Monday Mornings with Madison

Resolving Conflicts at Work, Part 2

Word Count: 1,454
Estimated Read Time: 6 Min.

Conflicts in the workplace are unavoidable.  If they go unacknowledged or dismissed as unimportant, conflicts can hurt morale and cause teams to become dysfunctional.  And conflict (with a boss or colleague) is a key driver of employee turnover.  But if conflicts are properly addressed, they can amplify a team’s effectiveness and solidify their unity.  When handled properly, conflicts can be harnessed for good.  Positively resolving conflict can boost team performance, increase cohesion, supercharge employee motivation, and redouble collaborative problem solving efforts.  It’s simply a matter of how conflicts are handled.

It is crucial for managers and leaders to develop the skills to appropriately deal with coworkers having difficult conversations or conflicted exchanges.  This set of skills is referred to as Conflict Competence.  It is the ability to develop and use cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skills that enhance productive outcomes from conflict while reducing the likelihood of escalation or harm. Like most skills, Conflict Competence can be learned.

In his book, Managing Conflict, mediation consultant David Liddle confirms that conflict is inevitable and affects the whole workforce.  In other words, it’s not a question of whether an organization has conflict, it is only a question of how an organization handles its conflicts when they occur.  Therefore, leaders need to expect and be prepared for conflicts to arise and institute effective resolution policies for when they do.  Liddle not only explains why organizations do not manage conflicts well, he also offers a comprehensive overview for managing institutional conflict.

Why Companies Don’t Handle Conflicts Well

Human considerations, emotions, desires, ambitions, workplace demands as well as personal ones, and other issues play a prominent role in the relationships between employees and employers. Those relationships play out in unpredictable ways within work environments and they involve people of different social and cultural backgrounds, working together to meet their own goals and the goals of their organization.

Managers tend to think of workplace conflicts as minor squabbles and petty issues.  And mostly they are.  But, there can also be conflicts that arise between employees and coworkers or management that can have serious consequences.  For example, employees who see colleagues and superiors acting in ways that contradict their firm’s publicly espoused values can develop distrust and conflict.  If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, consider this case in point.

Social media giant Facebook is currently under a microscope because of testimony given to Congress by a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower.  The employee’s testimony was damaging but made worse by the trove of documentation revealed to back up the claims made.  At the heart of the issue was that the social media giant hired staff (including the whistleblower in 2019) to reduce the incendiary political speech and misinformation on its platform while simultaneously programming its algorithms to spread those posts faster.  Employees saw the company’s leadership behaving in ways that contradicted their publicly espoused values, and that caused a huge conflict within the organization….  until that conflict – which went unresolved and was allowed to fester – ended up exploding onto the public arena.  So far, this conflict – accompanied by the release of the Facebook Papers just days ago – has caused (in part) Facebook’s stock price drop from $341 per share on Thursday, October 21, 2021 to $310 per share on Tuesday, October 26, 2021…. 9% in less than a week.  That wiped out millions of dollars of shareholder value… all because of an unresolved workplace conflict.

That is part of the reason why managers sometimes lack the courage to intervene in a conflict between employees, fearing it could spiral out of control.  So they ignore it.  Or, if they do try to handle a disagreement, it is by trying to determine the merits of the issue.  And, different teams or groups within an organization, like labor unions, HR departments and management staff – who may be pulling in different directions — might end up working against each other.  This only leads to mutual suspicion, lack of confidence, and distrust of dialogue.  In the absence of a clear dispute resolution strategy, conflicts not handled properly fester and can even explode.  This is especially true in larger organizations where there are many stakeholders with differing needs.

How Companies Can Handle Conflicts Better

Managers must not only expect conflicts but also be properly trained on how to handle them.  They need Conflict Competence skills.  The goal is to address what each person needs and focus on how to resolve the conflict.  An episode of conflict within a company typically follows a pattern of pre-conflict, early conflict, mid-conflict, late conflict, and post-conflict.  There are a variety of approaches that managers can use at the different phases. Everyone involved in the dispute as well as the manager who mediates the issue can learn from addressing a conflict productively.

Disputes that become points of conflict involve how human beings relate to one another.  Conflicts also emerge from the interaction of emotional and psychological factors.  People will resort to conflict when they make flawed assessments of the motivations behind people’s actions. But unless people share what they feel, these assumptions or internal prejudices cannot be overcome.  In the past, dispute resolution was predicated on some clash between clashing individuals or interests.  It was process driven, based on how well or badly employees worked.  Now, there is a shift to approaches that highlight individual concerns and values and stress dialogue.

A resolution-driven approach encourages participants to accept their personal roles in an issue, to reach for resolution and to understand how others see the issue.  It shifts the company culture from one of pointing fingers to dealing straightforwardly with problems.  The goal is for the two sides to participate in reaching a peaceful resolution to a problem in a way that benefits both sides.  The manager uses his/her emotional intelligence, data and insights to help arguing parties discover new alternatives and resolve differences.  The goal is to encourage discussion and not take sides.  This improves morale.

When faced with conflict, people respond in a variety of ways. They think about what is happening. They experience emotional reactions that are influenced by the ways they view and interpret the conflict. They also take action to address the concerns that the conflict raises.  To deal effectively with conflict, those involved must work on their cognitive, emotional and behavioral skills so they can engage the matter constructively.

  1. Cognitive Skills include: developing self-awareness about their current attitudes and responses to conflict; understanding what triggers a person in the first place; and how they respond when conflict emerges.
  2. Emotional Skills include: understanding one’s emotional responses to conflict; regulating those responses to attain and maintain emotional balance; and understanding and managing the emotions of one’s conflict partners.  If this doesn’t work, there’s also Cooling Down and Slowing Down.
  3. Cooling Down relates to strategies to help regulate emotions so a person can maintain or regain emotional balance before proceeding further. If someone is upset, cognitive faculties are impaired and it is easy to slip into use of destructive behaviors. So a key first step is to manage emotions effectively.

    If Cooling Down doesn’t work, another strategy is Slowing Down.  When strong emotions are challenging and efforts to calm down are not entirely effective, it is important to take time out to enable emotions to calm down rather than going too far and saying something regrettable.  Comments that escalate the conflict can be very hard to undo.

  4. Behavioral Skills include: choosing to understand others’ perspectives, emotions and needs by actively listening; allowing each person to share their thoughts, feelings and interests; collaborating to develop creative solutions to issues; and reaching out.
  5. Actively Listening for Understanding involves trying to understand how the other person sees the situation, using empathy to understand how the other person feels and asking what they want.  This helps develop new insights and lower tensions.

    Sharing involves allowing each person to express how they see the situation, and feel about it, and what they want.

    Collaborating on Solutions involves seeking answers to the issues raised by the conflict that will work for both parties.  This involves reflecting on the merits of alternative solutions, brainstorming new approaches, and remaining flexible to make the best out of whatever solution is crafted.

    Reaching Out involves working with the other person either at the very start of conflict to get communications moving or later on to get things back on track.

By employing these strategies to resolve conflicts instead of ignoring or avoiding them or worse, trying to strong-arm a solution, companies can dig down to a deeper level of connection and understanding amongst everyone involved.  It can turn a negative into a positive and strengthen an organization rather than hurt it.  Give it a try.

Quote of the Week

“Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” US President Ronald Reagan

 

© 2021, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.

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