At some time in your leadership career, you’re going to encounter conflict.
To succeed in leadership, you must be able to deal with conflict, whether it involves you directly or the dispute is between other parties in your organisation. Learning how to address conflict effectively is necessary to keep teams, departments, and the wider organisation moving forward.
Below we look at the benefits of conflict resolution, and how you can improve your skills in this area. We’ll also explore how not developing your conflict resolution skills as part of your professional development can disadvantage you as a leader. First, however, we begin by defining the concept of conflict resolution and understanding what is.
Conflict resolution is a formal or informal process in which two parties seek to resolve a disagreement peacefully. When a conflict goes unresolved, the disharmony can create a stressful, awkward, and generally difficult work environment. In fact, conflict is the single largest cause of poor performance, dissatisfaction and turnover.
In a workplace, different types of conflict can occur. The dispute could emerge between co-workers, between a manager and a team member, or between a client and a service provider. The parties in conflict could even be groups, such as a management team facing disagreement from employees, or two or more departments all clashing with each other over an issue.
Bringing a conflict to a civilised and peaceful conclusion carries lessons with it that each party, as well as the leader, can learn and apply should the same issues arise again. The person leading the conflict resolution process must be able to empathise with difficult personalities, be rational, and be an excellent mediator.
Conflict resolution has a variety of benefits for the workplace. Here are some of them:
Like many other skills, conflict resolution is learnable, and there are several ways you can improve it. You can find out more about conflict resolution in our blog post Conflict resolution in the workplace. Meanwhile, below we offer a few brief suggestions you can follow to build your own conflict resolution skills:
Our Conflict Transformation: Tackling Conflict in the Workplace course encourages the participants to adopt a proactive attitude towards conflict in the workplace and equips them with the skills to address conflict in a sensible, fair, and effective manner. Participating in the course will provide you with insight into the realities behind conflict and discuss elements such as blame, anger, the emotional dimension to conflict, judgment, and empathy, and look at different models of intervention. Completing the course will enable you to tackle conflict situations assertively, confidently, and effectively.
Management roles entail being able to cope with high amounts of pressure and responsibility. Conflict resolution is important because if or when a conflict breaks out, you must be able to resolve the situation adequately to sustain progress. Not being able to approach a conflict will increase your stress levels as the situation goes from bad to worse.
A leader who remains objective and empathetic can gradually guide the employees towards finding a solution and re-establish harmony on the team. The insight a leader gains from training in conflict management and resolution will help them to minimise the damage the dispute can inflict upon team morale and productivity. Having resolved the conflict, the parties on each side of the disagreement can regain focus and move forward in the same direction to benefit the organisation and accomplish its goals.
A leader who doesn’t build their conflict resolution skills can expect a more difficult time if discord does emerge. The conflict will eat into the leader’s productivity, into that of the parties involved, and possibly into the wider productivity of the team. Until resolved, the conflict situation will distract the leader and the parties in disagreement from their work, and the resultant ill-feeling and bad atmosphere can disturb the focus of those in the vicinity. Deadlines can be missed. The standard of work can diminish. Performance, overall, suffers.
Failure to resolve the conflict will also breed mistrust towards the leader, whose credibility will wane as well. In extreme cases, employees who are dissatisfied with the leader and their handling of the situation may leave the team, either transferring to another team or department or finding somewhere else to work altogether. The organisation must then spend time and possibly money trying to replace this employee.
Being able to resolve a conflict is just as important as being able to delegate the right tasks to people and guide the team to deliver an effective performance for the organisation. To resolve the conflict successfully, the leader must possess the courage to lead a conflict resolution process, show empathy during the process, and remain objective. Booking a place on our conflict transformation course allows you to approach conflict situations confidently and equip yourself with the knowledge and tools to turn the situation around.
To find out more about this course and book your place on it, click on the course link in this blog. We also invite you to contact us via the form on our Contact page, email at enquiries@inpd.co.uk or on 0161 826 3139. We welcome any questions you have about the course, too, of course, so feel free to get in touch if you have any queries you wish to resolve before booking your place.
The ability to tackle conflict is essential, and, as a leader, you’ll encounter situations of conflict in the course of your duties. We suggest improving your skills so that you can navigate conflict situations successfully and drive your organisation forward. We look forward to assisting you.