Conflicts at work are often dismissed or understood as individual events.

They are an unwanted experience. Uncomfortable. If they can’t be avoided, most people just try to get through them and move on.

End of conflict. End of story.

This is unfortunate. And costly.

Conflict, at work, nearly always comes at a steep price.

Because no one actually writes a check for a conflict. (In most cases!)

The costs don’t show up on your P&L. They are invisible.

So many leaders pretend they don’t exist. In fact, they’ll insist they don’t exist.

But they do. Absolutely, they do.

The statistics show that workplace conflict is strongly associated with the following:

• Lost time spent talking about the conflict.
• Unproductive time spent thinking about the conflict.
• Counter-productive time spent venting to others about the conflict.
• A decrease in morale = decrease in productivity.
• Broken relationships = increase in turnover.
• A loss in customers (either due to conflicts with them – or poor service due to poor internal communication.)
• Increase in workers’ compensation claims.
• Increase in lawsuits.
• Increase in employee sabotage. (This might not mean actually throwing a wrench into a machine. It could mean an employee making a snide comment about your company to a prospect or client.)
• Increase in employee theft.

Intuitively, most leaders know this is true.

In fact, most supervisors report an average of 20% of their own time is spent on dealing with some kind of conflict.

That’s just the supervisor’s time. It doesn’t include anyone else’s time.

That is one day per week. Nearly two months out of every year.

Are you getting a return on that investment of time?

What about everyone else’s investment of time in conflict? Is your organization seeing the benefit of all that hard work, concentration, and energy?

It adds up. Fast.

Dealing with Conflict (Or Tension) Differently Is One of The Fastest Ways to Grow

When conflict occurs, a wise leader takes at least a few minutes to look at it. To diagnose it. To explore whether this is symptomatic of anything larger.

To not do so is to let all of the time and expense mentioned above go to waste.

To explore if there is something deeper is a way to not only reclaim some of those costs – but to start making your organization even stronger.

Here are some examples. When the following companies decided that conflict was too expensive to ignore – they made systemic and cultural changes. The result?

• Motorola reported a 75% reduction in litigation expenses.
• Coca-Cola reported a savings of 700% of the cost of their investment to change company practices.
• NCR Corporation reported a 90% reduction in lawsuits.

Here’s what that means: Changing how they related to conflict had a dramatic impact on their bottom line. Without adding new products or services, new R&D, new marketing or new employees.

They just decided to stop throwing money away.

What results matter to you? Financial? Employee retention? Better customer service? Accomplishing your mission?

All of these are impacted, directly and forcefully, by how well your people relate and work together.

Conflict Resilient Workplaces

A conflict resilient workplace is not a workplace without conflict. Instead, it is a place where real people come to work. They have real issues in their lives and real disagreements on the job.

What makes this workplace special is that leadership and staff demonstrate a unique set of traits which create a completely different working experience.

The people in this workplace demonstrate courage, authenticity, humility, and compassion. Or at least enough of each of those traits.

They are brave enough to have difficult conversations and to care about others even when they feel threatened.

They are authentic enough to focus more on addressing what is real than trying to hide.

There is enough humility that they are able to grow, stay curious and acknowledge mistakes.

They are compassionate enough to care about the well-being and success of others.

Creating A Conflict-Resilient Culture

Creating a conflict-resilient workplace is a process of culture change. It is a deep level change that addresses not only how conflict is managed – but how it is experienced and understood.

Here are seven steps that will allow you to create a workplace where conflict is a creative force that builds relationships – not a destructive one that destroys trust and confidence.

You can’t fake it. Only leaders who genuinely want it can create it.

1. Establish Leadership Buy-In: Core leadership needs to be committed to doing what it takes. They need to be clear on what makes this worth it for themselves and their organization. They need to be evangelists for doing things differently.
2. Get the Right People & Give them the Right Jobs: Hire for people that reflect your values. Clearly define what is expected of them. Clearly define how decisions are made and who they report to.
3. Align Structure: Review policies, procedures and practices to ensure that your ‘way of doing things’ at a minimum doesn’t create confusion and conflict, and ideally –helps create more understanding and guides decision making. Examples of this are:  when all hiring practices match the job needs when marketing matches the user experience when contracts and policies are written primarily for the purpose of preserving relationships, not for limiting liability.
4. Demonstrate How: Leaders will need to demonstrate a style of leadership that allows for engagement and healthy conflict. Different situations have different leadership needs – so one size never fits all. However, leadership that demonstrates the ability to listen, understand the perspective of others, emotional control, respect and problem solving is useful in all situations.
5. Train and Coach How: Most people don’t know how to have difficult conversations well. There are strong tendencies, earned over a lifetime, to either hide and avoid the topic or to go on the offensive and try to win. Effective leaders will need to be able to coach and train their staff to handle situations differently. This will need to be reinforced through actual experiences until enough of the core staff have become accustomed to healthy conflict. At this point, they will help pass it on to others and it has become a part of the culture.
6. Create Clear Alternatives for Resolution: The best workplaces know that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem. Unfortunately, most grievance policies are very linear and ineffective. People should be trained to handle most disagreements themselves and then given clear options for where to get support if a conflict proves to be too big to handle. This can often be as simple as providing resources that are both internal and external to the organization.
7. Accountability: Expect and measure results. Talk regularly about progress. Address issues. Don’t let things sit.

Change at this level is so powerful that I’ve actually shifted roughly 80% of my practice away from mediation to culture and systems change.

It’s faster for the client. It leads to more sustainable results. It reduces the development of new conflicts.

• Does your workplace culture have a tolerance for (or avoidance of) conflict?
• What is one thing you can begin to do to turn that around?

Take good care,

Christian

If you would like to download the Step-By-Step Plan for Creating a Healthy Workspace, click here.

New Resource! My new book Conflict & Leadership: How to Harness the Power of Conflict to Build Better Leaders and Thriving Teams is being published by Business Expert Press.

It’ll be available in just a few weeks – March of 2018! It’ll be available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. But I’ll be able to offer my readers a discounted rate.

If you’d like to be added to my list to be notified when the book is available, please just respond to this newsletter or send me a note at christian@vantageconsulting.org

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