The workplace is a complicated place. Imagine a spider web of people, managers, supervisors and staff members who need to work together, interacting in various ways to fulfil the organisation's mandate. Disagreements and conflict are bound to occur; between staff members, between staff and management, and between clients and members of your organisation.

As a result of working with thousands of government employees to help them acquire and use defusing hostility skills, we have concluded that a good amount of bad feelings, organisational problems, destructive conflict and inefficiency result from a lack of skill in the WAY that people communicate with each other. This isn't that surprising if we consider that our society tends to glorify the confrontational, John Wayne type heroes. And, that as children learn language, they tend to learn confrontational, negative language before they learn how to get along with others.

Co-operative communication, or the skills needed to get along in the workplace, or, for that matter, anywhere else, are in relatively short supply, because we simply don't teach them to children or adults. So we get unnecessary conflict and friction. We get arguments that are more oriented towards winning than solving problems, and we get the so-called personality conflict, a convenient phrase that allows everyone to avoid responsibility for interpersonal problems. We get teams that don't work well because they lack the skills. We get meetings where the majority of time is wasted because people don't interact effectively. We get clashes with clients and customers that occur as a result of both parties moving into confrontational ways of interacting.

We've moved forward in defining the elements of co-operative communication so that they can be taught to people. But what is co-operative communication?

Some ways of communicating increase friction and anger. Other ways of communication tend to cause people to work WITH us, and not against us. While it is clear that blatant accusations, name-calling and personal attacks are confrontational (the opposite of co-operative), there are many more subtle ways to ruin a communication. To illustrate some of the techniques of co-operative communication, let's take a look at the following sentences:

"You never finish the work on time."

Which of these phrases do you think is more likely to elicit a productive dialogue? Clearly the first at least "sounds" antagonistic", while the second doesn't. Another example: "If you had bothered to read the report, you would know...."

What are the co-operative rules here? In our first set of examples, the initial statement uses an absolute word "never", and as a result tends to cause the other person to argue. In addition the phrase sounds blaming. The replacement phrase lacks those confrontational characteristics, uses a qualifier "seems", and offers to work together. In the second phrase set, the key word is "bothered", which suggests that the person is lazy, or uncaring, and that is what will be heard. It also is a blaming statement. In the replacement phrase, we introduce another qualifier "might", followed by an offer to solve the problem.

In both phrase sets, the first phrases are likely to create argument and personalised conflict while the replacement phrases are more likely to result in real problem solving.

There are a number of other aspects of co-operative communication, far too many to outline in a single article. However, co-operative communication involves the use of techniques that are designed to prevent destructive conflict, enhance workplace morale, and save considerable time and energy.

Our estimates are that between 5-10% of people consistently communicate in co-operative ways, although that estimate is certainly not scientific. A minority of people acquire these skills through experience, but unfortunately, experience is a slow, unreliable teacher.