Building Agreement

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Once you’ve brought both parties together, you need to help them find common ground on which to build lasting agreement. How can you do this?

You must:

• Create and agree ground rules
• Engage in future-pacing

Create and agree ground rules

The purpose of creating and agreeing ground rules is to help create agreement on how both parties will behave or respond if anything like the original trigger for their conflict should arise again in the future.

You could say something like: “Let’s be honest. Despite what we’ve agreed here today, the things that used to trigger your reactions are likely to happen from time to time in the future, whether you mean them to or not. So what will you both want to do to prevent your old, knee-jerk reactions?”

Have each person write down what they will do specifically. You could also ask them to explain how they will signal to one another – like a set of simple ground rules. For example: “If you get angry and start to say that thing, I’ll look at you, I’ll smile and waggle my finger at you. And you’ll hold your hands up and say, ‘Oops, sorry, I’m doing it again!’ Then things will be okay between us.”

Have both parties take a copy of the ground rules and agree to refer to it in future.

Engage in future-pacing

This is a process of agreeing how both parties would like to get on with one another in the future. If it is appropriate, they could even agree to differ and respect their differences.

When they imagine the future and the pressures of the workplace with its everyday stresses and strains, they may conclude that it could prove difficult at times to stick to their ground rules. So have each party consider what those risk factors or flash points could be. And have them tell one another how they would prefer to relate to one another inside and outside of such circumstances.

Having done that, the final question is, “How do they feel about things now?” Generally, both parties tend to feel they can work constructively together, and the negative feelings have been defused.

Building agreement in action

Remember the two bloggers we mentioned earlier? They found peace at this stage and went on to work together well in their team. In fact, the younger blogger became like a mentor for the older blogger, keeping him up to date on exciting new technologies and apps. They still argue about how best to craft an effective blog, but their conflicts now spark greater creativity between the two of them. And they know each other well enough now to recognize their triggers and handle them accordingly.