Four Steps to Move Through Conflict at Work Skillfully
At the heart of most conflict, at least the ones that leave us with an unsettled feeling afterwards, there is something with an emotional charge. It’s the part that stings or the jab that remains after the words are said. It can be be hard to move through. You can get stuck. Maybe the feeling dissipates over time, but it comes back when the same conflict in a different form comes up again.
This is why I ask company leaders who are working with another person closely, maybe they are cofounders, maybe peers on a team- any two people that work closely together will trip on conflicts or “tight spots” between them over time. If they continue working together, patterns will develop around the conflict. The moment you notice you’re in a tight spot is an opportunity to see what’s underneath that conflict for each of you.
Say you are arguing about whether to ship an update to your software. One of you thinks it’s good enough to ship so that you can move onto the next project while the other wants work longer on the update to fix more problems before it’s shipped. You argue about whether the update should ship or not, but it sounds like other arguments you’ve had in the past about the “doneness” of work.
When emotions are more calm, it’s possible for each of you to look back at this instance and examine what was true for you in the moment you disagreed. You might see that one of you values momentum and moving on to the next thing over perfection and getting things right while the opposite is true for your coworker. Neither of you is wrong, it’s just a difference in personalities, preferences and priorities. It’s powerful to recognize, even value, the thing in the other person that is so different than you. They have a different perspective that will make you better if you’re willing to see it. This is the process of finding where you are different.
- Look for a Deeper Pattern. Find where your personalities and priorities are different. Classic differences include:
- Optimism vs. Realism
- Satisfaction vs. Perfectionism
- Acting quickly vs. Deliberative action
- Conflict-avoidant vs. Conflict-acceptance
- Details and/or Application vs. Big Picture and/or Theory
And that is just a short list. Look at your tight spot. Is it possible that your conflict stems from differences along any of these different ways of seeing and valuing the world? Another possibility in this investigation is whether one of you has a tender point around a particular issue. For example, I get annoyed when I feel like I’m not being heard. In the example from above, maybe one person is very sensitive to the quality of their work reflecting on their competency or their identity. Asking them to compromise in that case would be very uncomfortable.
My favorite way to ask founders this question is, “What argument do you have over and over again?” Every dynamic has patterns, this question asks you to be more aware of yours.
2. Make an agreement. You’ll confront this tight spot again with different details in the future, so take a moment and decide together how you’ll handle these moments in the future. In the above example, the two founders agreed that if 90% of the most important components of the work were right, they would ship it and fix the rest later if needed. It was a compromise because one founder would have shipped it even early with more potential errors while the other founder would have kept working on it until it was 99–100% correct. By calling the task done at 90% right, neither were perfectly happy, but they found a nice balance between speed and quality.
3. Name it to Tame it. The next step after you discover the pattern and can acknowledge it without judging it is to name it. Give it a phrase or a shortcode that helps each of you understand immediately when you hear the word or phrase that the two of you are back that pattern. For the example above, you might agree to call it “the 90% solution” or ask your cofounder, “what is the 90% solution?” or “what are the 90% most important components?” However you use the words, your cofounder or partner is immediately queued into the pattern of conflict and the agreements you have about how to navigate it.
3. Catch Faster. The third step is to get better at noticing the pattern. Using the word or phrase to name it, call it out as soon as either of you see it. It might sounds like, “Are we in a 90/10% moment?” I like asking it as a question rather than an declarative statement. It helps you both lift your thoughts out of the details and into the larger context of the discussion.
Hopefully each of you becomes more mindful of the behavior as you practice catching yourself in the pattern earlier and earlier. Stopping here is still powerful, it avoids the additional energy, time, mental and emotional work required to have a conflict and skips right to the deeper question- “Hey, is this argument we’re having really about how we see X differently?” The faster you catch yourselves in the pattern, the more efficient you’ll be but also you might avoid the pain that can come with conflict. Catching faster brings you back together, we’re in the same loop we’ve been in before, and we’re in it together!
4. Laugh about it. The final step might be the hardest, it certainly doesn’t come right at the beginning of the awareness, more often over time. When something moves from your blindspot into your awareness, it can be painful to see it there. You didn’t see it as part of your personality or your relationship dynamic, but now here it is! Hopefully, as the two of you get better at naming the pattern and catching yourselves in it faster, you can also hold it more lightly.
It’s important not to weaponize the naming of a pattern, and use it like “You always X” or “There you go, doing Y again.” Holding it lightly means we both see how each of us contribute to one dynamic that makes us unhappy, we acknowledge that it’s part of who we are, and rather than trying to act like we can change that part of our personality, we can choose to accept it about ourselves or our dynamic. If we’re REALLY accepting, maybe we can even choose to laugh about it. We can choose to zoom out, be less attached to the conflict and see ourselves as silly humans dong silly human things.
P.S. — This works at home with your partner too.
