Professional Guide to PayDay Loans

We all have our own style of managing conflict. Our conflict resolution style is the mechanism that helps us deal with conflict psychologically. Conflict can also influence our behavior in a variety of ways—from rage, anger, and confrontation (fight responses) to denial, avoidance, and retreat (flight responses).We learn these strategies at a very early age—between birth and three or four years old. They become our primary or inherent styles of conflict resolution. The four inherent styles are evader, harmonizer, compromiser, and fighter; each is some form of fight-or-flight response.We create elaborate strategies to cope with conflict in order to maintain control of our situations and get what we want. The challenge is managing conflict in a way that allows each person involved to walk away feeling like a winner. To do this, we must understand the strategies for managing conflict, including the most important strategy, a Win-Win Orientation.

A strategy may be well conceived and executed, and it may even succeed in achieving its aims, but it may still be vulnerable to a competitor’s actions. To be robust, decisions need to take account of potential competitive threats, and so it is useful to consider worst-case scenarios to make decisions.

Consider the example of a small sandwich bar with a regular, local clientele. Suddenly, a film crew comes to town and, because of its exclusive patronage, business booms. Is this good for the sandwich bar? In the short-term, definitely. In the longer term, possibly not. Regular customers may go elsewhere, tired of waiting longer than usual to be served, and when the film crew leaves, the sandwich bar will be in a weaker position than it was before they came, if its original customers have discovered better or cheaper competitors. One solution may be to deliver orders (or at least the film crew’s), and have more pre-prepared sandwiches to minimise delays. A more desperate and less satisfactory measure might be (after the film crew has left town) to reduce prices or increase marketing with the extra cash made during the boom. In any event, market awareness is vital to competitiveness.

The following checklist provides a framework to ensure decisions help build a firm’s competitive strength.

Develop market awareness Developing a keen sense of market awareness requires keeping up-todate with what your competitors are doing, how they are perceived in the market, and why. Decisions should take the following into account according to the importance attached to each:

• pricing policies and product offers;
• brand reputation and recognition;
• customers’ perceptions;
• product quality;
• service levels;
• product portfolio;
• organisational factors such as size, economies of scale, type of employees, training, expenditure on product development and distribution channels;
• organisational culture;
• staff loyalty;
• promotional campaigns, timing, nature and channels used;
• customer loyalty;
• financial structure and performance and cash reserves.