How can organizational leaders help to create healthy,conflict-friendly workplaces? Bernard Mayer, a Queen’s IRC facultymember who is an international expert in conflict resolution andmediation, shares insights for managers in the following Q & A

What is a ‘conflict-friendly’ environment?

The key here is to acknowledge that organizations, communities andrelationships need conflict. It is naïve to think there will be noconflict where there are different needs and values. These are notsuperficial things, and as a result, we will have conflict.

Whether an organization is healthy isn’t related to whether there isconflict, but to how it is handled. A healthy organization welcomesgenuine conflict, makes it easy for people to raise issues, has anenvironment that encourages this, and promotes a constructive response.

So people can safely, powerfully, consistently and directly raiseissues. Conflict is also not prematurely referred to an impersonalbureaucratic process; nor is anyone made a scapegoat for the problem. 

In other words, a conflict-friendly organization accepts the importance of the conflict process.

What are the most common ways organizations avoid conflict?

Organizations are enormously creative, as are individuals, atavoiding conflict. But there are four general ways that are the mostcommon.

One way is simply denial and minimalization. That’s whenever someoneraises a conflict and you say, ‘It’s just few malcontents,’ or ‘It’snot that big a deal.’

The second way organizations deal with conflict is they misdirect.They don’t deal with it directly and openly: they bureaucratize, referit to a subcommittee or person far from the real issue, they scapegoat, or they immediately relate to it as a legal issue rather than aproblem to be solved.

The third major way is using escalation as a means of conflictavoidance. Sometimes people are threatened with punitive consequences,or a boss gets really angry. The purpose is not to raise the issue soit can be constructively dealt with; it is to inhibit people fromraising issues.

Fourth is premature problem-solving, or solving the wrong issues.

Think about sexual harassment a moment. It is a common problem inmany workplaces, subject to great deal of denial. We individualize it.People are intimidated about raising the issue and are often victimizedif they do.

Also what often happens is that people throw procedures into placethat are supposed to deal with it. But they ignore the underlyingculture of the workplace and the gender politics of the workplace thatcreate an environment allowing it to go on.

Maybe what’s needed is a process of employee training, raisingconsciousness, changing the culture. But the fact is that far too oftenwe rush to resolve the problem rather than staying with it a while,trying to really understand what people are concerned about.

How do we learn to handle conflict in way that benefits our organizations?

I’m not big on giving people prescriptions, but there are certain things we know make a difference.

The very first thing is to accept conflict as inevitable and healthy.

The second is to listen, to try to understand on a deeper level.It’s the most important thing we can do around conflict. Listen to whatpeople saying, not judgmentally, but to try and understand. You don’thave to like what they are saying, but you can start by trying tounderstand.

Managers are often guilty of saying immediately how they are goingto fix something without really spending time to understand and connectwith the person.  I suggest they try taking the attitude “My job is tounderstand; later I can come up with solutions.”

I also suggest three words that are almost always useful: “Tell memore.” Part of it is in the spirit you convey: of curiosity, of wantingto know, of wanting to understand, of not necessarily having answersall the time but taking it seriously.

A third skill is to learn to say what important to us, what we thinkand what we need, in a powerful way - but one that doesn’t shut othersdown, or seek to do that.

We also need to become good at coming up with forums for discussionand interaction around issues, and problem-solving where appropriate.

Another skill is knowing when to ask for help; where to go to askfor help; and developing organizational capacity to provide help.

For some reason we are perfectly willing to ask for help from legal,financial, public relations, even technical HR experts, but we arereally reluctant to ask for help with the relational issues that arereally key to what makes a successful workplace.

People often file grievances because they don’t know how to dealdirectly with a problem or issue and they aren’t provided coaching,training, or the forums to directly talk about it. Then you go file thegrievance, and often the first step is to talk directly with someone,and you are provided no help in doing that – even though it couldreally make a difference.

Often the stuff that’s most difficult in dealing with humanrelationships is the simplest. For example, how do you listen tosomeone who you are furious with?

How do you manage it?

I’ve been teaching this stuff for 30 years, and frankly, I don’t always do it very well.

The very first part is you take care of yourself. Take a moment toget clear, have someone hear you and get some sort of affirmation,understanding, before you try to deal with things directly, if youpossibly can.

If you can’t, it is one of these walk-on situations, you breathe, do what ever it takes to centre yourself.

The second thing is to become clear why you are angry and upset,then work on stating that as clearly and forcefully as you can. But sayit in the way that you’d want other people to if they had thosethoughts, feelings and concerns about you.

It is the opposite of being nicey-nice, which is one way of avoidingconflict. It is about being powerful in raising issues clearly andrespectfully at the same time.

I believe when we are at our best we all can do this. The biggestproblem is we’re afraid that we can’t, so we avoid things in a way thatultimately makes them worse.

It is hard. You can’t just wave a wand and make it happen the wayyou would like, but you can at least realize it is something you canbecome better at.

What happens when organizations avoid conflict?

I see this lot. Rather than confront a problem, especially when apowerful employee is involved, people restructure things in all sortsof ways. In one hospital there was a doctor who was a skilledspecialist, upon whom they depended. I was asked to come in and provideconflict resolution training to the staff.

Why? This doctor was behaving inappropriately. He was abusive tonurses, colleagues, and probably to patients as well. Instead of saying‘Help us figure out how to deal with this doctor,’ they said ‘Giveconflict training to all of us.’ I think this happens all the time.

Of course the doctor was going to take it too - and this one-dayexperience was supposed to change his personality. What happens inthese circumstances is the behaviour continues, morale goes down, andkey people leave. People avoid dealing with issues directly and theproblem gets larger.

In what kind of situations is escalation often used to avoid conflict?

A good example is what has happens with efforts to deal with medicalemployees with alcohol or substance abuse problems. The first approachoften is to deny the problem until something happens - and thatsomething is often very bad. Then the next approach is to get verypunitive and demanding, and to set up elaborate monitoring procedures.That doesn’t work very well either. It sets a standard and a norm atleast, which is a good thing. But it doesn’t directly address the rootsof the conflict.

What happens in a conflict-friendly organization?

People deal with conflict openly, directly and forthrightly. They say, ‘We have a problem here; let’s just talk about it.’

One example was a large organization that had been through some veryferocious strikes. What had happened was not good for anybody, andprior to the next collective bargaining round, I was approached by bothunion and management to work with them.

I’ve done this a number of times. Without all the games people playin collective bargaining, I helped them find ways of saying in a safe,direct, unfettered way what they really thought about what hadhappened. We talked about how relationships were going, and cleared theair.

We also discussed how they were going to deal with the next round ofbargaining, and what would happen when the necessary dynamics ofbargaining made everyone feel pissed off at one another again. How werethey going to deal with this? It made an enormous difference.

How does unresolved conflict drain an organization’s resources?

Avoiding conflict, not dealing with issues, and not creating anenvironment where conflict can be raised costs organizations billionsof dollars a year.

The biggest pitfall is to avoid dealing with issues. A second bigproblem involves solving the wrong problem. It happens all the time.The worst is when people go through a whole strategic planning andrestructuring and process to avoid dealing with a problem employee.

Many businesses go down the tubes. Why do most mergers andacquisitions fail? Not because the business plan was bad necessarily,but because people didn’t take into account all the different conflictsthat inevitably arise when you take two different cultures andorganizational styles and put them together.

The price of not creating a conflict-friendly environment is high.