LI410 Unit 5 Conflict Case Reflection Example

I Won the Escalation and Lost the Maintenance Lead: A Unit 5 Conflict Case Reflection

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

LI410: Leadership in Practice

Unit 5 Conflict Case Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Kettle Run Recovery, its maintenance lead and every figure are composite and illustrative; the models and sources cited are real.

The Case

The disc screens on Kettle Run's sort line separate cardboard and paper from containers, and plastic film wraps around their shafts as the night goes on. The maintenance lead, who has kept the line running for eleven years, wanted to stop the line for forty-five minutes in the middle of every second shift to cut the film off. I wanted to keep the belt running, because second shift was missing its tonnage target and a midshift stop cost about seven tons of throughput.

From his side, the reasoning was sound. Wrapped screens let paper fall through to the container line, which raises contamination in both bales, and heavy wrap strains the shaft bearings. He had seen a bearing fail at another facility. From my side, the reasoning also looked sound: the target was mine, the plant manager reviewed it every week, and the screens could be cleaned during the shift change instead.

For a week I avoided the issue and let the line run. In our first real conversation, I proposed cleaning every other night, which he rejected. In the second, he said he would clean whether I liked it or not. I then sent the plant manager a spreadsheet showing the tonnage lost on each midshift stop. The plant manager ruled that screens would be cleaned only at shift change.

After that, the maintenance lead answered my radio calls in one line. He stopped telling me when wrap levels were heavy or when he heard a bearing running hot. Five weeks later a screen shaft seized during a heavy night, and the line was down for six hours.

Placing My Moves

Thomas (1992) describes conflict-handling modes along two dimensions, assertiveness, how much one pursues one's own concerns, and cooperativeness, how much one pursues the other party's. My moves fall in three places. The first week was avoiding: low on both. The every-other-night offer was compromising, a split down the middle that nobody had examined. The escalation was competing: high on assertiveness, low on cooperation, and backed by an authority above both of us.

Competing has its place, especially in emergencies or when a decision cannot wait. This was neither. I chose it because the spreadsheet made me confident and because a ruling from above would end the argument quickly. It did end the argument. It also ended the flow of information I depended on.

The plant manager's ruling settled whose plan the line would follow, and in doing so it taught the one person who could hear a bearing failing that telling me was no longer his job.

Positions and Interests

Fisher et al. (2011) separate the demand a party puts on the table, its position, from the interests that make the demand matter to it. Our positions were simple: stop the line midshift, or keep it running. Our interests were wider and overlapped more than either position suggested. I needed tonnage, but I also needed clean bales, since rejected bales cost the county more than lost throughput, and I needed the line to stay up on heavy nights. He needed equipment life and fewer emergency repairs, but he also wanted his crew out of lockout as quickly as possible, since every cleaning stop means locking out and verifying the line before anyone reaches into a screen.

In their meta-analysis, De Dreu and Weingart (2003) reported that disputes about tasks and personal friction alike were tied to weaker team results. Our dispute started as a task conflict about cleaning schedules. My escalation turned it into a relationship conflict, and the six-hour outage is what that looked like on the line.

The Conversation That Could Have Happened

If I could replay the second conversation, I would start with questions rather than a proposal. How much wrap builds up in a normal hour, and in a wet-load hour? What does a bearing sound like before it goes? How long does a cleaning stop take if the crew is ready at the moment the line halts? Then I would offer my own constraint plainly: second shift has to reach its target, and I cannot explain a seven-ton gap every night.

A rule we might have written together is a wrap threshold rather than a fixed schedule: the maintenance lead checks wrap at a set time each shift, the line stops only when wrap passes a level he defines, and the stop is planned for the lightest inbound hour. On light nights the line might not stop at all; on wet nights it would stop early, before the bearings suffered.

My Practice Now

Before I escalate any disagreement, I hold one conversation about interests with the other person and write down what I learned, and I tell the person before I take anything above us. I have asked the maintenance lead for that conversation about the wrap threshold. He agreed, after a pause long enough to show me how much the escalation had cost.

References

De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2003). Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(4), 741-749. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741

Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in (3rd ed.). Penguin.

Thomas, K. W. (1992). Conflict and conflict management: Reflections and update. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13(3), 265-274. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030130307