Supportive Communication

1. You are the manager of the marketing department for a corporation. You oversee 25 employees. There are two employees who seem to be in constant conflict with one another because they do not know how to effectively communicate with each other. The inability to communicate effectively and constant conflict has affected the other workers and lowered productivity. You, as the manager, need to get the situation under control. What do you do? What advice can you offer about supportive communication?

In the above situation the first thing I would do is to call a meeting or conference call with the employees who are having conflict in order to find out where the actual problem is. People have different ways of reaching the same or similar results. These different methods can cause conflict while a project is ongoing. This becomes a problem because the employees do not understand or they don’t have good or compatible communication abilities. To eliminate or reduce the conflict I would offer my advice but only after hearing both sides of the conflict. I would explain to the team mates what supportive communication is and explain the principle behind it. I would then tell them that if either has an issue or problem arise that the best way to resolve it is to mention the problem to the other team members instead of placing blame. For example in a marketing firm one conflict may be that one person adds the illustrations to an ad and another team member’s job is to place text on the ad and a third persons role may be the placement of an ad such as on a website. Upon placing the ad on a website the team member notices that the images and text are over lapping in a way that make sit unreadable. That employee looks at the project plan and realized that the illustration was placed incorrectly. Instead of saying to the illustration employee, You did this wrong he should go to the other two employees and state the problem and what can be done to resolve it. In doing this he is using supportive communication. I would also explain each of the eight supportive communication principles as follows:

I. Congruent, not Incongruent- this principle focuses on being honest and matching thoughts and feelings with actual statements made

II. Descriptive, not Evaluative- this principle focuses on reactions to and possible alternatives to reactions to problems or issues.

III. Problem oriented not people oriented- this principle focuses on placing blame on a person instead of pointing out problem and working as a team to resolve

IV. Validating, not invalidating- this principle focuses on focuses on being in agreement, as well as respect, flexibility and collaboration to reach an agreement

V. Specific, not global- this principle focuses on events. Rather the avoidance general statements , extreme statements or either or statements that are broad