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One of the most crucial aspects of leadership is navigating and resolving conflicts. Leaders must be able to address conflict head-on, and the first step to doing so is learning effective conflict resolution skills. When leaders prioritize developing and honing their conflict management skills, they can create a culture of resilience, positivity and innovation that ensures their team can remain successful amidst any conflict.
Conflict in the workplace is natural and inevitable, but it won’t resolve itself. Resolutions result from intentional, proactive leadership. A leader’s ability to manage and resolve conflict directly shapes its outcome, for better or worse.
When conflict is mishandled or ignored, it can erode trust, hinder performance and negatively impact culture, while effective conflict resolution strengthens all three. Knowing how to lead healthy conflict resolution is the key to ensuring disagreements drive progress, not stall it.
In the workplace, conflict is not the problem. Avoidance is. When handled directly and properly, conflicts can build stronger teams and drive breakthroughs.
Leaders who face conflict head-on can bring numerous benefits to their team, including:
To lead conflict toward a healthy, productive resolution, leaders need the right set of skills, including:
This skill goes beyond hearing the problem by getting to the heart of the issue. Instead of interrupting or being dismissive, leaders should:
When leaders actively listen, employees feel valued, are willing to openly communicate and trust leadership to navigate the team through whatever conflict they’re experiencing.
Empathy goes a long way in resolving conflicts. Emotional intelligence helps leaders understand their employees’ perspectives, validate their feelings and acknowledge the values driving their thoughts and actions.
When team members see that their leaders genuinely care about them and their ideas, they’ll feel heard and respected, making them more likely to trust their organization and more willing to collaborate in resolving conflicts constructively.
Emotional intelligence can also decrease tension and encourage openness in the workplace as a whole. Empathetic environments help everyone feel psychologically safe, so employees can have an open dialogue with one another and address conflict respectfully.
Leaders can stop conflict before it begins by clarifying expectations and boundaries early on. Undefined and confusing roles and expectations are a source of many workplace conflicts. Before a project begins, leaders can define each team member’s role, responsibilities and deadlines and reinforce these by developing policies and delivering feedback. Conflicts are less likely to unfold when each employee clearly understands what they’re doing and what is expected from them.
When a conflict escalates, leaders need to be able to facilitate a constructive conversation between the parties and find an agreeable resolution. Stepping in to resolve an issue as an objective third-party can help team members feel seen and supported while creating a safe environment for them to address the issue constructively, making them less defensive and more open to resolution. During these meetings, leaders should refrain from directing the discussion or showing bias for either side. Taking control can make employees feel disempowered, and showing favoritism can make tensions worse. Instead, leaders should focus on the facts and help their team reach a fair resolution.
Any destructive conflict in the workplace is a problem. Problem-solving skills enables leaders to analyze and resolve conflicts objectively. Leaders with problem-solving skills can:
With effective, open communication, leaders can convey their thoughts and expectations to the team in an articulate, respectful and transparent way, and vice versa. Open communication encourages an ongoing dialogue, allowing team members to feel comfortable expressing their concerns without accusations or judgments. The result of open communication is:
The ability to resolve conflicts amicably is one of the most important skills leaders can have in the modern workplace. Effective conflict resolution is extremely valuable for leaders as well as their teams and organizations, as it helps create a constructive and collaborative workplace that keeps employees engaged and initiatives moving forward.
Leaders can develop these crucial conflict resolution skills through leadership training, like our Managing Conflict Effectively course. Leaders learn how to turn destructive conflict into constructive conflict, inspiring more productive communication, collaboration and interpersonal relationships in their teams.
Explore the full library of CLS courses, and contact us to learn how your organization’s leaders can turn conflict into growth for their teams.
