Question

Caring confrontation is a concept that emerges from an interpenetration of two more positive opposites. The first is personal caring and concern (Collaborate quadrant attributes). Caring leaders demonstrate patience, support, and compassion. They are not self-focused but other-focused. Their intention is to help others grow and develop, to experience joy, and to flourish in their roles and responsibilities. How have you utilized Caring Confrontation in your leadership experiences. If you have not utilized Caring Confrontation how can you see your company making use of the leadership behavior. Discuss.

Answer 1

Caring Confrontation use in leadership behavior.

Caring confrontation is a method of working with peers on logic errors without losing sight of their needs, individual qualities and respect for one another. When using caring confrontation, the practitioner must be aware of environmental factors such as work obligations, office routines and requirements etc.

Employing caring confrontation is a quest from domination to dialogue where the leadership (top management) employees this mechanism while interacting with peers in an organization. The method has established the fact that the caring approach followed while all types of confrontation eliminate barriers and build bridges amongst hierarchies in an organization. For better understanding the caring confrontation theory, it is important to first understand confrontation and its types.

Types of Confrontations the leadership have with their peers and teams are:

1. Written confrontations: All types of written communications that are done with the peers within the organization. This may be in the form of letters, emails, blogs, comments or ERP employed in the organization.
2. Verbal Confrontations: These generally happen over the telephone or face to face interaction with peer groups.
3. Regulatory or Policy confrontations: The organization (management) frame regulations and policies to govern the operations of the firms. These regulations also confront the employees in framing their mindsets.

Now since we know what channels of confrontations are, we move on to the reactions we have when we hear the word “confrontation”:

Some of the basic reactions are:

• Have you ever avoided conflict?
• Maybe you have felt uneasy about a conversation that you know you should have which involves giving someone feedback?
• Perhaps you have felt nervous about telling someone that they have impacted you negatively?
• Maybe you haven’t wanted to say the wrong thing, so you choose to keep things positive and polite?

In all of the above thinking of yours, there is something you don’t feel to resist due to the chances of arriving to a conflict. Once a conflict has arrived then applying a conflict resolution mechanism may be a far more tedious activity towards mending things in the organization. So what we can better practice is to confront with care which in other words is also called cared confrontation.

A true leader practices cared confrontation to interact with peers and groups by understanding at the back of mind who, when and why is he interacting to and what are the care factors that should be considered in framing the communication effectively.