Tips for Managing Conflict
For better or worse, you can’t avoid conflict at work. In any case, differences in perspective are much better than groupthink. But conflict that’s frequent, prolonged, or excessive is a problem.
Once differences surface, a major contributor to serious conflict is the tendency for the parties to treat their differences as a zero sum game: For one party to win, the other has to lose. That kind of mindset leads people to oversimplify the problem, make assumptions about the other party’s intentions, and resort to thwarting ploys, such as sarcasm, shouting, blaming, accusing, and—perhaps the most difficult of all to deal with—silence.
If you face conflict in your work, keep in mind that in most conflicts, people aren’t against you, they’re just for themselves. This is not a trivial difference. During conflict, emotions run high. When people are looking out for themselves, it can feel like an attack on you. Therefore, it’s useful to step back and consider the other party’s perspective. Doing this can reframe the conflict and open up possibilities that you might not have considered otherwise.
Interestingly, some tips offered for keeping the peace at home can be useful in the workplace. For example, posture matters. Avoid having one person stand while the other is seated, or one sitting on a desk while the other is in a chair, or one leaning back with feet on the desk while the other is in a straight-back chair. Everyone should be at the same level; neither should have a power position over the other.
In most arguments, the most important points come out in the opening minutes. After that, people repeat themselves, often louder each time. To prevent an ever-escalating shouting match, take a time-out when stamina is running low, tempers are flaring, or the same issues are getting voiced repeatedly. Get away from the scene of the argument even for just a few minutes, and you may return with a fresh perspective that can become the catalyst to making real progress.
In this Harvard Business Review blog, Mark Goulston, an executive consultant and business psychiatrist, describes a technique he used to mediate a dispute between a sales manager and his boss, a senior VP. The gist of the technique is that you can't be empathic toward someone and simultaneously be angry at the person. After meeting with the two men individually, Goulston had them face each other and speculate about what led the other to behave as he had. Read the blog post to find out what happened next. (Hint: The result was overwhelmingly positive.)
Of course, most of us don’t have mediators handy to facilitate this type of interaction, but that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate about someone else’s behavior without any outside assistance.
