The Harmony Outlook: Conflict Avoidance in Greens

“I’ve Never Been So Upset, but for God’s Sake, Don’t Say Anything to Anyone.”

Erikson describes conflict avoidance as a dilemma with Green behavior. They despise a squabble. This aversion to conflict also causes many other challenges, such as stubbornness, ambiguity, and resistance to change. Because Greens are pronounced relational people, nothing is more important to them than keeping a relationship together. The problem is that their method doesn’t work.

You can look at conflicts in two ways. The first way is called the harmony outlook, or striving for harmony. Everything depends on being on good terms with others. Reaching an agreement is an end in itself. This means that those who cause conflict are problematic troublemakers. Conflicts are indicative of poor leadership, poor communication, and discord. And so we smother conflict and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Because who wants to be acquainted with a troublemaker?

I once met a coach who used an interesting metaphor for this kind of behavior. She said it was like sitting at the dinner table with a rotting pile of trash in the middle. You know, with mold and flies and everything. Everyone sees that the trash is there, but no one says anything. You brush away the flies and pass the food across the liquefying banana peels without thinking anything about it. Maybe by the end someone wonders if there even really is a pile of trash on the table at all. Finally, one of the dinner table guests says, “We have to do something about this!” That person becomes an agitator, because we now have to deal with this nasty mess of garbage. Couldn’t she have just kept quiet?

Nowadays we know better. The aspiration of having everyone in agreement about everything all the time is an impossible utopia, not even worth trying to achieve. Someone will lift the lid off all that discord that was so effectively and hermetically sealed for such a long period of time—and what happens then? It stinks from a long way off. In the end the harmony outlook inevitably leads to conflict.

The second way, and the opposite to the first, is called the conflict outlook. It basically means that we accept that conflicts exist—that it’s natural. No group exists where everyone is always in agreement about everything.

The whole point of the conflict outlook is to deal with every little dissentient issue as soon as it shows its head. Reds, and also some Yellows, do this naturally. When they see something that doesn’t work, they say that it doesn’t work. This means that problems can be resolved at an early stage. But you have to deal with the issue before it begins to stink.

The conflict approach usually creates harmony.

But a Green will just turn a deaf ear. He’ll do everything in his power to maintain that magical feeling that everyone is in agreement. It’s nicer when everyone agrees, isn’t it? Wouldn’t the world be so much better if there were no conflicts?

Consider a situation all of us have experienced at some point. We’re in a meeting at work. There are maybe ten people present in the room. Add or subtract from this so that you recognize the situation. Someone—the boss or anyone at all—has just completed his presentation and now asks what everyone is thinking. Full of expectation, he looks around, waiting for feedback.

If there are any Reds or Yellows in the room, they will speak about their views on the proposal they’ve just seen. The Reds will love it or loathe it. The Yellows will speak about their own reflections on the proposal. One or two Blues might have a few questions.

What do the Greens do? Absolutely nothing. They just lean back in their chairs and let themselves absorb the proposal. They say nothing at all unless asked a direct question. They look anxiously around, hoping that someone will say that this proposal is, in fact, an incomprehensible mess. The group is too large for them to trot out any dissenting opinions. To say something truly dramatic or negative would mean that everyone’s eyes will be on you, and that’s not going to happen. If they say what they are really thinking, a heated debate will erupt, and since a Green doesn’t want to take part in heated debates—he doesn’t even want to be in the same room as one—he simply keeps silent.

How will the speaker respond? He’ll assume that everyone is in agreement, right? What he doesn’t know is that half the people in the room think it was the stupidest thing they have ever heard. When the truth creeps out—it has to, sooner or later—guess what happens then? Exactly—conflict.

You can be certain that while you are standing at the coffee machine and maybe even while visiting the restroom the truth will come out. When Greens need to relieve the pressure of not speaking out, they talk behind your back. In small groups of two or three people, they will gladly vent their displeasure. And they’re good at it. As long as they think they can escape your gaze, they’ll backbite you in ways you would never expect from a Green.