Conflict Resolution For All

A must-have skill for the future

HBR gave their take on the top trends that will shape work. One of the trends that stuck out to us was the establishment of conflict resolution as a must-have skill for managers…

This year, conflicts between employees are poised to be at an all-time high due to various crises, including geopolitical issues, labor strikes, climate change, pushback to DEI efforts, and upcoming elections for half of the globe. Conflict between employees at all levels pulls down both individual and team performance; for many, work is not a safe space.

[...] Managers who can effectively navigate and manage interpersonal conflict among employees will have an outsize positive impact on their organizations — the question is how many really feel trained and prepared to do so? [...]

Organizations should upskill managers and managerial candidates in conflict resolution through dedicated training and shadowing or coaching opportunities for new managers.

We’d go further. Our coaching experience has taught us that all professionals need foundational conflict resolution training. Often, this kind of training comes either through coaching with their manager or by attending a dedicated session like our Conflict Skills Workshop.

The most important thing to remember when dealing with conflict is to remember that it almost always originates from mismatched expectations. So when conflict erupts, we often ask coaching questions that try to work out both where expectations got misaligned and why that happened.

For example, in a recent leadership team meeting, we saw tempers get a little frayed after a leader (James) said he thought a new product wouldn’t sell well. By contrast, another leader (Kirsty) was certain it would make the company a lot of money and so an argument ensued. What neither leader realized was that the entire disagreement was actually about what James meant by ‘well’. He thought the goal was to get broad market penetration (selling to lots of people). She thought the goal was to make as much money as possible, regardless of the number of individual sales.

We were able to help the team resolve the conflict by slowing them down and making sure they had shared definitions of concepts that, up until that point, they’d considered “too obvious to bother asking questions about”.

Conflict resolution doesn’t have to be difficult when you have the tools and resources to address it.

We covered some of the foundations of this topic in a previous newsletter so please check that out if you’re hungry for more.