Conflict Resolution: The Peacemaking Pyramid

The theme this week in class was conflict resolution. We discussed a lot of things from learning to be a good listener to preventing debating and arguing. All of the topics we discussed are important, however, the part that had the biggest impact on me was called the Peacemaking Pyramid. The speaker showed us tow slides, one with a pyramid representing how we usually spend our time and the other displayed how we ultimately should spend our time. In the first pyramid, the top section is correcting. With listening, learning, and building relationships down towards the bottom. The Peacemaking pyramid displays the opposite. It suggests that we should spend the majority of our time building relationships and learning about the person we are dealing with and spend hardly any time on correction.

I think that this lesson is so important for every leader to learn. Many times when there is a problem in a company or group the leader focuses his or her time on fixing the problem (or the person creating the problem). This is not the way we need to approach problems. Instead, as leaders we can focus our time and energy on getting to know the person and learning about them. This way, we will not only be able to figure out why there is a problem and fix it, we will also be able to build stronger relationships with the people we are working with.