Dealing with conflict - How to Help Your Teams

Help your teams deal with conflict

Date

28.10.22

Avoiding conflict is bad for business! When your teams feel unheard, they will look elsewhere for work. Avoiding difficult conversations can be costly.

Help your teams deal with conflict

Organizations have been so focused on building a happy, engaged workforce that dealing with conflict has become a challenge. When leaders avoid conflict, managing teams, and cross-functional relationships become more difficult – ignoring a situation of conflict and assuming employees will simply “handle it” themselves usually increases stress levels and does not make interpersonal differences go away.

Avoiding conflict is bad for business! When your teams feel unheard, they will look elsewhere for work. Avoiding difficult conversations can be costly.

The negative side effects of conflict avoidance are often:
• high turnover
• a dysfunctional working environment
• strained communication
• loss of productivity
• impaired teamwork

How are you dealing with conflict in your organization?

Imagine that you are in a meeting and an issue arises causing discomfort in one or more of your team members. After the meeting you realize that they escalated the issue to you. This may be a clue that people are avoiding addressing issues directly, or, in other words, are avoiding conflict.

This type of behavior is not surprising. Employees’ happiness and well-being are nowadays exalted to a point where we are starting to think of conflict as an opposite to engagement, and it is not.

However, the relationship between leaders and team members becomes less effective when conflict avoidance is high. A clear example is discouraging employees from expressing their opinion to avoid interpretations of disagreement or discontent with others in the organization, or with the organization itself (Park, 2017).

In professional relations, it’s common to clash with people, even with those we get along with.

What to do:

1. Recognize the conflict soon and maintain a good attitude. It is important to detect conflict as early as possible. Conflict can, over time, become entrenched and tends to worsen, threatening a team’s engagement.

2. Create a positive mindset around conflict: Create an expectation that tensions are part of reality in any workplace. Clarifying what healthy and productive tensions look like may prevent people from interpreting diversity of thought as a dysfunctional dynamic. This way, you are giving every team member a part to play in defusing the tension when it arises.

3 .Focus on needs, not on points of view: The more someone is focused on defending their point of view, the more committed they will be to it. Most times people identify themselves with their point of view. When this happens, the likelihood of solving a conflict is reduced because people want to be right!

If you are ever caught in this loop, go ahead and state what your needs are, and what matters to you. This will give you and the other person the opportunity to choose from one of many different starting points.

In our work with leaders and managers in different countries around the world, we have witnessed that in situations of conflict, it is good to transform the energy of the situation by helping people articulate (1) what they observe in the situation, (2) how they feel about it, (3) what their needs are, and (4) what their request to others is – see: Nonviolent Communication, a language of life, from Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD.

Throughout this process, behaviors and attitudes are improved, bringing a valuable contribution to a thriving workplace culture, increasing business results and team’s well-being!