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Abstract:

In Confronting without Offending: Positive and Practical Steps to Resolving Conflict, Pegues provides a detailed guide to confrontation with a biblical spin. The book is broken up into five parts: Confrontation: The Bridge to Harmony, Biblical Confrontation and Conflict Management, Strategies for an Effective Confrontation, Confrontation and Personality Temperament, and Confrontation Guidelines for Selected Situations.

In part one Pegues talks about the goal of confrontation and what the Bible says on dealing with confrontation before it gets out of hand. She defines confrontation as “the act of coming together face-to-face to resolve an issue (pg. 16) Pegues goes on to say that “every offense has the potential to cause a permanent breach in a relationship” (pg. 12).

In part two Pegues discusses the different conflict management styles used when dealing with various issues. The conflict management styles include: the dictator, the accommodator, the abdicator, and the collaborator. Pegues has dedicated a chapter to each of the conflict management styles. The dictator is described as “do it my way”, the accommodator is described as “have it your way”, the abdicator is described as “I’ll run away”, and the collaborator is described as “let’s find a way.” In each chapter Pegues explains when it is appropriate to use each style and offers a biblical example to support each style.

Part three shows us the six-step confrontation process. The steps include: preparing to encounter, owning the problem, speaking the right words, listening, negotiating future behavior, and releasing the offender. Pegues has also devoted a chapter to each of these steps. Throughout each chapter Pegues provides examples of how to use each of these steps through biblical stories as well as realistic examples that can be applied both at work and in the readers personal life.

In part four “we explore four basic temperaments that most of us reflect, not only in conflict, but also in our day-to-day interactions with others” (pg. 127). These temperaments are closely related to how we decide to handle conflict. In an effort to help the reader remember the different temperaments they have been labeled as people found on an airplane: passenger or phlegmatic, attendant or sanguine, captain or choleric, and engineer or melancholy.

Lastly, in part five Pegues provides the reader with a variety of interactions that they may encounter each day. The interactions in this section include: family interactions, marketplace interactions, and social/other interactions. Pegues provides the reader with a number of situations as well as guidelines on how to resolve that conflict.

In conclusion, disagreements are going to be found wherever there are people. Through reading this book one can learn the proper ways of communication when experiencing a confrontation as well as what the proper steps are in resolving the conflict.

Concrete Response

As I read through part three: strategies for effective communication, I realized that my staff and I could use some improvement on our effective communication. The first thing that stood out to me was establishing the right purpose. Pegues tells us that the focus of bringing a confrontation to the forefront should be to “achieve a better relationship or getting someone to stop doing something that is negatively affecting you, others, or themselves. The goal should not be to tell someone of, to get something off your chest, or to run a guilt trip on the offender” (pg. 68) Lately, it seems that employees, both in my department and outside of my department, have had the wrong intentions when bringing issues to the forefront. Their motivation has been to get back at someone or “to get things off their chest.” I have been guilty of this as well. At times I feel that when an employee gets irritated they immediately begin to bring issues up that they otherwise would not have mentioned. Additionally, when my employees confront one another or when they confront me they usually start off with “Other people feel that you…” rather than stating “I have noticed that you…” Pegeus describes this as a cowardly act. She states, “not owning the problem when you have a problem with another person’s behavior is a cowardly act” (pg. 71). I believe that if my working team began to understand and implement these steps of confrontation then we will be able to better communicate with one another and work better as one team with a focus on the participants and their care.

Reflection

While reading through each part of Confronting without Offending there was nothing that stood out to me or caused me to question if this book would work for me as a leader and for my work team. I really felt that this book would be beneficial to my team because of the way each part is laid out. However, I do believe a workbook would help readers better apply the concepts within the book and prevent them from becoming overwhelmed when reading over the different situations provided as examples in each part.

Secondly, I come from a team where there is a lot of turnover in just about every department and this seems to be the reason for a lot of the confrontation and tension within each department. Just when an employee adapts to the way their manager runs their department, someone new comes in and the “get to know you” process starts all over again. For example, over the last four years my assistant has had five different managers causing her to have a lot of resentment towards our organization. I have noticed that she doesn’t handle change well and gets frustrated at the first mention of change. With that being said, my question to Pegues is how does she suggest the reader apply these concepts if the reader is constantly experiencing ambiguity within their organization? Is it worth going through each of the steps if the reader knows they are going to be getting a new manager sooner rather than later?

Action

Pegues (2009) states that “the major problems experienced by most organizations are not technology related; they are rooted in how people deal with each other…and conflicts arise when these fears are tapped into or needs are unmet by others” (pg. 127) I believe that in order for my department to understand one another and to achieve the overall goal of effective communication, we must first know what our personality temperament is. To achieve this, I plan to administer the P.A.C.E personality temperament quiz provided to me on page 128 of this book to my staff, including myself. Once each of us have identified our temperament type I will provide my staff with a handout describing their needs, fears, preferences, and propensities. These handouts will be created using the information provided in chapter fourteen (pg. 133-145). I will also give them the P.A.C.E. Personality Profile Behavioral, Summary provided in Appendix I (pg. 173) to give a quick overview and insight into the behavioral tendencies of themselves and others around them. By understanding their temperaments, they will be able to better interact with people, both inside of work and outside, who are different than them.

According to Pegues (2008) confrontation can be the most powerful tool for personal growth and the enhancement of relationships when done the correct way (pg. 14). This stood out to me because I feel that this is a concept that is severely lacking at my organization. Few communicate effectively, saying things to other people rather than the person who actually offended them. Pegues (2008) tells us that everyone uses a certain conflict management style when dealing with different life situations (pg. 27) and our personality temperament determines how we approach and respond to these different situations (pg. 27). In an effort to improve the communication within the recreation therapy department, I am going to host an in-service on the strategies for effective communication given through out part 3 of this book. During the in-service I will touch on the important points made in each of the six chapters. After touching on the key points in each chapter I will administer a worksheet retrieved from the Seven Challenges Workbook: Communication Skills for Success at Home and Work (Rivers, D., 2012). The challenges include: deep listening, explaining your conversational intent and inviting consent, expressing yourself more clearly and more completely, translating your criticisms and complaints into requests for action, asking questions more “open ended” and more creatively, thanking: expressing more gratitude, appreciation, encouragement, and delight, and adopting the “living-as-continuous-learning approach. I believe that through the pairing of these challenges with the information provided from Pegues, my work team will be on the fast track to more effective communication. Because of the hustle and bustle of the holidays, my goal is to implement this idea beginning Monday, January 5, 2015.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and believe that it will be beneficial to my personal growth as well as the personal growth of those on my team.

Reference

Pegues, D. (2009). Confronting without offending. Eugene, Ore.: Harvest

House.

Rivers, D. (2012, January 1). – Featured item: The Seven Challenges

Workbook –Communication Skills for Success at Home & Work.

Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.newconversations.net