According to the CBI bosses are reluctant to tackle conflict at its roots, with any prefering to parachute jump for the first time than address a problem with their team!
Yet the organisation also identified nine ways in which companies stand to lose money as a result of workplace conflict – and they are far scarier than any insectoid dining experience:
Workplace conflict is a complex, multifaceted issue. In its online advice on disputes at work, conciliation service ACAS highlights nine, potential triggers for acrimonious relations:
Any of those factors would be worthy of deeper examination. But for our purposes here, we will focus on some sources of preventive medicine, via four questions that team leaders can ask themselves when disagreements threaten to spill over into disputes…
In a piece for Inc.com, US serial entrepreneur Thomas Goetz – founder of pharma product reviews database Iodine – drew a distinction between disagreements that arise over decisions, and those that spring up over process.
He cites a contentious website redesign at his own firm as an example of a move that sparked frank exchanges of views between colleagues. Initially, their confusion seemed to centre on the functionality of the new-look site – but after digging a little deeper, Goetz found that what had inflamed certain employees was their lack of involvement in the revamp.
As a company grows, Goetz notes, decisions get more distant from those who have to execute them, and “a different kind of conflict” emerges. “These disputes,” he writes, “may seem like they're about a single decision with a specific adverse effect (the wrong redesign). But they're actually disagreements about process (‘Why wasn’t I consulted?’)… These are distinct kinds of conflicts, but they get conflated all the time.”
Learning to distinguish between the two “is invaluable for any leader”, Goetz advises. He also points out that it is essential for leaders – particularly those within rapidly growing businesses – “to grow their organisation’s decision-making process in lockstep with scaling the organisation.”
(Switch his example of a website overhaul with, say, the implementation of a particular treasury management system to see how this may chime with your own career.)
In his superb book, Creativity Inc, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull discusses the animation studio’s core, artistic policy of ‘Honesty and Candour’, and how that works in practice.
Catmull explains that, while other Hollywood studios operate a system in which directors receive creative notes from executive figures with no filmmaking experience – conditions renowned for sparking disagreements – Pixar has its ‘Braintrust’: a crack squad of filmmakers who subject new projects to exhaustive, 360-degree, expert analysis at critical phases of production to ensure that the emerging brainchild is everything it can be.
People who take on complex projects, Catmull notes, “become lost at some point in the process”. He explains: “The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming.”
That, he suggests, “creates a problem for those who seek to give helpful feedback. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see?”
As channelled through the Braintrust, Pixar’s Honesty and Candour policy is a sort of peer-review method that enables key players to understand projects in the round and get on the same page, preventing gulfs of expectation from opening up between colleagues.
Teamwork expert Dr Eunice Parisi-Carew – author of Collaboration Begins With You – has some sterling advice for leaders who find themselves in rooms that are gradually overheating with conflicting positions, strategies or opinions about a particular project.
“If two or three strong, but differing, positions are being argued in the group, and it is getting nowhere,” she writes, “a leader might stop the group and ask each member to take a turn talking with no interruption or debate. The rest are just to listen and try to understand where they are coming from and why they are posing the solution that they are.”
The prompt for this clearing of the airwaves, she suggests, could be something like: “Let’s stop for a minute. I want each of you to state what is underneath your argument. What is your desire, your concern, your goal, your fear or your need that leads you to that conclusion?”
Parisi-Carew adds: “In this instance, the leader’s job is to make sure everyone is heard. When the exercise is completed, the leader should look for concerns or goals that people have in common. Once all are uncovered, the leader can build on any interests that are shared.
“In most cases, this becomes the new focus and it turns the situation from conflict to problem-solving.”
This question forces leaders to think carefully about the effectiveness of their own conciliatory skills at times when disagreements are teetering on the edge of full-blown rancour.
Negotiations expert Dr Kandarp Mehta of Barcelona’s IESE Business School says that the four biggest obstacles to resolving workplace disputes are different perceptions, cognitive biases, emotions and strategic barriers.
As such, he notes, it is important for leaders to be able to adopt neutral positions and harness mediation as a means of safeguarding productive, professional relations.
Some of the methods he recommends to mediating leaders are:
1. Active listening Showing a real interest in what the other person is saying and paraphrasing key points to demonstrate you have understood them. Not interrupting, not being overly critical, not questioning the other person’s arguments – and not rushing to judgement or jumping in with unsolicited advice.
2. Identifying interests By virtue of their neutral position, mediators can help tease out the interests of the conflicting parties, then encourage each side to think about their interests form the other’s point of view. Active listening is key to reaching this stage.
3. Reformulation This involves moving people away from fixed positions and ultimatums and instead guiding them towards areas of common interest. There are several different strategies under this banner, including:
Mehta also urges mediating leaders to maintain an optimistic outlook, “highlighting the progress achieved, rather than the differences still to be overcome”.
Conflict in the workplace is inevitable. Differences of opinion will always arise. But as the above points show, there are ways and means of preventing them from turning into destructive rushes of blood to the head.
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist