It is essential to develop de-escalation strategies to help de-escalate a situation that may arise. No matter which profession you are a part of, you have likely come face-to-face with a customer’s complaint at some point. For many people, the first reaction when a person challenges their expertise or advice is to double down and mirror the other person’s behavior. However, this can lead to poor results, such as when the situation escalates to danger.
De-escalation techniques can be carried out in a few moments, but the space to control your emotions before you deal with someone else can have a lasting impact on your business, job, and customers. This article will outline common de-escalation techniques and help readers develop their strategies for avoiding conflict and keeping everyone calm.
Defining De-Escalation
De-escalation is the practice of approaching a situation that has the potential to escalate toward conflict or threats with care to help everyone gain or regain control of emotions. This helps the participants make respectful choices and can reduce the potential for conflict moving forward. These techniques are not complicated, but they do require that a person challenge themselves to move past their own emotions and reactions to help calm the situation.
De-escalation is essential because if the escalation is not addressed adequately, the situation may remain calm for a short time, but the underlying issue may escalate the problem again. This possibility will likely increase a person’s anxiety and create a power struggle between the people involved, which can lead to trouble identifying the root cause of the issue and force unnecessary altercations between people.
By de-escalating, the people involved can work toward solutions and avoid the situation again in the future.
Those in the alternative dispute resolution field will likely encounter the potential for a situation to escalate frequently and will need to understand how to address such a situation in a way that de-escalates it. Emotions play a large role in disputes and will often be the driving factor behind the conflict. This will ensure that the parties can continue working toward a resolution and not let their emotions take over the negotiation.
Common De-Escalation Techniques
The following techniques may help during a stressful situation either between you and others or the parties you are guiding through dispute resolution. The right de-escalation techniques for a given situation may need to be found by running through the different strategies and evaluating the options based on the situation, such as whether you need to protect a person’s feelings or keep a child calm. By using a combination of the techniques below, you will be able to form a de-escalation strategy to deal with the issues before the situation escalates.
Use Active Listening
One of the best de-escalation techniques is the use of active listening to stay calm and take a moment before offering a response. If everyone involved in the conversation or situation affirms that active listening will be used when they begin, it can be an incredibly beneficial tool to avoid unnecessary altercations. By actively listening, each person not only feels that they have been fully heard, but they will also gain a broader and more thorough understanding of the dispute. This allows them to focus on what the other person is saying and respond calmly.
Active listening includes a variety of listening skills that can help aid in the de-escalation strategies that you have developed. To practice active listening, a person will commit to focusing on what the other person says when they talk, ensuring that they hear what is said rather than attempting to solve the issue or create an answer while the other person shares.
When you hear everything that was said fully and respectfully, you can identify the cause of the behavior and potentially talk the other person out of an escalation. Ensuring that everyone hears and feels heard will help manage the situation before anyone gets upset.
Practice Empathy
Another way to de-escalate a tense situation is by showing empathy to the other person. A person will often act poorly and escalate the situation because they feel wronged or mistreated. By offering empathy and affirming that you understand why they may be upset, you can reassure them that their feelings are valid and that there are options to address the issue and maintain a relationship between the parties.
Empathy includes acknowledging the other’s feelings and encouraging them to respond to those emotions in a way that communicates them while keeping everyone safe and the situation stable. If a person is met with anger or matched emotion, they will either avoid or challenge the other person. When a person feels that their emotions are valid, they can focus on working on the situation that escalated the dispute and respond to the issues appropriately.
Be Nonjudgmental
Similar to empathy, another way to de-escalate a situation is to work to be nonjudgmental towards a person challenging you. With the same energy as mentioned above, being nonjudgmental will often disarm a person who is attempting to escalate the issue and drive a wedge into the relationship. When you respond in a way that validates the frustration with the issue or the system that a person is trapped in, the person can feel that their opinion matters and will often choose to engage with the other person rather than continue to push the situation.
Respect Personal Space
When a person challenges another, the space that the people are in will often begin to feel smaller. This can leave people feeling trapped or cornered into continuing the escalating situation. Additionally, when personal space is encroached on, it can spur behavior that will force further escalation and increase a person’s anxiety. If a person is cornered for a few moments or more or if the exits are blocked, they may become anxious and have trouble breathing.
For those in dispute, it can be helpful to respect personal space and focus on ensuring that each participant feels like they have their own space can keep everyone calm.
Keep Body Language Neutral
Another key technique when it comes to de-escalation is to acknowledge the role that nonverbal communication plays in the interaction and how it can contribute to the escalation or help you avoid unnecessary altercations. Body language is all of the nonverbal communication that you send to another person. This includes eye contact and facial expressions that communicate what your words cannot. The cues that we give off with body language can either help or harm the situation.
This means that when attempting to de-escalate a situation, you will need to focus your behavior while speaking and listening and keep your body language neutral. If attempting to keep a child calm, it can be helpful to get down to eye level and acknowledge why they are upset. This can even the field for the child and help calm any anxiety they may feel with a person of authority.
Additionally, it is helpful to maintain eye contact with a person when you are working to help them calm down and regain control of their feelings. When we turn away from people, they often think we are trying to hide or avoid acknowledging their position. Some may even interpret it as refusing to listen. This is why it is helpful to maintain steady contact while discussing a person’s feelings or concerns. It can also help to control your face and the way you show your emotions.
Practice Deep Breathing
A customer or client hoping to escalate a situation will frequently rely on your reaction to what they are saying or doing. They will watch for the response that they are hoping for and meet it with further prodding. In these instances, it can be helpful to practice deep breathing and work on finding an instance of peace to address the situation. By keeping your emotions in check, you will contribute to de-escalation techniques.
Offer Concise and Respectful Choices
Especially for those in customer service or dealing with customers regularly, a great way to add to a de-escalation strategy is to give a person options when there is an issue with the service. People will often have major feelings or frustrations with how a situation was handled and may have trouble identifying the best way to remedy the situation, causing them to escalate and increasing the person’s behavior to a bad situation.
By choosing to offer concise and respectful choices for the person to consider when looking to fix the situation, a customer will be able to formulate a response that addresses the issue. Giving a person options gives them the space to choose a remedy without making the situation worse. This will often work best in conjunction with other de-scalation strategies.
Set Boundaries
Another way to avoid escalation and having another person be upset is to set boundaries around a conversation. This means that you outline what you will find acceptable within the conversation and what will be off-limits. Boundaries help protect you from belligerent behavior and give the other person a framework to determine how to proceed.
Encouraging the other person to react in a way that is helpful rather than harmful and outlining the consequences of what will happen if they choose not to honor your boundaries will often result in de-escalation and a more thoughtful and thorough response.
Boundaries must also be selected and communicated with care, or they can contribute to the escalation of the situation. If you establish an unnecessary boundary, the other person may feel that the rules are too strict and no longer productively engage with you. Similarly, if the boundaries are communicated in a way that does not offer a response to the person’s feelings or acknowledgment of why they are upset, they may react out of anger or resentment toward the rule.
Ignore Challenges
When a person is attempting to escalate the situation, they may ask challenging questions and hope for a response from you that contributes to the overall issue. When dealing with someone like this, it can be helpful to choose to ignore challenging questions and refuse to answer them. By not offering a response to questions designed to stir up the people around, a customer will need to readjust their strategy, which often contributes to an overall de-escalation. Challenging questions will often be difficult to ignore, but answering them or reacting will only further spur on issues.
Recognize Client and Customer Complaints are Commonplace
When you are on the receiving end of an escalation, especially when someone is unhappy with the way that you performed your job, remembering that complaints are commonplace can be the best de-escalation technique. When you take a complaint as a personal attack rather than a critique of your service based on the way they interacted with you, you can easily get lost in your emotions.
It makes sense to feel your blood pressure rise as you are listening to a complaint, but recognize that clients will often have concerns that are not an attack on your work but a reflection of their own feelings. It can be helpful to practice deep breathing for a moment before offering a response out of anger, which can cause the situation to escalate rather than de-escalate.
Conclusion
Anyone who deals with clients or works in customer service will understand that customers attempting to escalate an issue and harm the person receiving the criticism is unfortunately very commonplace. However, when you develop de-escalation strategies to deal with such situations, they become less stressful and more approachable.
When everyone can remain calm, both the customers and the other person will leave happy.
To learn more about de-escalation strategies, alternate conflict resolution or more, contact ADR Times today!
While in law school, Emily served as an executive editor on the Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal and had the opportunity to learn about ADR from world-class professors of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution.
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