Crafting Solutions to Conflict

Mitzi Perdue has a unique perspective on the importance of family business culture: she was born into the Henderson family, founders of the Sheraton Hotel chain, and she married into the Perdue family, where her husband, Frank, was the head of the family-owned poultry business. Both families are thriving through the generations.

Mitzi talked about the importance of families spending time together – starting with Gen1, the first generation, eating meals together. She mentioned the work of Professor Robyn Fivush of Emory University. As the family grows, creating reasons for the family to spend time together becomes essential: holidays, reunions, or other regular, fun events work well. Traditions cement the feeling of family unity. 

Philanthropy helps families join in a common, positive purpose. Mitzi is dedicated to the fight to stop human trafficking. Learn more at https://www.winthisfight.org/ Win This Fight focuses on “two of the greatest needs of the anti-trafficking community: we raise funds for other anti-trafficking organizations, and we help raise awareness.”

Learn more about Mitzi’s passion for helping family businesses thrive through generations here: https://mitziperdue.com/

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Disputes and conflicts.  Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about and dealing with interpersonal disagreements don’t necessarily use those words interchangeably. A dispute has the connotation of a specific point of contention. A conflict, on the other hand, suggests a disagreement that may be longer-lasting or possibly broader.

When a dispute erupts between or among people who are in an ongoing relationship, there may also be a conflict beneath it. It’s best to go beneath the dispute to look for an underlying conflict and deal with what you find. Now if you can, later if you can’t.

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

:Family Business Mediation helps families and their businesses, large or small, to deal with conflicts effectively. Family businesses are certain to face challenges, by their nature.  Typically, these include: a mix of emotions and money; individuals who wear multiple hats;

long-term relationships, expectations, and memories; power imbalances; and a multi-generational time horizon.  This episode provides a brief overview. If you would like to dive deeper, please join Richard Lutringer, Jack Wofford, Natalie McVeigh, and me at the virtual annual conference of the Greater New York Chapter of the Association for Conflict Resolution. On Thursday, June 3, we will offer an interactive presentation on “Family Business Mediation – Addressing Unspoken Factors Driving Business Challenges.” You can register here:

https://acrgny.org/ACRGNY-2021-Conference-Schedule-and-Speakers

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Disagreements can happen in any business relationship.  Startups may face challenges unique to their nature, including issues surrounding the value that each partner is bringing to the venture, when they hope to achieve their goals, and how to onboard employees in the startup environment.  Bryant describes how he came to work with these businesses, and others that attract millennials. We also discuss Bryant’s upcoming book, “The New Middle: Disagreeing with Heart and Mind When it Matters Most.”  In it, he reflects on themes that have arisen in his work in conflict resolution, including the need to treat each other with respect and to remember why they began working together. You can learn more about Bryant and his work at the firm he founded, CollabsHQ, here:   www.collabshq.com. Bryant is active on LinkedIn; you can read his articles and posts, and see book updates here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryantgalindo/ .

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Gary Friedman, a highly-respected and deeply-experienced mediator, ran for local office in the small Northern California town where he had lived for 40 years. Recently, tensions had flared in town meetings over a few local issues. Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, wrote about his foray into politics in her article, “I Got Obama’d”.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/01/conflict-resolution-politics-amanda-ripley-excerpt-484786

Starting out with a goal of including everyone, Gary soon fell into the trap of divisive politics, and tensions escalated. He and his allies lost power. He then regained his perspective and worked to help to help his neighbors understand each other – even when they disagreed. Then conflict could lead to something productive, to true problem-solving.

What some of us like to call “good conflict”, the creative and collaborative kind.

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Use of Restorative Justice in criminal justice and its application in other areas have both grown in recent years. Restorative Justice has a focus beyond punishment of offenders that includes the needs of the victims.  In addition to broader use in the criminal justice arena, Restorative Justice has grown in application to include schools, religious institutions, and societies at large.

Howard Zehr, a Restorative Justice pioneer, offers these questions to consider if a process is accurately described as Restorative Justice. Are the wrongs being acknowledged? Are the needs of those who were harmed being addressed? Is the one who committed the harm being encouraged to understand the damage and accept his or her obligation to make right the wrong? Are those involved in or affected by this being invited to be part of the “solution?” Is concern being shown for everyone involved? If the answers to these questions are “no,” then even though it may have restorative elements, it isn’t restorative justice.” https://zehr-institute.org/what-is-rj/

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Internal Family Systems Therapy allows an individual to support one’s own contradictory parts.

Amy is a certified leadership coach who has pulled together a range of professional and personal experiences that help her serve her clients. One aspect of her coaching work is the application of Internal Family Systems Therapy. The IFS model  accepts and welcomes the various parts that we each hold within us. You can learn more about IFS here:  https://ifs-institute.com/    Learn more about Amy and her work at her website, https://careerleadershipalignment.com/ Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/AmyKayWatsonCoach/ and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/amykaywatson/ .

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

When a bad conflict ends, consider carefully how to deal with any sudden and severe shift to your foundation. There is a shock. A shock to you. A shock to the other person -- or people – and a shock to the relationship itself. And it’s predictable that those shocks will have effects. What they are and when they will occur is less predictable. Often, even less predictable are the aftershocks. Don’t be thrown by the shock. Whether it’s a shock or an aftershock, try hard to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to lash out and hurt others in the relationship. Though the immediate lash-out may seem satisfying in the moment, that feeling can fade very quickly. And then the “jerk” part remains. 

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Truly understanding estrangement is quite tough; clearing up some misconceptions is easier. There’s often a tilt to the misunderstanding of estrangement. A tilt to the negative, the hopeless, a belief in a guaranteed increased hardening as time goes on. There can also be a misunderstanding about how the two “sides” view the estrangement itself, even if they agree about how they started on the path to estrangement. It’s common to believe everyone chooses anger, reciprocal rejection, or a genuine effort to forget about those on the other side. That’s not always the case, as demonstrated by the words of a man, years into an estrangement, who said this about his brother: “He’s in the family. Absent but loved.” 

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving. 

Families can benefit if they leave the work of fiduciary duties to a dedicated professional trustee and focus on being a family. Marguerite describes the duties, including obligations of ethics and fairness, that trustees must fulfill. Communications with all the relevant people are essential, while also preserving the agency of an aging person.  If a family member -- and not a professional -- is acting as trustee, communication is even more important because of real, imagined, or potential conflicts of interest. You can learn more about Marguerite and Lorenz Private Trustees at https://www.mytrustee.net/ . Her book, Ethics for Trustees 2.0, is available on Amazon.

Marguerite also talked about the work of the Independent Trustee Alliance, an international professional alliance dedicated to growing and supporting the Independent Trustee profession. Learn more here: https://www.trusteealliance.com/.

Do you have comments or suggestions about a topic or guest? An idea or question about conflict management or conflict resolution? Let me know at [email protected]! And you can learn more about me and my work as a mediator and a Certified CINERGY® Conflict Coach at www.dovetailresolutions.com and https://www.linkedin.com/in/janebeddall/.

Enjoy the show on your favorite podcast app or on the podcast website: https://craftingsolutionstoconflict.com/And you can follow us on Twitter @conflictsolving.