The conflicts around the world today mirror everyday conflicts leaders have in their offices or production space. Responsible for creating spaces with psychological safety and meeting organizational goals, leaders are stretched regarding how to deal with conflict efficiently and effectively. The real challenge begins when leaders address only one part of the conflict (the immediate) and then fail to understand the conflict process (the real issue) and where best to address the challenge.
Where to begin? Think of conflict as an acronym of PURE and use the framework to figure out where you are and what steps to take. First, conflict does not just appear—by the time it reaches a leader’s desk, email or text, it has been going on for a while. Leaders need to cool down, slow down, and instead of looking at the immediate issue, take a moment to understand the conflict process.
When dealing with conflict, start early and often. Disagreement and conflict begin and end with you. How you engage with the conflict (and this includes avoidance and delay in responding) will play a major role in conflict resolution.
Understanding the difference between disagreement and conflict is also important. As a graduate student and military officer, I co-led open meetings with the President of the Conscientious Objectors Association. We disagreed on many things, but we always ended the meeting with a meal and talked about the presentation we just finished. Our personal respect for each other helped us better understand each other, allowing us to learn from each other and grow.
Conflict is when I am right, you are wrong and worse, you are a bad person because you do not think like I do. A lack of respect signals conflict.
So, what to do:
P: Prevent Conflict: Work to prevent conflict before it begins.
- Begin with building psychological safety in your team. This is very difficult in a new task, and it is most important. Leaders know they have a challenge to accomplish and want to move quickly, and doing this with empathy, humility, and transparency can speed the process, not slow it down. Why? Because role modeling vulnerability and transparency sets the conditions for the innovation and open communication you need to be successful.
- Determine what success looks like. At the very beginning of a process or task, don’t start with goals. Generate respect and understanding by talking about what success would look like for the task. Then backward to goals. This is a key sticking point for conflict. People can have the same goal and entirely different ideas for success. Ask the team what success might look like and get their ideas into the discussion early.
- Clarify roles, actions, and resources: Who’s who in the zoo and what do they do? This creates boundaries. This is not about who is in charge—it is about who is responsible for what part of the process and how to hold them accountable. This is when we build teamwork because we know we can depend on the other people we need to make the process happen.
- Identify how your team will work together. Now you are really moving. You know what you want to achieve and who is responsible for what piece. Now determine how you are going to make it happen—what the end state looks like, how you will provide individual and team-based feedback. And something very important for hybrid teams—how you will communicate and the forms of communication. Knowing these boundaries creates teamwork and reinforcing these boundaries yields efficiency.
- Check your psychological safety. All too often people perceive this as ‘holding hands and singing We are the World at meetings.’ Not recommended. Instead, in your weekly individual updates with members of the team, ask how comfortable they feel in meetings and what can be done to increase communication and accountability. They will appreciate your asking.
U: Understand: Conflict will occur.
Now as a leader, you need to decide how to address it and the role to play—even before you act. So before making the choices for conflict, understand where you are, where they are, what you want to do together, and the end state you’d like them to create.
- Me: Understand why you are involved in this conflict. Know yourself and any bias you bring to this issue. If you are the boss, you may need to get involved. But are the people in the conflict seeking you to make a decision or do they just want a kind ear to listen to the bias they have that is creating their woes? Understanding yourself and why you are in conflict is important to any resolution you become involved with. According to Dr. Thomas Kilmann, a leading researcher on conflict and disagreement, leaders have preferences about how to handle conflict. These are based on how cooperative you want to be and how assertive you prefer to be in conflict. According to Kilmann, people have five conflict preferences (you actually use all five, but you will use one over the other): avoiding, accommodating, compromising, competing and collaborating. Which one do you choose the most?
- You: Why is this person in this conflict, what are the facts (not their perceptions), and how might you leverage the factual nature of the conflict to resolve the feelings engaged in the conflict? And neuroscience will tell you that feelings beat facts every time. The best question to ask here is a tough one: ‘What would you like to see happen?’ This helps the other person reflect and speak out loud about the conflict— often changing their view.
- We: Some people call this ‘squaring the circle’ or ‘triangulating the argument.’ If this conflict is between two other people who are asking or need your intervention, they are the solution to the conflict, not you. The best solutions are always those where somehow those two people meet and work out their issues. You may begin in the mediator role and see if they can work it out. The important thing is getting them together and using the facts you identified in your conversations.
- Us: The goal is to focus on the future, not the present or the past. Conflict resolution focused on the present is negotiation. Resolution focused on the future offers opportunity and the potential for a better outcome. When you meet with the people involved or even when you meet with someone you might be in conflict with, how might you resolve this conflict in a manner focused on sustaining the relationship? You might ask the people in conflict, ‘Five years from now, how will you reflect on this issue?’ It mentally allows them to leave the present and see themselves in a different way.
R: Resolution: Leaders don’t let conflict or tension fester.
They get involved. And it is hard. Army General and Secretary of State Colin Powell had a saying, ‘When people stop coming to you with their problems, you have ceased being a leader.’ How you handle those problems often determines your reputation as a leader. According to Eckerd College and the Center for Creative Leadership, leaders have a number of different approaches to conflict. These approaches can be positive or negative and involve an active or passive response. Outlined in a matrix, you can see which ones resonate best with you:
E: Evaluation: Congratulations.
You have effectively addressed the conflict, but you are not done yet. How well did you do? Is this a short-term or long-term solution? Did the people in conflict solve this? Did you tell them what to do? Are they going to be back in your office tomorrow with an updated and more visceral issue? After you have worked to prevent the conflict, tried to better understand it, and sought to resolve the tension, you need to evaluate your actions. And you can do this very quickly with three questions:
- What did you do that worked? Begin with the energy around the positive and identify how it worked and why. What did you do with each person that resonated with them? How did you effectively generate options for success?
- During the process, what surprised you? We often go quickly to ‘what did we do wrong…’ Instead, stick to what surprised you and let your answers drive your reflection. When you are surprised, an event has occurred outside your mental model for what ‘should’ happen. This can be positive (Surprise! It’s your birthday!) or negative (Surprise! All the budget figures for last quarter are wrong!). Either way, it offers a deeper introspection into why you may have made specific decisions.
- Finally, and most importantly, what will you do differently next time? Words here are important—the question is not about what you will do better—it is about what you will do differently to obtain a better result. To ask what you will do better implies your current solution is ineffective or wrong. But your current solution used all the information you had available. Now you have more information because of the time you took to reflect. So, what will you do differently next time?
Well done, leader. You have now taken a PURE approach to conflict. You accepted the importance of the conflict and took the time needed to truly address tensions in your team, process, or production space. You began wanting to create a space to prevent or even leverage conflict for the best outcome. Then you understood the nature of the conflict, sought to resolve it, and then learned from the process. Leaders know conflict will always exist and leaders also know how they address conflict will determine the impact it has on themselves and their team.