How do I improve my conflict management skills as a leader?

You hired your team for their passion and varying perspectives. But when they're passionate about conflicting ideas, it can cause conflict, distract from their work, and position teammates against each other. How can managers help their teams preserve relationships and develop solutions that accomplish everyone's goals?

Learn how to improve your communication skills and implement conflict management techniques to help your team overcome stagnation caused by conflict. Find strategies in this guide and take a course on edX to find out how leaders can resolve workplace conflict.

How does conflict arise within teams

Conflict is a common and natural aspect of workplace culture. It isn't always negative — it can even spur innovation. But when conflict doesn't naturally resolve, your team may experience distractions and stagnation. Managers should work to mitigate personal disputes in the workplace before they become overwhelming and distracting.

Despite the complex emotions that may surface during conflict, the causes are often simple:

• Communication: Not everyone communicates the same way, which can cause misunderstandings. For example, you may notice miscommunication between employees who use different slang or cultural references.
• Personalities: Team members may approach work differently. For example, one person may prioritize being detail-oriented, while another follows a big-picture strategy. Both viewpoints add value to your team, but the difference in perspective may create conflict.
• Expectations: Your team may have mismatched ideas about the time and effort required to complete a task. One employee may believe they only need to spend a few hours on a deck to get their point across, while their teammate wants to design a specialized template that wows the audience.
• Goals: A process change that works for one may negatively impact another, making it more difficult to achieve goals. For instance, when an organization switches software, it may assist one team, but another may have trouble accessing essential specialized features for their role, causing conflict.
• Biases: Unaddressed biases are often unconscious, and acknowledging them can be uncomfortable. However, purposefully negating biases is necessary to foster a safe workplace. For example, an employee with a bias against IT staff may have had a bad experience with them in a former role. Still, they should negate their bias to establish a friendly relationship with that integral team.

How do leaders manage conflict

By taking actionable steps to manage conflict, leaders can reduce stagnation and help their teams feel safe sharing their feelings at work.

Actively listen to identify conflict

Samantha Adler, founder of SEA Conflict Consultants, has over a decade of experience in workplace conflict mediation. She says active listening is a great skill to practice when developing conflict management skills.

“The manager should listen nonjudgmentally and carefully to everything that they are being told and be able to, in a neutral way, reflect back to the other person what was shared factually and the feelings that were expressed," Adler said. “This lets the other person know they have really been heard and starts to build a foundation of trust."

Adler also emphasizes the importance of open-ended questions, which can help you determine the cause of the conflict and how the person truly feels about it. Examples of open-ended questions include:

• What happened?
• How did the problem first arise?
• How did that make you feel?
• What would you like to see moving forward?
• What can we do differently next time?

Prioritize reasonable compromises

When resolving conflict, Harvard Business Review writer Amy Gallo recommends leaders prioritize a reasonable compromise that achieves as much of both parties' goals as possible. In doing so, leaders can

• Maintain relationships
• Avoid biased outcomes
• Encourage further collaboration

Establish a conflict management strategy

While conflict sometimes breeds innovation, it can also stall progress and damage relationships if the disputing parties cannot reach a resolution. By establishing a conflict management strategy, different types of leaders can help workers resolve potential problems efficiently without damaging relationships or disrupting work.

Adler says that when workers don't have a go-to guide for conflict resolution, it can lead to further confusion and miscommunication.

“My best recommendation is to have one policy that's just for conflict resolution issues," Adler said. “I see often in companies [that their conflict policies] are very haphazard…and that causes some conflict in and of itself."

She recommends having a specific person who can handle conflict. Whether this is an HR professional or a manager with conflict resolution training, implementing a clear path to resolution gives employees a framework for communicating and negotiating with colleagues. This path can help them navigate and resolve the dispute before real stagnation begins.

How to prevent team conflict

Leaders and managers can also preemptively deter conflict by noticing the early signs and working to alleviate pain points before they progress. Noticing these warning signs requires intention, active listening, and nonjudgemental communication.

For example, you may notice that an employee communicates less in meetings when a certain coworker is involved. You schedule a private meeting and encourage the employee to share openly, where you discover that the coworker makes negative comments that impact the employee's willingness to share. You can then take the necessary steps to ensure that the employee feels supported, heard, and accepted by their coworkers and avoid what may become a distracting emotional situation.