HOW TO HANDLE CONFLICT IN PURCHASING AND SUPPLY

HOW TO HANDLE CONFLICT IN PURCHASING AND SUPPLY

Knowing what causes conflict in your purchasing and supply is one thing, solving it is another and by focusing on the attention of the parties, there are two dimensions to conflict handling, that is:

Knowing what causes conflict in your purchasing and supply is one thing, solving it is another and by focusing on the attention of the parties, there are two dimensions to conflict handling, that is:

• The parties’ assertiveness: the extent to which they are trying to satisfy their own concerns
• The parties’ cooperativeness: the extent to which they are trying to satisfy the other party’s concerns

Kenworth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann built a five point conflict handling model which you can use when negotiating, here is how it works.

Before you start handling the conflict

You have to decide about the degree to which the relationship is important vs the importance of the issue or outcome

The importance of the outcome will make you to be assertive, unassertive or relatively assertive

On the other hand the degree to which the relationship is important will determine whether you will be uncooperative, relatively cooperative or cooperative.

This just explains the conflict environment or dynamics and I suppose the question still is how then do you handle the conflict?

The answer will depend on where you stand as far as your relationship vs outcome conflict is related and typically is will be one of the following five sports.

#1 AVOIDING

If you are neither interested on the outcome nor the relationship then you are better off avoiding the conflict. You should however note that this doesn’t make the conflict go away so it best be something trivial.

#2 COMPETING /FORCING

A second situation is where you really want the results but you don’t care about the relationship. This will mean forcing/competing basically zero sum approach.  This approach entails hard bargains and coming up with solutions that only favour you.

The downside is you can ruin the relationship and so this is not an approach you want to keep on using if you are negotiating with people you care about.

#3 ACCOMMODATE

There are times when you really care about the relationship between you and the other party but don’t really care about winning or losing in which case you accommodate, you kind of let them have the win. It’s like racing against your four year old kid, you need to let them win sometimes otherwise they won’t be interested in the game and you see this even with rats, one of those studies that was conducted by Jaak Panksepp. The point is learning to know when to accommodate.

#4 COMPROMISE

What if you are half interested in the outcome and half interested in the relationship with the other party? Compromise, that’s the tactic. This will mean splitting the difference basically meeting the other party half way. Effectively it is lose-lose kind of situation in which you let go of something to the other party wants and you get when you want as well. By the way this doesn’t mean you get 50:50

#5 COLLABORATE

The last situation is you want the relationship just as bad as you want the results and that means collaborating. Basically a win-win approach where you work together to meet the needs of both parties. This will obviously take time but given what is at stake you do it none-the-less.

Just so we are clear there is no “one best” style in fact as you negotiate learn to be flexible