Hard conversations and conflict in the workplace can be like a gift wrapped in sandpaper. In the moment, it may feel uncomfortable, difficult, and upsetting to navigate the prickly issues (the sandpaper), but often through the process of the conversation, you find the gifts. Opportunities from conflict can emerge such as a better understanding of your colleagues, learning something about yourself, and experiencing a sense of relief as the conflict conversation helps unravel the issues and solutions get discussed.
Support For Leaders Navigating Conflict:
Finding the benefits of well-managed conflict and being able to create the opportunities to be able to deal with conflict effectively and provide support to leaders is important. I talk to a lot of leaders who feel very much alone when it comes to conflict. They might be lacking a sense of confidence in their skill, and they don’t always feel supported about talking to somebody or getting additional support and guidance.
Sometimes leaders share their situations like, “I’m embarrassed, Charmaine, that I don’t know how to figure this out or deal with it.” Or, “I’m worried what people will think of me as a leader if I go and ask for help and guidance.”
Often leaders struggle through issues alone. Making sure that companies have support, training, or coaching for leaders will help leaders to flourish and advance their skills around conflict resolution, which absolutely carries over with positive impact at the team level. The entire team benefits when their leaders are skilled in conflict resolution.
Leaders as Mediators:
One of the programs I created years ago that I love training on is Leaders as Mediators. The reason I created that program was from seeing a need within all the work I had done with leaders.
I realized that, many times, leaders are acting in the role of a quasi-mediator. They are facilitating those difficult conversations among people on their team, and they feel really uncertain about how to create that much needed collaborative conversation space. They want to understand how best to set the right guidelines—what I call courtesies—for how colleagues communicate together. Leaders also need proven tools to handle some of the nuances or behaviours that pop up when they’re facilitating conversations between employees—how to handle emotions, how to remain objective, and how to deal with power imbalances.
Seeing all of those needs made it clear that training opportunities like Leaders as Mediators are essential to help leaders build confidence and skill when they lead those conversations in team meetings or between employees who are actually having a dispute or a conflict. I’ve heard time and time again that leaders use these skills that I’ve trained them on and that it’s really, really helped.
Exponential Benefits of Mediation Training & Conflict Resolution Skills:
What I love about leaders getting conflict resolution training is that the benefits ripple out to the entire team. A lot of employees learn by watching, don’t they? If you’re a leader, your team learns by watching you. They learn by seeing how you show up, how you handle those bumpy, messy, and tough conversations.
When you are modelling and integrating effective conflict resolution skills, e.g…
- Asking from a place of curiosity
- Using open-ended questions
- Not shying away from those tough conversations
- Reducing or clarifying assumptions
… you will often begin to see your employees and workplace colleagues use those same skills themselves. It’s a positive form of mirroring.
Many of our articles can expand on the costs of conflict in the workplace (and there were a lot, and I probably just scratched the surface on some of the costs), but the opportunities from conflict (when it’s well-managed) are within reach when you have these kinds of elements in place:
- Building a supportive workplace culture
- Creating psychologically safe and healthy workplaces by implementing the 13 factors
- Having policies, procedures, processes, and follow-up guidelines around conflict
- Providing ongoing training like Leaders as Mediators to ensure people develop their conflict resolution skills
Implementing the right combination of elements can really start to shift workplace culture in a positive way. These investments in people and culture reduce the costs that we are facing right now because of unmanaged or poorly managed conflict.
How Opportunities From Conflict Show Up in the Workplace:
We can see the benefits of managing conflict in the workplace are plentiful and positive. We begin to see people who actually like Mondays. They want to come to work because they feel safe, they do feel supported, and they don’t feel the stress or pressure from those unresolved conflicts. We see team relationships start to restore where people are gelling together again, where that sense of belonging or connection is there. We see trust start to be rebuilt—sometimes even restored, quite honestly. We see relationships start to get back on track. People who maybe stopped talking to each other because of a conflict are now saying, “Good morning.” They’re acknowledging each other. They look at each other in staff meetings. These are all demonstrations of progress.
Additional Benefits:
Some of the other benefits of well-managed conflict include:
- Greater freedom for creativity and innovative problem-solving
- Enhanced environment for critical thinking and proactive thinking
- Increased engagement (e.g. You will see some of your employees who want to put their hand up and say, “Hey, I’ll help with that. Let me take on that task.”)
- Improved or restored company reputation
- Boosts in right-fit employee interest and retention
I love it when I hear positive stories like this one from leaders…
“Charmaine, the best day of my life was when I had these two employees who’d had problems for years. We did the training, they came back, and then they had a conversation without me. I didn’t even know they talked together, Charmaine. They came to me after and said, ‘Just to let you know, we had a really big disagreement. It impacted how we were working together. We wanted to let you know that the two of us have met and we wanted to share the agreement we landed on, so that you can support us as a leader in making sure that we stick to this.'”
That leader said to me, “Charmaine, I wanted to jump off my chair and hug these two people because I was so proud of what they had accomplished.” Her take-away was that often when people are trained and supported, they not only manage, they well-manage the issues on their own.
Remember, you teach people how to treat you and others by how you show up!