Let’s talk about conflict in the workplace

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to tell a colleague something about her/his performance, behavior or something you believe is disrupting the harmony in your team?

I bet to that in most cases, it is one of the most difficult things to do, and it is something we try avoid! and if you do it…You just hope for the best!!.

At the end of the day, you need to face your fears and talk directly to that person.

In this article I’d like to share some tips that I have used over the years that had helped me solve some conflicts:

Never, ever assume: This is my number one and seems too obvious but, in fact, the vast majority of our opinions are based on perceptions; how we perceive reality at that specific time. Making assumptions in a conversation is like creating callback hell in JavaScript code in javascript code.

Always ask before you assume. It is valid to have a preconceived idea of a problem or a situation, but first, try to clarify; try to talk from your perspective. I would like to share a real-life example that happen to me several years back in my previous company when I was promoted to team lead. The first problem I was able to identify was that one of the key engineer’s performance was not satisfactory. When I was thinking about how to approach and tackle the situation I started going through a lot of ‘what-ifs …. Maybe they are not happy with me being promoted as leader……… Maybe is not happy with the role in the project … Maybe ….. as you can tell, a lot of maybes had influenced my judgment and i hadn’t even addressed the situation with the engineer. So what I did was to clear those assumptions from my mind and directly brought up the situation and asked what was going on.

Sounds pretty obvious right? But for some reason, this approach is not always so obvious. The result of that conversation was very good and it turns out that none of my assumptions were true. We openly discussed his concerns and it turns out that coming to the conversation without a preconceived idea helped me to engage with this person.

Setting the goals: Before you start an emotional conversation defined your desired outcome. If you don’t know what you want to communicate then the conversation can turn into a loop of different conversations or even worse you can create unnecessary tension. Let’s use the same situation I described in point 1. My intention with the conversation was to understand what was going on, where is the problem who or what is causing the behavior that's it I did not want to get a behavior change or performance improvement right away I just wanted to understand the situation.

Be Empathetic: According to the Cambridge dictionary, empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. Humans are driven by emotions.. Using the same example above; when I was listening to the engineer history it worked very well for me to start asking myself, what would I do in the same situation?, how would I feel if I had experienced the same as him? what would be my reaction?. The outcome of those thoughts was so revealing because it helped me to connect with this person and based on this connection we were able to solve the situation.

The Facts: I know I know …. Probably this will be your number one starting point because everything is about the facts, as long as you keep yourself to the facts you should be right …. But think in the HTTP Protocol and its POST method, 99% of the time we care about what's inside the Body and we don’t worry about all the metadata that is on top of that, we only care about the content but the protocol itself does care about the rest of the metadata so it can establish a safe communication. The same thing happens with human interactions, if we provide a safe environment our message will be delivered with success and more important the receiver is going to be able to do something with this message. At this point you can expose the facts to the other person, you can show some data or examples things that will help to understand what is the issue or where is the misbehavior because, in the end, you are having the conversation because you want to generate a positive impact in the other person.

The Agreement: Exposing the facts in a safe environment increases your chances of reaching an agreement. Having an understanding will help you to get an action path. The other person will feel comfortable and more receptive to creating action items to improve the behavior that you identify. In the end, this is all about you engaging in a conversation because you wanted to get some results, you wanted to cause a positive impact on the other person, and you wanted to make sure the harmony in your workplace keeps running smoothly like butter.

Remember, there are times when no matter how hard you try to talk with a person or what techniques you apply, they aren’t open to a conversation.. To have a conversation you need 2 so, do not feel bad about it and move forward.‍

Conclusion: Having a healthy work environment doesn’t eliminate friction. The trick is being able to handle those differences in a way that leaves the two parties satisfied with the way it was addressed. Maybe you are not able to achieve an agreement with the other person but if you feel good about being able to express your ideas and also being able to hear others, that’s an indicator that you are in a healthy space.