Hot Buttons: How To Resolve Conflict And Cool Everyone Down Summary

COMM 332 - Negotiation
First Summer Session 2005

INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
BOOK REVIEW

Title: Hot Buttons: How To Resolve Conflict And Cool Everyone Down
Publisher: Cliff Street Books
Place of Publication: New York
Year of Publication: 2000
Number of Pages: 336
Price of the Book: Price ranges from $ .46 to $23 depending if the book is new, used, hard cover, paperback, or collectible.

The book "Hot Buttons: How To Resolve Conflict And Cool Everyone Down" talks about conflict management. The following is a background on the contributors:
- Sybil Evans is a nationally recognized specialist in conflict resolution and diversity issues. As president of the consulting firm Sybil Evans Associates, Evans
is a widely sought after trainer and speaker, enriching the relationship skills of individuals and Fortune 500 companies, including Campbell's Soup, Avon, Lucent Technologies, and AT&T. She is also the author of "Resolving Conflict in a Diverse Workplace".
- Sherry Suib Cohen is the author of eighteen Books, a contributing editor to McCall's, and an award-winning member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

The book is organized as follows:
Chapter 1 -- What's a Hot Button?
Chapter 2 -- Hot Buttons Everywhere!
Chapter 3 -- Hot Buttons: Hazardous to Your Health!
Chapter 4 -- What Pushes Your Buttons?
Chapter 5 -- Hot Buttons and Intimacy
Chapter 6 -- Hot Buttons and the Family
Chapter 7 -- Hot Buttons and Children
Chapter 8 -- Hot Buttons and Friendship
Chapter 9 -- Hot Buttons and the Workplace
Chapter 10 -- The Magic of Your Mind

The book's core concept is to develop cooperative collaborations that generate win-win solutions that everyone wants to implement. These are built from a five-step process:
1) Watch what's going on like you are a part of an audience to a play so you experience detachment and objectivity. This helps calm you down.
2) Confirm the validity of the other person's point of view to them in order to help calm them down and positively engage their attention.
3) After the other person's anger is sufficiently diffused, ask questions neutrally and respectfully to get more information.
4) Assert your own interests and needs in terms of the other person's perspective and story. The other person now listens to you because you first listened to them.
5) Find common ground for a solution. Brainstorm possible solutions, and then deal with both of your issues to find the optimum ways to build a win-win direction that works well.
The authors include a story that has been repeated many times in mediation/conflict resolution literature to make the win/win point --we even used a very similar example in one of our class group exercises. "The Orange Story"
Two kids both want the last orange. They fight over it. They reject a compromise - cutting it in half - that won't satisfy either, really. Mom walks in. She knows about collaboration and win/win. She knows she has to find out their needs, try to be fair, and come up with options so that each child feels she has won. "Why do you want the orange?" she asks one child. "I'm thirsty - I want juice," is the answer. "And why do you want the orange?" she asks the other. "I want the rind to make orange icing for my cake" is the answer. Mom gives all the rind to one child and the whole orange to the other. Both win. The lesson is that the first step to agreement is understanding each point of view.

The authors appear to believe that conflict is the result of people pressing each other's hot buttons. As stated in the book, "A hot button is an emotional trigger." Your hot buttons get pushed when people call you names, don't respond to you, take what belongs to you, challenge your competence, don't respect you, give you unsolicited advice, don't appreciate you, are condescending... and so on. In "Hot Buttons: How to Resolve Conflict and Cool Everyone Down", the authors claim that by recognizing what pushes your hot buttons --and by learning how not to push the hot buttons of others conflicts can be avoided. Even more important is the ability to turn them off once they have been pushed.

As I said in the prior paragraphs, hot buttons are emotional triggers set off by what people do and/or say to others.
Each person has his or her own set of hot buttons. Once the button is pushed, people tend to explode in angry ways. This leads to everything from road rage to divorce. The book is filled with illustrations of people pushing someone's hot button and the responses. It contains many examples of conversations that illustrate how not to say things as well as how to say certain things to each other in a way that doesn't trigger the other person's hot button. It teaches good skills helping people on how to stand back, analyze the situation, and find a new way of communicating the same information without triggering a hot button in the other person. You get ideas for lots of different kinds of situations and relationships. The many case histories in the book helps you get a feeling for how to use the master process recommended here. The self-assessment in the book helps you internalize which lessons are most important for you to focus on. It showed me what to work on and made me rethink how I say some things to people around
me.

Learning why people behave the way they do is very complex, especially when it comes to conflict situations.
Understanding why they do so is even more confusing. The book is a good tool that takes the reader to the next level of understanding not only the "WHY", but the "HOW TO" in dealing with the broad diversity of personal and work-life situations. It guides the reader at assessing their interpersonal behaviors. It then offers, at a pace suitable to their individual life situations, a practical toolkit for both avoiding and managing potential conflicts. The Hot Buttons book is a good complement of what we so far have learned in this class. It reinforces many of the aspects of communication/negotiation. It helps you to know how to better control your behavior (as well as the other party's) leading to a better collaboration and best of all to reaching a win-win
agreement.

I think Hot Buttons is a book that should be on everyone's bookshelf. The book would help coworkers, family members, siblings, marriage partners, and parents and children learn how to resolve conflicts.
I give this book a very good recommendation. Reading it may not only save you the expense of family counseling to resolve conflicts within the family, but also help to avoid many conflicts. Every manager should read this book to help resolve workplace conflict. Also, people dealing with customer service/relationships would definitely benefit from reading this book. Reading this book can lead to a more peaceful existence for everyone and a better understanding of each other.