How to Manage Conflicts at Work
The guide to successfully handle conflicting situations at your workplace
Working with other people is great. It allows you to share ideas, talk about different possibilities and most importantly take advantage of each person’s abilities. However, it’s not always a bed of roses. Conflicts might arise and dealing with them in the correct way might be challenging sometimes. During the past years as a CTO, we’ve had different kinds of situations in my team but we’ve always overcome them making our team even stronger. Handling these issues fast is the key to success for having strong teams that work very well together.
The problem
When you are working with other people problems start appearing quickly. I’m sure you’ve sometimes misunderstood sentences in chat conversations, you’ve had moments of frustration because another person’s work was not what you expected or someone had a harsh response to something you said. These things might happen more or less often depending on several factors like the company culture or the personality of the members of the team. However, there’s one common factor: the lack of communication.
There’s plenty of examples of bad or lack of communication. It happens more often than what we think, and the consequences can be very bad if it’s not addressed quickly enough.
I’ll give you one example. Imagine you get a message from some coworker blaming you for something you did, being harsh and even disrespectful with you. You don’t have any context on why this person is sending you that message, so the first thing you need to dig out is what led this person to do this. You will most likely not get a straight answer, as whenever this happens there’s usually an underlying reason that’s not obvious. After talking to that person and asking questions you might find out that he’s having serious personal problems. So the reason why this person was treating you like this was not personal, it was just that he was having a bad day.
Another example might be when an employee delivers something totally different of what you were expecting. In that case, you need to analyse what went wrong. Was it that you didn’t clearly communicate what was expected from his work? Was it that the goal was not clearly set? Has it been clear from the beginning what’s that needs to be done? Or was it that the person’s skills were not good enough to do the job? Unless the latter, communication is your problem.
The solution
There are several solutions to this problem. The first and most important thing you can do is to prevent the problem. Embrace good and continuous communication, write guidelines, provide examples, set goals, and predicate transparency and honesty. Learn where the main mistakes are made, and try to improve it.
Embrace good and continuous communication, write guidelines, provide examples, set goals, and predicate transparency and honesty.
Sometimes you can’t prevent these things to happen or you can’t foresee that a conflict will arise. In those cases the best thing you can do it act fast and talk with that person or group of people. Try to listen and understand what the other person is saying and try to dig out what are the real reasons of the conflict. If there’s no clear answer, keep asking questions and listening. At the end, you will find out the real reason why it happened, and hopefully, you will find a solution for that too. Sometimes this takes a bit more time depending on the person, but if you spend enough time they will eventually open up and talk about the underlying issues that provoked the conflict.
Company culture has a big role too. If you embrace honesty and transparency, people are more likely to empathise with each other and problems tend to reduce. Of all the practices I could tell you to boost transparency and honesty, the most important one is: start from yourself. Lead by example and, whenever you see a problem, act immediately. If you let it slip, you are saying that what happened it’s just okay. Guess what’s going to happen next? The same thing is going to happen all over again. And if you react after that, people are not going to take you as seriously because you are acting inconsistently. Tackle the problem from the root and as soon as possible.
Another factor that might influence is that people have different personalities. People act differently under different circumstances and we don’t always react the same way when something happens. This is something we can’t change overnight, and sometimes we can never change it at all. However, we can provide an environment where people can be open and share feedback, so we encourage other people to follow the same path and act alike. One technique we’ve been using a lot is to ask for feedback instead of just waiting for it. When you ask feedback you are saying that you care about people’s opinion, so you build trust, empathy and openness. Building this kind of habits will make people talk more openly about issues and eventually reduce the number of conflicts.
In most of the cases, these practices will work and you will reduce the number of conflicts at work. Although, it might happen that after all someone is still causing a lot of trouble and none of the practices before mentioned helped. We must face reality, and not everyone is willing to receive feedback in a positive way and not everyone will take feedback seriously enough to change some habits. Some people don’t like to get feedback and don’t want to improve. In this case, you should fire that person. If you don’t do it, it will not only spread a very toxic culture but it will probably affect other people’s motivation and take away your credibility as a leader.
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