conflict Archives | The Glasshammer

Many of us do not enjoy conflict, but tensions are bound to arise in workplaces filled with differing personalities, perspectives, working styles, and priorities. Sooner or later, different vantage points will create friction and collide.

It might be simple. An inappropriate comment. A passive aggressive e-mail. A turf war between colleagues. A standstill disagreement between departments. An accumulating history of poor performance by a team member. But it can be challenging to confront.

Maybe your early experiences wired you to freeze, flee, or fawn. Many of us tend toward being conflict-avoidant. But as a leader, you can’t turn your gaze the other direction, sweep difficult conversations under the rug, or exit the room when things get uncomfortably heated.

Unresolved conflict compromises work culture and takes a costly toll on the bottom line for organizations. Since conflict in the workplace is inevitable, leaders must develop the relational skills of confronting issues and navigating disharmony—especially if facing it runs against the grain of your comfort zone.

Catalysts for Workplace Conflict

At its core, workplace conflict is often more structural than it is personal. According to 3×5 Leadership, five common reasons conflict arises in the workplace are:

Functional differences – Tensions arise from different functions with different purposes, priorities, and pressures.
Information asymmetry – Differing views clash when people don’t have the same information, or interpretation of it, at the same time.
Competing priorities and trade-offs – Tensions occur as different people seek to optimize for competing priorities or factors (efficiency vs thoroughness).
Interpersonal differences – People bring different triggers, communications styles, and interpretations of behavior which create relational conflict alongside process conflict.
Ambiguity and unclear expectations – When roles, responsibilities, or decisions are unclear, people create assumptions which often breed conflict.

Not all conflict sounds like a heated argument. Conflict can also look like water cooler conversations on the side, silent withholding in meetings, passive resistance, emotional reactivity, repeated misunderstandings, territory-guarding, or a tense atmosphere.

Why Leaders Avoid Conflict

In what has been called an epidemic of conflict-avoidance in the workplace, today’s leaders are more hesitant to confront conflict and have tough conversations than previous generations of leaders.

According to Bravely, 70% of workers avoid difficult conversations, a trend that is also growing among (especially Millennial and Generation Z) leaders.
A recent study revealed that nearly 50% of emerging leaders struggled with conflict management skills in the workplace.
Another study showed that only one-third of global leaders feel confident in their ability to manage conflict.

Conflict competency is one matter. But Conflict EQ asserts that what often inhibits leaders from addressing conflict, even when they know it needs addressing, are the competing pressures they experience.

The more relationship-oriented you are, the more you may experience discomfort and complexity in approaching conflict. So you hesitate. You hold out for more information. You wait and hope it washes over.

You might anticipate the possibilities of getting the difficult conversation wrong, facing intense negative reactions, losing approval, creating more tension, or causing unwanted consequences.

Many leaders care not only about resolving the conflict, but also about their relationships. Difficult conversations carry an emotional, cognitive, and relational load that gets in the way of taking action.

Why Negating Conflict Backfires On You

It can be tempting to try to maintain a guise of harmony. But holding tightly to a harmony-outlook when a problem is present is like waiting for the lid to blow off Pandora’s box instead of admitting there’s a box.

Avoiding conflict can provide short-term relief from discomfort: you set the issue aside to focus on other matters. At times, it can even be wise to pause, assess the situation, and hone your approach. Some conflicts do require space: but there’s a limit. While navigating conflict is not about speed, it is about working for resolution.

Habitual delay in tackling difficult conversations means the conflicts will fester, the issues will compound, and the collateral damage will spread—including the damage to your leadership.

The longer you wait, the bigger the problem grows, the greater the pressure to do something, and the harder it may become to address it. It starts as factual and specific but begins to feel more personally loaded as you hesitate.

An uncomfortable conversation today will not be easier in a couple months’ time. It will become more complicated, carry more emotional weight, and be more time-consuming, meanwhile your credibility has worn down.

Say a problem begins with one underperforming employee. But unattended, the issue expands to affect the entire team. The hidden cost of the conflict gets passed on. Others have to absorb and compensate for the discomfort you avoid.

It takes courage, judgment, and skills to intervene in the right moment, but not doing so creates wider, more significant issues and impacts the workplace on a broader scale. What you leave unattended says as much about your leadership as the things you attend to.

The Specific Leadership Costs of Avoiding Conflict

Leaders diminish leadership effectiveness and team effectiveness when they habitually avoid the discomfort of resolving conflict:

Erosion of Trust

A willingness to engage with difficult issues is an expectation of leadership. When it doesn’t happen, employees may lose respect, lower their standards, or feel like speaking up does not matter. Who is holding the anchor of accountability?

Team members are left to flounder about in uncertainty as a situation festers. Leaders may seek to avoid conflict to protect relationships, but instead may irreparably damage them.

Reduced Psychological Safety

When there’s an elephant hanging out in the room, and the leader is avoiding the risk of acknowledging it, how can the team feel safe to be honest, admit mistakes, challenge others, or take interpersonal risks?

Avoiding conflict communicates that difficult conversations are unwelcome. Members may begin to edit themselves, drop candor, become quiet, or be overly agreeable, meanwhile talking candidly in side conversations. New problems begin to take root.

Poor or Delayed Decision-Making

When a leader is uncomfortable with managing conflict, they may unintentionally convey that harmony is implicitly rewarded—but harmony for harmony’s sake doesn’t make for the best decisions. Productive disagreement is necessary for effective team dynamics.

A leader’s own discomfort with interpersonal conflict may incline her to harmony-rewarding behaviors that inhibit the emergence of debate, dissenting perspectives, probing questions, and counterarguments—resulting in compromised quality around decision-making.

Unclear Standards and Weakened Accountability

Accountability creates safety and sets clear expectations and standards. Avoiding conflict by not addressing problematic behaviors, dynamics, or decisions can create distance in connecting actions to repercussions. The longer it waits, the more lines begin to blur around what’s tolerated and what’s unacceptable.

Avoiding conflict makes it harder to convincingly draw boundaries: what goes unchecked becomes a new informal standard, implicitly endorsed by passivity. It can also lead to dissatisfaction amongst team members who feel held to a different expectation.

Performance and Morale Drops

Unresolved conflict sits heavily on team dynamics, and begins to strain interpersonal relationships, lower levels of engagement, and reduce team efficiencies and performance.

High-performing team members may be especially attuned to observing what leaders address and what they bypass, and may choose to leave environments littered with unresolved conflicts to find healthier dynamics where conflict is addressed and rewards are clearer.

Reduced Leadership Confidence

When people observe a leader ignoring problems and allowing issues to go unresolved, they begin to question how things are being handled. Perceived credibility around judgment and decision-making drops.

As unspoken tensions rise in the team, confidence in leadership falters, team interactions become messier, and the leader ends up carrying the added emotional labor being created by the avoidance.

“The Only Way Out is Through”

The real path to greater coherence in the workplace does not result from avoiding addressing conflict altogether, but by accepting it exists and addressing it directly and skillfully as and when it arises.

The moment you notice yourself negating the tough conversations, remind yourself that your leadership is ultimately as strong as your willingness to approach and manage conflict.

Conflict isn’t distraction from leadership: it’s your opportunity to rise up and create it.

By: Aimee Hansen is a long time writer and heart coach with theglasshammer.com. Her recent work includes “This Book is a Retreat” co-written with Marianne Richmond.

If you would like to work with Aimee or any of our coaches including Nicki Gilmour our head coach and founder, please click HERE for a free, exploratory call with Nicki who can match you with the right coach for you.

By Aimee Hansen

The culture of chronic overwork isn’t working in many ways, but there’s one way it works too well: upholding gender inequality.

Professor Robin Ely of Harvard Business School, co-author of a recent study released by the Gender Initative, tells us “It is the culture of overwork—not women’s work-family conflict—that locks gender inequality in place.”

According to Ely and her co-authors, the focus on work-family conflict is a gendered diversion from the bigger 24/7 work week problem that deflects long hours as a women’s issue. We spoke to Ely about the dilemma, what needs to change and what women can do.

The 24/7 Work Week Strains Both Sexes

In an interview-based study of a global consulting firm, co-authors Ely, Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University found that men had the same turn-over rates as women and reported the 24/7 hour work week was just as compromising to their family lives, too.

Reid wrote in Harvard Business Review that men reported feeling “overworked and underfamilied.”
Yet despite much evidence that overwork backfires for employees and companies, a culture of overwork continues to remain the norm for being seen as competitive.

Ely noted, “For employees, being needed 24/7 is like a symbol of status; it means we’re important.”

In fact, the researchers found often the extra hours are spent on proving importance. Ely shared, “in the case study, many people said that they actually wasted a lot of time; for example, they spent a lot of time perfecting their work product, not because the client needed it to be perfect, but because it was a way to prove how smart they are to each other. That kind of work doesn’t contribute to delivering value but it does perpetuate the 24/7 standard.”

With both men and women struggling with the 24/7 expectation, what differed was how women and men cope and the resulting impact on their careers.

Women Are Overt In Coping, Men Are More Discreet

Women tended to make transparent and formal arrangements, such as reduced hours or other family-friendly policies which often come with a “flexibility stigma” and backfire to derail their careers. Reid wrote that men who were transparent about difficulties in managing hours were also penalized, harshly, for not being perceived as a devoted employee.

Men, however, are much more likely to cope informally to handle time pressures under-the-radar, while still appearing to be fully devoted. In research with the same firm, Reid found that nearly a third of the men interviewed used discreet hour-cutting strategies such as lining up local clients, building alliances with colleagues, not revealing their whereabouts between phone calls, and “passing” at working 80 hour weeks when they simply weren’t.

Faking it worked and these men did as well on performance reviews as those pulling long hours. What mattered was performance coupled with the perception they were overworking. In other words, being an 80 hour devotee mostly has to do with appearance.

“Passing” is Tempting, But Not The Real Answer

If you’re beginning to think you could become skilled at “passing” yourself, there is a gender trap. Even if deception was the secret to career advancement, it’s harder for women. It’s easier for men, in Reid’s words, “to stray while passing as fully devoted.”

The bigger issue, Ely emphasized, is an underlying culture that holds up 24/7 as the norm, and implicitly disadvantages women by doing so.

“Despite the increased flexibility that technology has allowed, many organizations continue to reward ‘face time’ as well as the appearance of constant work (emails sent late at night, for example),” said Ely. “Couple this practice with the fact that when women do take advantage of flexibility, they are presumed to be doing so for family reasons while men are more often assumed to be leaving the office early to, say, meet with clients, and you have a situation in which employees feel compelled to be “present” (whether in the office or online) all the time and women are seen as less capable of meeting that demand.”
“Passing”, while covert defiance, isn’t as easy for women and falsely reaffirms the 24/7 norm is necessary to performance.

What Can Women Do?

Overwork is a cultural and industry-level issue but women can get savvy to their surroundings.

“Women, specifically, should look for signs of whether working mothers who take advantage of family accommodations experience career derailments,” Ely told us. “Companies often tout flexibility policies that appeal to women with children, but in practice taking advantage of those policies means being seen as lacking leadership potential.”
Ely advised to ask critical questions: “Can women who use family accommodation policies maintain the careers they want, or are they shunted into less prestigious, less powerful roles?”
“Ultimately, women need some key supports,” said Ely, “including organizations that don’t equate having children with a lack of commitment to our jobs and managers who give us opportunities to develop and shine even if we’re not available 24/7.”
She also iterated the importance of supportive family and partners, and not necessarily putting your career second. “We need to visit and revisit the social contract with our partner to make sure that we each are living a life that is consistent with our individual and collective goals.”
The work-family discussion is too small if being a 24/7 employee remains the benchmark. This issue is bigger than gender, because it’s not only women who suffer, even if it’s their careers that do.

“Research indicates that companies can be productive and competitive without demanding constant availability from their employees,” said Ely, “if we could start to see that realized in practice, more and more organizations might be willing to break this mould.”

Tag Archive for: conflict

Why Leaders Can’t Afford to Be Conflict-Adverse