one whose outfit is the same as most people in general, they require her to wear the way they set the standard. My city is very humid and people have the air conditioners in the bedrooms only, so I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it is to do the household chores in such an outfit.

At the school where I work, I have to deal with the teachers who are more than twenty years younger than I am. They are called the millenials generation who fully integrate computers into their everyday communication (O’Hair & Wiemann, 2012). It is indeed true, because I find the way they communicate is different from what I usually do when I communicate with my old friends from colleagues or relatives. They are the ‘gadget’ people who seem to be available 24 hours on their cell phones through BBM or WhatsApp. They can even communicate through these to a person that they can just walk and find to talk with when they are in the same building and on the same floor.   

I cannot and should not just consider those people uncommon and ignore the difference. Like or dislike, I have to face with people who are different from me when I communicate. To make sure that my goal of communication is achieved, I have to try to make my communication effective. In dealing with those people who are different from me as a result of diverse religion and age, there are three strategies that I think will be useful:

1.       Accept my neighbor’s unusual principle to show respect. It is their right to set their outfit standard. As long as they do not tell me to do the same, I should not be bothered. I should put myself in their shoes to understand the reason they do that is to respect what their religion tells them to do which could be certainly different from my religion or belief.

2.       I should not stereotype my neighbor by thinking all Moslem people dress up illogically or have a prejudice against them by judging them to be weird or making a rigid description.

3.       I do not have to be a millenials generation or a person to be reachable anytime on my Wasap, but I have to be capable of using BBM or WhatsApp to be ‘in’ their link. For some reasons, BBM or WhatsApp is very useful. By doing so, I will minimize the gap and at the same time show an effort to adapt.

 

Reference

O’Hair, D. &Wiemann, M. (2012). Real communication: An introduction. New York:

Belford/St. Martin’s, Chapter 3, “Communication and Culture” (p. 80)

 

 

The Analysis of Nonverbal Behaviors

 

 

To observe a nonverbal behavior in a communication, I choose a serial TV show from HBO. The title is Serangoon Road. The first time I watched it, it was turned off. I assumed there were a husband and wife having a conversation before going to bed about what they had done the whole day and what they were going to do about it for the next day. It seemed that the husband was proposing something good that made the wife looked so happy from the way she smiled. The following scene was the next day in the morning, both of them left the house, and there came a conversation of two women and the man or the husband from the previous scene having tea in the living room and one of them read a newspaper. Then a man wearing a very formal suit came and seemed to tell about bad news that caused the two women looked surprised.  

The second time I watched it with the sound turned on, I found that the man and the woman were not husband and wife. They were just friends talking about another person that I was not sure who he was. The next scene he went to his neighbors and brought a newspaper. He was talking with two women about the news on the newspaper when a man wearing a suit came and they were talking about the political conspiracy related to the news.

From both different ways of watching the same brief scene, it is very obvious that facial expression and body language only is difficult to guess and cannot tell the correct message. They create many assumptions. Having the possibility to listen to the verbal communication in the conversation makes a TV scene much easier to understand. The nonverbal communication during the conversation helps viewers to get the message correctly, and the music which was played during the scene helps us to be more involved in the story. Thus, it is perfect to hear clearly and see carefully to understand a message in a communication.