Conflicts and Resolution – don’t avoid them deal with them!

Introduction: conflicts, why and how they occur

‘Conflict’, as defined in dictionary: disagreement; being contradictory, at variance, in opposition; differing in views.

Conflicts are a regular occurrence in business and in personal life. Our societies have defined customs, beliefs and agreements to be followed. Sometimes our individual needs, ideas and feelings tend to oppose these agreements, or those of other individuals in the society. Thus conflicts arise.

Every organization has its own set of rules, written and unwritten. Organizations operate, with the inherent purpose of providing a product or a service of value to the targeted customer; conflicts occur as a natural extension of this endeavor. It is unreasonable to expect people with diverse backgrounds, expectations, skills, needs etc., not to have conflicting thoughts, in their endeavor to achieve organizational goals.

Although conflicts are common, conflicts need not be destructive. In fact, more often than not, when properly managed, conflicts bring about innovation, new ideas and new ways to do things differently to service the targeted customer. Disagreeing without being rude / unprofessional has merits.

Conflicts and their resolution

That conflicts are bad, was the dominant viewpoint, in the past. Up until the middle of the last century, conflicts were seen necessarily as evil and affecting productivity and efficiency. This had a lot to do with the prevalent “Adam Smith” culture, where individuals were entrusted with repetitive work, expertise was developed on a certain narrow area, and emphasis was on production numbers and standards than on creativity. The resolution to conflicts was through elimination of all disagreements, with authoritarian measures if need be. This sometimes led to violent conflict and created lack of trust between the order-givers and order-takers.

With the advent of the knowledge industry and specialization, Organizations realized that employees, more than the industrialized tools and machines, are primary resources for the organization. A concerted effort was made improve their involvement in the organization and thus make lives better and easier. This improved scenario ensured that there were no conflicts for provision of basic requirements to perform the job at hand in a congenial manner.

Conflicts, thus, changed form. These were not so much between the order-givers and the order-takers anymore, but more about individuals and their expectations. The project manager or the people manager was not the all-encompassing leader of the employees. He / she was someone whose primary activity is to ensure that the common endeavor of the group is achieved with expected quality.

There are two aspects to conflicts.

• Behavioral aspect – conflicts will invariably exist in organizations. They need to be handled, and the skill of the manager lies in handling stakeholders through the conflict situation. Productivity will improve as stakeholders seem to agree, but will inevitably fall if the conflict is allowed to persist.
• Developmental aspect – here we allow conflict to occur and agree to resolve. Stakeholders are trained to understand that conflicts are beneficial to the organization and they actively encourage disagreement without being rude / un-professional. Collective idea sharing rather than a passive, peaceful, non-conflicting approach helps an organization’s ability to innovate.

The different schools of thought bring about one salient point – that of execution. Theorizing about conflicts with their positives and negatives is necessary: but how does it actually play out in an actual corporate environment? And in the case of conflicts, how does the manager resolve a conflict in a strong, pro-active and empathetic manner? Eventually, all forms of business interaction hinge on the basic tenets of ‘what’s in it for me’ – so how does one figure out what are the driving motivational factors for an employee or a group that is engendering the conflict?

Attempting to answer that question is the main objective of this article, and the process we describe here has been proven across various forums and with various levels of employees. But before delving into that, let us look at how normally a manager would deal with a problem.

Traditional Ways of Conflict resolution:

A typical response to conflict is to ignore it — to avoid getting to the root of the problem and hope that it will somehow go away. Every time conflict rears its ugly head, people break for coffee or promise to ‘take the discussion offline’, presumably in the hope that it will help restore harmony to the discussion. It may be a nice way to handle tension in the room, but it has not particularly resolved the conflict. Instead, members need to know how to create environments that feel safe for airing conflicting opinions and exploit the benefits of diversity. And there are good reasons for this. Teams composed of high-performing individuals are naturally subject to contradictory tensions, like cooperation and rivalry, trust and vigilance.

For instance, friendly competition within a team helps weed out inefficiencies and — however uncomfortable it may feel at times — also keeps people at the top of their game. Besides, high performers are naturally competitive and to not allow them to express their competitive nature is to deny them something that is very much part of who they are. And this can make the team feel psychologically unenthusiastic.

The traditional way of resolving conflict in the long run, follows these steps:

1. Gather data;
2. Analyze the facts that emanate out of the data;
3. Figure out a way to deal with (or combat) the facts (not emotions, mind);
4. Provide for an amicable solution, sitting in the greenroom;
5. Communicate the solution to the individuals who have raised the conflict.

The problem with this approach is that this does not attempt to delineate the emotions from the facts, and does not rationalize for the real concerns of individuals and answer those. Data, while a great source of knowledge, might not provide the entire picture- and we might, be falling into the trap of authoritarian conflict resolution (as was the case in the pre-1950s era). Ask yourself this question: are we using data the way a drunk uses a lamp-post: as a form of support rather than illumination?

So what should we do? The method we suggest is a rule of three:

The Rule of Three

We may feel many things cause a conflict and so there is a logic that we have used to address the “psychological” safety to deal with conflict. Despite many seeming causes conflict drivers can be broken down to three primary areas. We believe there are always three primary things that are core to resolving any conflict. Remember the “three” must be within the team’s circle of influence to change.

Why three, you ask. Most of us, humans, process in a way to absorb three key ideas or messages at a time. And that is where we come to the issue of first identifying the three drivers to resolve the conflict in a way satisfactory to all parties.

We do realize that every driver of the triangle of conflict areas does not have equal (33.33%) weight in a conflict: neither in the mind of the stakeholder, nor in the overall scheme of things. Every conflict is different. Similar problems with different stakeholder might have different weightages – and that is something the manager must take account for. The resolution lies in understanding the risk balancing act.

Assume that your objective is to run a successful business i.e. creating wealth (money). Often people would tell you lower cost and increase price. Lowering cost may mean pay less to your employees. Increasing prices would mean unhappy customers. This is high level conflict to resolve, you can quickly put together a Rule of Three, as follows.

Rule of Three for a successful business

The organization, to make money, would need customers who would be ready to buy its products / services at an agreed price. For that to occur, the organization would need to satisfy the needs of the customer better than its competitors, i.e. delight customers. If it does, the customer would provide it with additional business or will recommend and refer it to other prospective customers.

The employees of the organization are the ones who are providing the value to the customer – they are the ones who ensure that a customer is delighted. Employees who go out of the way to ensure the client is delighted bring more opportunities … and as we have established, a delighted customer will lead to the virtuous cycle that would lead to more money to the organization.

Now, the employee would go out of the way to provide customer delight only if he/she is happy. And that is the responsibility of his/her employer, the organization. Thus the employer organization would need to satisfy its internal people, its employees, for the entire chain of making more money to come into effect.

So in any conflicting business situation use this triangle and question if the solution would help employees, customers and investors. Find a balance. A process to help all the stakeholders understand will help the business. As we said earlier, different economic environments would drive one or more than of the components to be the focus.

Rule of Three for Project Management

A successful Project Manager is he/she who could balance the three primary drivers of a project and ensure the success of the project. Any conflict with team members or with clients at different points in time of the project duration could be solved with the help of these three drivers. For a given scope of work and a defined budget the schedule could be adjusted to complete the project and all stakeholders could be satisfied. It is indeed a fine balancing act around the triad, as anyone who has run a project, would know.

Let us look at another one: making an investment decision. We thought long and hard, and the basic tenets of every decision, even apparently wrong ones would be based on the triad of Value, Cost and Risk. Even debating on a decision with yourself, the conflicts result out of any one of the three areas or the relationship between them. When you make an investment decision, we strongly recommend you consider the triad.

Investment

One can extrapolate this to any personal endeavor too. Assume you’d like to take a course. You would probably only be looking at the Earning potential post completion of the course. But that is an incomplete picture, and the decision would be biased and the risk of failure would be high. What’s more, this approach has the potential to lead to major internal conflicts, as we believe this approach does not consider some more internal and intrinsic considerations, for you, the reader. The other two arms of the triad that we would suggest to consider, would be Learning and Enjoyment. Would there be tangible learning while taking the course? Would your personal potential be enriched in the short and long term by taking the course? Just considering more earning for the short term might be a little short-sighted (while the writers do not undermine the importance of that too). Also, how about enjoyment? Would you be able to do justice to the course, thereby increasing your earning and learning potential, if you do not enjoy what you are learning?

This is what the suggested triad looks like:

Personal Endeavor

In Conclusion…

The authors do not claim that this is the only way to be successful in any conflict situation. We are sure, there are other ways which have their merits. What we do recommend, strongly, is the usage of logic instead of emotions in resolving conflicts. Emotions lead to rather short-sighted decisions, which are based on looking at only one view of the conflict. And we encourage you, to discover the three drivers to resolve conflicts. The drivers would help in limiting the emotions. As soon as we could remove the emotion out of any conflict, and use logic to reach to the core of the conflict and then make an informed, inclusive decision, there would be a comprehensively larger chance of resolution of the conflict. And what’s more, there would be a much greater chance of gaining precious experience out of the situation.

The author Vish Sivaswamy is the Managing Director of Anthelio (www.antheliohealth.com). He has been successful executive in running large businesses, mergers and acquisitions, managing teams and delivering consulting and business transformation endeavors. Shom Biswas in a consultant and has helped in research & writing this article.