Our tolerance for workplace tensions is being sorely tested. Conflict – like any other business input or output – can be managed. Here are six tips for how to harness its electricity, while eliminating its belligerence…
Up to a point, conflict is healthy. You need only watch a random selection of rockumentaries from the past five decades or so to grasp that conflict is not merely a by-product of band life, but one of the primary engines of the recording and touring process. The same goes for filmmaking – another field fraught with collaborative challenges. If creative tension and battles of ideas didn’t exist, the vital spark that drives collective artistic endeavours would simply evaporate. In the words of the splendidly monikered Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain, if there were no disagreements within his band, “It’d be almost like you didn’t care.” Disagreements between colleagues in more mainstream workplaces also tend to revolve around creativity, with each side of the argument typically drawing upon copious reserves of passion to make their case. But if a company devises a clear adjudication process for handling such moments, overseen by a calm arbiter who can either make a call on which idea goes through – and sensitively explain why – or even merge the best of both, it will be using conflict to constructive ends.
You would have to be a particularly distracted or emotionally removed manager not to notice an instance of conflict between team members mushrooming well beyond the useful and into the poisonously personal. If you see it, act on it. The longer conflict lingers, the more power it will acquire to gestate into something even uglier – and you don’t want to hang around to see what sort of havoc full-blown animosity could wreak upon your department. As US team-building and engagement expert Rick Gibbs puts it: “Negative energy has the potential to spread rapidly through a workplace, sometimes even affecting employees who are otherwise content or uninvolved. “In order to counter this, when conflict does arise, leadership should respond quickly to maintain positive employee morale and prevent discontent from extending throughout the workplace.”
Electronic forms of communication erect as many barriers as they surmount, often producing an unintentional distancing effect between parties. As such, emails and text messages are out when it comes to resolving conflicts: they have a nasty knack for concentrating sour emotions into undesirable tones, or stoking plain old misunderstandings. That goes double for team-messaging apps such as Slack or Flock, which should be entirely devoted to project management or other professional, collaborative tasks, and never allowed to become hotbeds for sarcasm or snide sniping. Social media likewise carries a host of risks around wrecking relations between networked colleagues in the event that workplace disputes go rogue. To prevent conflicts from warping out of shape with digital distortion, require workers to conduct their disagreements through purely organic channels.
It is crucial to find a place for both sides to air their respective grievances. Ideally, this should not be a senior figure’s office, which may be too much of a personal stomping ground and could easily become contested territory in a fresh round of sparring. Other possibilities include the boardroom during a handy gap in its normal schedule. Or perhaps your firm is lucky enough to have a rec room that will usefully detach the disputing parties from the trappings of the main office and get them to relax a little. Alternatively, you may have a canteen in your premises that could produce a similar effect and – as a public place – enforce a note of civility. The point is discussions should happen in person. The parties should be able to observe and absorb each other’s body language and tones of voice. People are like sponges, and will pick up on those sorts of cues. So, if a climate of openness diffuses the tension, paving the way for the occasional smile or conciliatory phrase, olive branches are likely to be extended.
Not that you would want to force team members to return to painful territory – but within reasonable limits, and in a calm atmosphere, it would be helpful to have a sit-down with the parties after the resolution has spurred a defined outcome, such as the completion of a project, and ask: what have we learned from this? Explain why it was necessary for the dispute to be resolved in the way it was, and outline the positive results that have stemmed from that decision, or set of decisions.
In the interests of clarity, enshrine your approach to conflict resolution within your formal company policy. This will ensure that staff will know exactly what is expected of them if they become embroiled in arguments with their colleagues. Whatever shape your policy takes, it should certainly convey a zero-tolerance approach to bullying – the ugliest mutation of workplace conflict.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist