Over the last few months I’ve been delivering a number of workshops on dealing with conflict, as its one of the top challenges that people have in the workplace. The problem is that a leader’s unwillingness to address conflict can result in devastating consequences for the business. Not only that, people can also fail to address this in their personal lives, and the results too can be damming.
Whilst some people enjoy dealing with conflict most of the people I work with would rather avoid it. There are a variety of reasons for this including the need to be liked, the pursuit for acceptance and the desire for stability in one’s life – they don’t want to rock the boat. The irony is that although many people seek to avoid conflict what they are actually doing is internalising their frustration. This frustration bubbles inside of them and then suddenly, just like a volcano, it erupts leaving a wake of devastation in its path, that other people don’t understand because that are unable to join the dots to see what was the trigger as often this happened days, weeks or even months beforehand.
“Avoidance is the best short term strategy to escape conflict, and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering” – Brendon Burchard, author The Charge
Unfortunately, great leaders cannot lead effectively without addressing conflict as it arises within the workplace. In fact, if they choose to avoid conflict at all costs, they can put their business at great risk.
Here are five deadly sins of conflict avoidance that I often witness in organisations when the leaders routinely avoid addressing conflict:
- Communications Become Strained: Conflict that goes unresolved will only fester and cause communication breakdowns to develop within the workplace
- Teamwork Diminishes: As communications become strained within a team, cooperation and teamwork will lessen as animosity builds up.
- Productivity Declines When teamwork fail to work together productivity declines. Silo mentality results and often competition rather than collaboration becomes the norm
- The Customer Experience Suffers: When team members are not engaged and team become dysfunctional this directly impacts the customer. Typically it is seen as poor quality and reduced service delivery.
- Top Performers Leave: Non-one wants to work in a highly tense environment marred by conflict. When leaders fail to address, say the poor performance of other team members, then your best performers become frustrated at carrying the load and may opt to vote with their feet.
What Can You Do to Become Better at Addressing Conflict?
There are five steps that you can take to be a better leader, even if avoiding conflict is your default pattern.Consider the following:
- Develop and communicate your vision: Some conflicts can be avoided through clarity. So, develop a clear vision for what your team is to accomplish and communicate it. Help everyone understand what you’re trying to do and how they fit in and contribute to the vision
- Set expectations: Once the long-term vision is understood, expectations of each team member should be set. Expectation setting is important because it establishes baselines for guiding behavior and results.
- Monitor progress: By actively checking behavior and monitoring results any needed intervention can be provided earlier and larger conflicts can be averted.
- Focus on results: You can keep personalities out of the discussion by focusing on outcomes. It’s a way to keep everyone honest without making it personal. Team members that aren’t keeping up with the plan or, otherwise, are not meeting expectations can be “coached” based on facts rather than perceptions–which can make conflicts easier to address.
- Take Decisive Action: Many of us tend to put off doing things that we prefer not to do. Do not put off addressing conflict situations. If the need to confront someone on your team arises, do it now. There is simply too much at stake to let it go or to wait for things to work themselves out.
I know from my own experience how damaging avoiding dealing with conflict can be as it nearly caused the business unit I was running at the time to implode. Basically, I failed to deal with a performance issues of one of my team members. They had some great skills that we needed in the team, but their attitude and behaviour were not aligned with the company values. I made a bad decision when I hired them but my ego got in the way and I didn’t want to admit this. So I kept making excuses for them. The crunch came when my team told me, either they go or we all go. It was what John Maxwell refers to as the case of the bad apple. The longer I allowed that underperforming team member to stay he more he was affecting the rest of the team. Taking decision action was the only solution, as I then actively had to manage him out of the business.
And yet managing conflict doesn’t have to be difficult. My horses are masters at dealing with conflict. They aIways act immediately giving feedback to each on other on whether their performance is acceptable. They don’t fret about what the other horse will think, or worry about being liked. They don’t worry about the consequences.They just do what needs to be done and then “go back to eating”, Admittedly this is easier as they live in the present moment and don’t have to be concerned that the other herd members will hold grudges for months to come, which is something that many leaders get concerned about.
Always remember, it is a leader’s job to address issues as they arise and take decisive action. If we choose to avoid conflict at any price, the price may be far greater than we are willing to pay. The impact of conflict avoidance can ripple throughout the organisation and cripple the future growth and success of the business. So, embrace conflict resolution. After all, conflict can be very healthy, too. It is often how we get the best answers to the toughest questions.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
