Conflict 101

Susan H. SHEAROUSE

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814417126
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Conflict Resolution

Learn how conflict is created, how to respond to it, and how to manage it more effectively so that your team can get back to doing what it does best: producing top results for your organization.

From mild disagreements to major personnel blowouts, conflict in the workplace is unavoidable. Conflict 101 employs research, humor, and relatable anecdotes to help readers more deeply understand:

• what it takes to build trust,
• harness negative emotions,
• encourage apologies and forgiveness,
• use a solution-seeking approach,
• and say what needs to be said in the workplace to move past conflicts.

Whether it's a fight over resources, a disagreement about how to get things done, or an argument stemming from perceived differences in identities or values, the manager's role is to navigate relationships, build compromises, and encourage better collaboration.

In doing so, you'll not only become a stronger manager--you'll build a much stronger team.

PART I
Introduction

As conflict—difference—is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it, we should, I think, use it. Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us. …The transmission of power by belts depends on friction between the belt and the pulley. All polishing is done by friction. The music of the violin we get by friction.… So in business, too, we have to know when to try to eliminate friction and when to try to capitalize it, when to see what work we can make it do.⁶

—MARY PARKER FOLLETT

CHAPTER 1
The Joy of Conflict

Driving along a four-lane road several years ago, I came up over a small hill. I knew this road well, had passed this way many times. This time, I noticed a major construction project under way at the gas station on the right-hand side. Workers were digging a hole right next to the road. This hole was huge. I was amazed at how deep it was. I was fascinated.

Have I mentioned the traffic light that was some fifty feet over that rise in the road? Unfortunately, I was much more interested in the size of the hole than I was in the road. Several cars were stopped at the red light just ahead. Cruising over the hill, I smacked into a car waiting there. I rammed into that car hard enough to get the attention of the car in front of the car that I had rear-ended. Pretty soon we were all milling around the cars, inspecting the damage.

In that moment, everybody noticed me. The people in the car I hit certainly noticed me. Those in the car in front of the car I hit noticed me. The cops came very quickly—they had also noticed. Later that day, my insurance company noticed.

Since then, I have gotten my car repaired and am back on the road. What I realized then was how many cars I do not hit, and that nobody noticed. No one has ever gotten out of a car to come around and thank me for bringing my car to a complete stop before making contact with the rear bumper in front of me.

And so it is with us all. Throughout most of our days we successfully navigate differences, find solutions, and accommodate others’ needs, building compromises and collaborations along the way. When it comes to resolving all of these conflicts, nobody notices. Our skills are taken for granted.

What everyone notices instead are the collisions—those times when our needs and expectations clash with others’ needs and expectations. Someone says something, and we are sparked to anger. Suddenly we’re standing in the middle of the room, yelling at someone else. Or slamming the door and stomping out of the room. The label “conflict” is slapped on the event, and we walk away embarrassed and ashamed. “How could I have said that to her?” “Why didn’t I just let that go?” We turn these moments over and over in our heads, feeling lousy about who we are and what we have done and because of how we reacted.

Conflict Defined

Managers deal with conflict all the time. As leader of a group, the manager’s job is to understand the mission of the workgroup—how it supports the mission of the organization—to articulate that mission to staff and to others inside and outside the organization, and to support staff in accomplishing that mission. Providing that support frequently involves resolving differences and disagreements with staff. Often we don’t label this “conflict resolution” because we listen, respond, and resolve differences in the workplace before those differences kick up enough emotional dust to be visible. What, then, do we mean by the word conflict? Most dictionaries define conflict as the competitive or opposing action of incompatibles. In other words, conflict is when what you want, need, or expect interferes with what I want, need, or expect. It may be a disagreement over data or processes (how things get done); or it may be over resources (where the money and staff will come from to do the job); or it may be about relationships or our identities or values.

With this definition, we can consider the various levels of conflict, from mild disagreements, to disputes that require much time and attention, to intractable conflicts where emotions run high and relationships are broken. Resolving conflicts may be done so quietly and effectively that the moment is not remembered as a conflict. You have probably experienced this on a daily basis. Say, someone comes into your office with a question, you talk it over, agree on an answer, and sketch out a way to proceed. This is the job of management: conflict raised, conflict solved. Other conflicts become much bigger, with tempers flaring and any resolution seeming impossible. What I do in this book is help you develop an understanding of the nature of conflict and its resolution so that more of the conflicts you encounter can be resolved at the lowest possible level—in essence, to manage better.

Most of us face challenges in dealing with conflicts in our professional and personal lives. As I often tell groups I work with, I earned a life degree in conflict, as many of us do—at work, in my community, and with my family. I knew there must be a better way. In 1985, I headed back to school to get a master’s degree in conflict resolution. I wanted to work “between people.” I wanted to help them develop skills to address their differences, and use my own skills when they needed assistance addressing those differences. My hope was that they could more frequently walk away from a disagreement feeling relieved—and maybe surprised: “That went better than I thought it would.”

Since then, most of my work has been inside organizations. A large part of my time is employed mediating and facilitating within offices, between bosses and direct reports—helping each to hear the other, so that both can find a productive, mutually acceptable way to move forward. The rest of my time is spent teaching people the skills to manage conflict more effectively themselves.

Learning to handle conflict is a lifelong journey. There will always be differences between and among us. Much of the time, most of us work our way through them effectively. We all also hit the wall on occasion. Someone says something that triggers a response and we go off. Looking back, we scratch our heads and wonder what happened. And we wonder how we can keep that from happening again. What I love about my work is that I see it as a key developmental task for all humans. There is always more to learn, a new test waiting somewhere ahead on the journey.

Conflict in the Workplace

Many people I work with were hired for their technical expertise and promoted into management positions. Sometimes the change happens overnight. The job she left on Friday afternoon is not the job she starts on Monday morning. In that shift, the nature of the work changes dramatically, from dealing with “things”—data, spreadsheets, reports—to dealing with people. Instead of doing the work herself, now she must manage people so that they get the work done. More than once I have had a new manager, who is struggling with difficulties on her staff, look at me forlornly and say, “I’d like to have my old job back, where I knew what to do, where I didn’t have to deal with getting people to do the work I used to do.”

Managing people requires “people skills”—new levels of communication and conflict-resolution skills. Often these new managers or supervisors have new challenges that they had not imagined before. They find themselves in the middle of conflict with direct reports. Many times what the boss wants, needs, and expects from staff is counter to what the staff wants, needs, and expects. The boss also must stand up for the people within the organization, fighting on their behalf with other business units for scarce resources, managing expectations and workload, negotiating for positions, promotions, and opportunities. And the boss also stands between co-workers who are having their own share of conflicts, aiming to harmonize differences so that people can get back to work.

Understanding conflict—how it is created, how we respond to it, and how to manage it more effectively—is what this book is about. We all, at one point or another, find it challenging to handle the differences between us. We need to recognize what is happening and why, know when to walk away and when to stand our ground, and learn how to do all of that more effectively.

The cost of conflict in the workplace is high. Some of the ways that unresolved conflict affects productivity include:

42 percent of a manager’s time is spent addressing conflict in the workplace¹

Lost revenue from staff time is spent unproductively

Excessive employee turnover (replacement costs average 75–150 percent of annual salary)

Over 65 percent of performance problems are caused by employee conflicts²

High levels of absenteeism

“Presenteeism,” whereby employees are present but not productive, due to low morale

High incidence of damage and theft of inventory and equipment as a result of employee conflict

Covert sabotage of work processes and of management efforts because of employee anger³

The benefits to a manager, and to a workplace, of resolving conflict effectively, at the lowest possible level, result not surprisingly in minimized costs. While statistical studies are difficult to conduct directly on the relationship between effective conflict resolution and employee satisfaction, nevertheless by improving these skills a manager can expect increased productivity, improved employee morale, and reduced turnover and absenteeism. In a study linking employee fulfillment directly to business performance, “the single biggest contributor to these feelings of fulfillment, empowerment, and satisfaction lie in the day-today relationship between employees and their managers.”⁴

Conflict is a broad subject; much has been written already and there is much to say. There are so many skills that managers must use throughout the day. This book is an introduction to these skills, providing tools and approaches that enable managers to deal more effectively with the conflicts they encounter.

One of the challenges for managers is differentiating: When is this question a disagreement that I need to engage others in resolving? When does this situation involve the supervisory responsibility to make decisions? There are times when making directive, unilateral decisions is appropriate for managers and supervisors. There are other times when communicating and collaborating (i.e., engaging conflict-resolution processes and skills) are essential in order to get the work done efficiently and effectively.

In this book, I talk about interpersonal conflict—when what you want, need, or expect gets in the way of what others want, need, or expect. Within an office, the wants, needs, and expectations of an individual may conflict with those of the group and its work. Often, interpersonal conflict in the workplace affects more than the two people involved. In an office I was working in recently, the supervisor and the team leader frequently had confrontations and loud disagreements. The tension between the two reverberated through the office. All of the employees became anxious about who was in charge, how decisions were being made, even what they might expect when they came ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Understanding The Dynamics of Conflict
• Part III: Keys to Resolving Conflict
• Part IV: Putting It all Together
• Bibliography
• Index