The specific qualities one has in his or her life are very crucial in how we conduct our business, shape our interactions with other people and essentially form our lifestyle. By gaining a better understanding on how we constructively deal with conflict as individuals, we can identify and understand how our approach will influence our behavior by helping us combat our weaknesses and capitalize on our strengths. The life styles inventory tool is a survey of questions geared toward helping individuals gain an insight into our own personality and self-development along with the type of behaviors we exert to others as well. It helps us to look at the positive and negative qualities of our personalities and ways to build on them and improve upon them.
I set the bar pretty high in managing to dominate with high scores in all of the "constructive" conflict orientation styles including Pragmatist, Self-Empowered, Conciliator and Relationship builder. All scores for these particular categories ranked between 90 and 93 percentiles. Individuals exhibiting these styles deal with conflict effectively; they see conflict situations as opportunities for personal growth, treat opponents as respected equals, and tend to have a goal beyond winning or losing which enables them to benefit regardless of the conflict's outcome. I have always been complimented on my ability to build and sustain meaningful and satisfying relationships. I scored on the high range and according to the survey results I tend to be most effective and comfortable in the company of others. I will generally strive to improve and maintain those relationships that are important to me. I value teamwork, cooperation and mutually rewarding relationships. I express my liking for a people, and because I am tactful and considerate of others' feelings, they tend to like me in return. This characteristic has worked in my favor throughout my career and personal life.
It brings me to a time that based on my solid relationship building skills I have endured, my connections have grown and increased as well. These relationships have become a solid reward of business networking to my advantage. This philosophy applies to people looking for a job. When I was in the job search process, I discovered an interesting statistic: Almost 90% of people look for jobs only by looking at ads, but that’s where only 10% of available jobs exist. At least 30% come from referrals. The more you focus on your network and relationships, the better connected to opportunities you’ll be. What I was getting at with my example here is that with each job I have been a part of, I was always one of the 30% statistics. To elaborate on that factor, the business I am now working for enables me through my strength of relationship building an extremely effective way to promote our work and generate more business as a whole.
When looking at it on paper, it appears that I am right where I should be with my constructive orientation style. After all, constructive is a positive thought toward conflict, right? Let's break it down and look at a bigger picture. Regardless, of my high assessment in this area, I still have things that I need to discover and can potentially learn from in this area. Being too pragmatic, means I am not willing to try something because I don’t know if it’s going to work and feel that we only have one shot to get it right. The conciliator, not the parties, often develops and proposes the terms of settlement. By being very self-empowered, I may tend to think I know what is best for me and others involved, when I may need to be more open-minded to several options available. Conciliation is used almost preventively, as soon as a dispute or misunderstanding surfaces: a conciliator pushes to stop a substantial conflict from developing. I also have a big disadvantage in relationships because I trust way too easily….resulting in me ending up getting "burned" in several occasions.
Transitioning to the complete opposite of the spectrum, we can analyze my weaker styles of conflict orientation to be the "aggressive/defensive" behavior. I ranged from Escalator--10th percentile, Dominator--25th percentile, and Perfectionist--44th percentile. I think I was the most surprised by the Perfectionist not falling into the 90's or higher! By nature, I have always been viewed and labeled by this trait. I have always been goal oriented and pushed by my goals in fear of not reaching them. I never settle with good, I want the best. I am very hard on myself and critical at the same time. I tend to hone in on these imperfections and have trouble seeing anything else at times. I have a very obsessive-compulsive behavior stemming from this that leads to over inundated stress and anxiety. So, I am not the dominating type….and I really do not prefer to escalate a situation, sounding again like a pretty positive outcome, or is it?
Considering that I am possibly a doormat, doesn't sound too appealing either. Ideally, you should not be aggressive to enhance your own self at the expense of others. However, being assertive and expressing your feeling, opinions and needs directly, openly and honestly without violating the personal rights of others is the way to go. I need to strive for a fine line and be more assertive. Saying no in the right way will enable me to kick the "doormat" status.
This leads to the situation I encountered at work recently. The day started off with me answering the phone to a customer that decided she wanted to bind homeowner's insurance with us based on the quote we provided her the week before. I was unable to locate the quote, and unfortunately not able to process a new one based on my status of not being "licensed" to do so. The quote was initially processed by a former employee that was no longer with us. I wanted to make sure we provided exceptional service to the customer and advised I would need to call her back as soon as I retrieved the quote for her so that we could properly review it together. In the mean time, I had another team member process the quote. It came back $100 more. I returned the call explaining the situation and why we had different premiums in the quoting process. After listening to her go from frustrated to mad to understanding in a 45 minute call, I was able to compromise and come to an agreement. She provided credit card information and was ready to complete her application and bind the insurance. So, you are thinking great…situation resolved! Not so fast, again since I am not a licensed team member, I am unable to process the finalization of any binding of applications as well. I forwarded all essential information to the team member that just gave me the new quote. Within 5 minutes, the situation completely did a 360. The team member realized she didn't quote it correctly and made a mistake. This was a $200 mistake that would cause the premium to increase again. She gave me the documents and advised I needed to call back the customer and advise of the situation. At that point I realized I had been the easy way out and also the doormat so to speak. My lack of dominance and assertiveness were working against me here. I was the one delivering all the bad news. I clearly spoke up to the manager and team member and advised at this point, due to the disadvantage of the mistakes that were made throughout the quoting process, it would need to be one of them that returned the call and explained the outcome. They needed to be held accountable for their actions and I need to learn to say no when reasonable.
I tend to fair midline on the remaining styles with three falling in the 50th percentile including the majority of the "passive/defensive" characteristics such as Regulator, Insulator and Avoider. In addition, Competitor falls at 65th percentile and finally, Accommodator, scoring a little higher at 85th percentile. To summarize my place here I try to maintain a sense of harmony and try to smooth over differences. However, this puts me at a disadvantage as I start trending toward the destructive direction since it denies me the opportunity to contribute my own views and gain genuine acceptance. I am accommodating myself at the approval of others. I strive to be somewhat of a competitor and I believe this comes from the perfectionist aspect working together. Not that I intend to lose sight of pursuing a mutual agreement, I just tend to focus on that motivation of personal gain and success so much I lose site of the main goal at hand.
My strengths within my conflict style are manifested in both my professional and personal lives. I continually strive to grow and always look for new ways to challenge myself. I know myself very well and take pride in that. I value knowing myself and have a very good handle on my self-worth. As a self-empowered person, I tend take ownership and responsibility. I see a crisis as a challenge and an opportunity in searching for solutions. This is the style that I feel describes me the most. It has allowed me to adapt too many situations. Even in conflict or disagreement, it has proven to be my biggest asset in the end.
To better improve on my weaknesses, I will now continue to initiate several ways of developing a willingness and ability to engage in self-reflection. Since this is definitely a critical leadership skill that is not easily learned yet which reaps many rewards. In this way I can motivate myself to work harder and set greater goals to achieve. To become more self – actualized I need to accept others with fewer conditions, restructure unpleasant tasks to make them more enjoyable, make it a point to do the things I enjoy regularly, see problems as opportunities for growth and development, live each day in the present and know myself. Moving forward….the benefits I will gain when I am more self - actualized is greater professional success, enhanced creativity and ability to be innovative, stronger acceptance of myself and others, improved perspective and judgment, while being able to enjoy the ability to relax and enjoy myself.
I believe my personality is something that I have had since childhood. I was raised to hold those values to do my best always. I most likely developed all my life styles by the environment that I grew up in. My parents continually motivated me to be the best and work hard in everything. Growing in that environment, it became habit to set goals, work towards these goals and produce high quality results, demonstrating that hard work will pay off.
This survey highlighted both my strengths and weaknesses. It was very helpful to analyze myself as a manager and a leader. There were a lot of characteristic properties that were brought to my attention. The inventory also confirmed many traits that I realized but have not been attentive to find ways to build upon. With the help of this survey, I have been made aware of what I will work on, build on and improve upon to become a successful manger and a leader. As mentioned earlier, I was surprised with my perfectionism scoring lower than I had imagined but overall, I believe the LSI results are accurate. Not only this assignment but the course itself has motivated me to utilize my traits to develop my career, relationships, personal and professional life, while continuing to evaluate and direct myself on the right track to continued success.

Please utilize the chart and graph below to understand the conflict styles that best describes my personality:

| | | | | Position | Style | Score | Percentile | Range | 11 | Pragmatist | 38 | 90 | HIGH | 12 | Self-Empowered | 37 | 93 | HIGH | 1 | Conciliator | 37 | 90 | HIGH | 2 | Relationship Builder | 38 | 93 | HIGH | 3 | Accommodator | 21 | 85 | HIGH | 4 | Regulator | 15 | 57 | MEDIUM | 5 | Insulator | 16 | 57 | MEDIUM | 6 | Avoider | 5 | 50 | MEDIUM | 7 | Escalator | 2 | 10 | LOW | 8 | Dominator | 3 | 25 | MEDIUM | 9 | Competitor | 15 | 65 | MEDIUM | 10 | Perfectionist | 19 | 44 | MEDIUM | | | | | |

Works Cited:
Class Lecture - Weeks 1 & 2

Folger, J.P., M.S. Poole, & Randall K. Stutman. Working Through Conflict: Strategies for Relationships, Groups, and Organizations, (6th Edition). Pearson, Allyn and Bacon: 2009.

Wilmot, W.W. & Joyce L. Hocker. Interpersonal Conflict, (8th Edition). McGraw-Hill: 2011.

http://www.survey-server2.com/lsiconflictuniversity-sso/part_menu.asp

http://www.epaperflip.com/aglaia/viewer.aspx?docid=56ca406928b7448ca0bdff018b904418