Making the Invisible Visible: Uncovering the Mystery of Personality Conflicts at Work

Conflicts are inevitable in organizations not only because of the objective differences in needs, goals, and means, but also due to individual subjective psychological differences. Those situations are often described as “personality conflicts.” In this chapter we introduce a new method and approach that professionals and leaders can use to mitigate and leverage those “personality conflicts.” The method, titled BOTH: Passwords to Human Minds employs powerful birth order sibling metaphors that anyone can relate to. Those metaphors, consistent with one’s experience as a child among siblings, facilitate identification of typical relationship habits that develop in early life and tend to influence how we habitually respond to workplace conflicts as adults. Furthermore, The BOTH method (Birth Order Typical Habits) demonstrates how one person’s typical habitual “blind spot” often unintentionally becomes a “stressor” for another, creating unnecessary “personality” conflicts. The BOTH Method provides powerful insight to lower emotional charge, and a clear situational roadmap of traditional conflict management skills.