Flashcard: Conflict at work

How to keep disagreements and stylistic differences from turning into conflicts

I have a bad temper. Once, years ago, when I was selling advertising for a television station, I pulled into the parking lot. The station was in Seattle, in an area where it was hard to find parking, and so we all appreciated the pass card that got us access to the rooftop lot. One day, after some challenging outside sales calls, I drove up to the parking lot access and waved my card in front of the card reader. Nothing. I waved again, opening the door so I get could get closer to the scanner. Still the access bar stayed down. I waved, I gestured, I got out of the car to press the card up against the reader. Nothing. Finally, I backed out of the driveway and found parking on the street. I then walked back to the office, in high heels and a suit, carrying my heavy briefcase.

When I got back to my office, I threw the briefcase across the room into the wall.

I’m over six feet tall in heels, I used to play sports, so I have an arm on me, and I threw that briefcase like I was in the Olympic trials for briefcase hurling.

There wasn’t anyone in my little office, but there were people outside my office who could see me throw my briefcase – with the company issued laptop inside –and hear the impact.

What the fuck was I thinking?

As a hot-tempered person, I have always had an interest in anger at work, and how we handle conflict. I have a whole training I do with teams about how to deal with conflict. So today and next week I’m going to do some flashcard material on conflict.

We face three kinds of conflict at work, and it’s useful to understand the difference between them, since each should be handled differently.

First is rupture. We all recognize this as conflict. This is the fight or tension over something one or both people perceive as bad behavior. Someone steals your client, lies about you to the boss, talks trash about you in some shared electronic medium, sexually harasses you.

Second is a disagreement. This is when two or more people or groups both have good intentions and rational reasons for their decisions or conclusions, but they don’t agree.  The project manager thinks a task should take three days. The creative team thinks it should take a week. They both have rational reasons for their timelines, they just disagree.

The third is difference. People with acutely different styles can conflict over time and create enough hostility that is starts to look like conflict, when it’s really just a stylistic difference.

The reason I start with identifying three sources of conflict is that too often people take a disagreement or difference and round it up to a rupture.

Just because something pisses you off doesn’t make it wrong or destructive. But a surprising amount of conflicts that I am asked to deal with are actually just about a disagreement or stylistic difference and there isn’t any bad behavior or bad intention.

How and why do people round up to rupture?

Generally, it’s not the facts, it’s the story people tell themselves about the facts. If people assume best intention or try to understand the other person’s rational or perspective, they rarely get into full on conflict. But if they assign all sorts of negative narratives and see disrespect and disdain where there is actually just disagreement, it becomes a conflict. And if they add in all sorts of emotional freight around their narrative, and then tell others about it and escalate further, even the simplest disagreements can become conflagrations.

How do you deal with these? Most of us know how to deal with ruptures from actual bad behavior, so I’m not going to spend too much time on it here. If you have human resources, get them involved. Deal with it swiftly, hold the perpetrators accountable, and protect the victims.

Let’s focus more on how to deal with disagreements or differences in style that get spun up into battle. How do you stop that train after it’s left the station?

Do lots of naming. Name the disagreement, with neutral language. “I hear Jane saying that the tasks needed can be done in three days and I hear Rachel saying that the tasks will take two weeks. Can we go through the tasks and see where we might get greater alignment?”

Or name the situation. “We all feel strongly about this project, and there’s clearly lots of energy around how to handle this next step. Which can be great – let’s try to channel that energy into coming up with the best deliverable.”

Pro tip – use the word “energy” or something else that’s neutral rather than labeling something as “anger” or any other freighted word. “There’s a lot of energy around this topic” is very different from “Jane and Rachel are so pissed off.”

Normalize conflict. Different regions of the country or cultures have different understandings of when energy goes into the “red zone” of conflict. I’ve seen screaming fights in offices in New York generate less ill will than a side-eye in Seattle. As a second-generation Italian, I’m really comfortable with conflict, where people from an abusive background or different cultural points of view may have a much lower tolerance.

A way to get everyone on the same page is to be clear about the benefits of disagreement. Most of us have seen examples in our professional lives where differing factions worked through their conflicts in a way that improved the deliverables. The process, or technology or creative deliverable that gets so much better when the tension between perspectives is harnessed to make the thing better. Giving people permission to disagree is a start.

Another cultural assist can be in developing group agreements around conflict. If you lead a team where there is lots of rounding up, you may need to take a beat and work with the team to establish rules of engagement. Each group gets to decide what works for them. I had one executive team decide that interrupting each other was a good thing, whereas other teams don’t like interruptions. Generally yelling, profanity, and outbursts like table pounding or throwing things are not appropriate. I personally am a big fan of what I like to call the Minority Opinion, which is giving intentional space to the person who disagrees with the majority, so they have the time to clearly outline their concerns.

If we assume that conflict will arise, anticipate it by building cultural expectations and guardrails for how we will deal with it, that education can go a long way to helping people move conflict towards resolution and away from escalation.  

Tune in next week when I talk more about conflict and how to move from identification to resolution.