“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” - Harper Lee
So, will you take the time to listen before a conflict happens?
You’ll face conflicts as an entrepreneur; you’re faced with many challenges, navigating your team and your relationships with your clients. With everything going on, conflict can happen which seems like a threat to the success of your business but knowing what conflict management is and how to use this skill to help with the challenges you face, managing conflict will turn those challenges into opportunities for growth and help your business cultivate success.
Now, how will you prepare for a conflict, resolve the conflict then adapt and move forward? Keep reading because in this post, you’ll learn how to navigate conflicts.
Prepare for Conflict in the Workplace
As you prepare for conflict, know it’s a part of the journey. Build a strong foundation of communication and trust with your team, establish clear expectations and goals. By taking these measures, you can lessen the conflicts that could happen. Here are some effective strategies for conflict preparation.
Recognize conflicts will happen
As an entrepreneur, it’s important to acknowledge conflicts are part of business. No matter the industry you’re in, conflicts will happen because of different perspectives, different goals, and variations of communication styles.
We often view conflicts as a negative thing because typically conflicts come with consequences but depending on how you handle them, they don’t have to be negative. Instead of viewing conflicts as something as a failure, you want to use those conflicts as an opportunity for growth.
By acknowledging conflict will happen, you can prepare yourself and your team to deal with when conflicts occur. When you change your mindset, you can approach issues in a way that helps you solve them before it gets out of hand. Also, when you use problem-solving skills, you won’t be caught off guard by an argument.
When you acknowledge conflicts will happen, you’re able to create a business environment that embraces constructive conflict. You can create an environment where your team members feel comfortable expressing their opinions, thoughts, and concerns. As mentioned in other blog posts, working collaboratively can foster a positive work environment that will lead to cultivating success.
Build Strong Communication and Trust
As you go on about your day, you’re constantly communicating. It's not about just having a conversation, you must have effective communication. Effective communication will help build a solid foundation that helps you prepare for conflict. When you establish a foundation of trust, it will help prevent it from getting out of hand or from even happening.
Let's lay the foundation:
Open and Honest Communication: You are the business owner, you are leading by example, so in order for you to foster a solid foundation to where everyone is on the same page, encourage open communication. This involves creating regular communication channels such as team meetings (not an email- because for some reason, team leaders consider an email a team meeting), one-on-ones with everyone you work with which can help with providing feedback, suggestions, questions or concerns (Open door policy). Providing these opportunities promotes a positive business culture, you can even say a family dynamic.
Active Listening: Effective communication is a vital part for conflict prevention and resolutions. As you’re speaking with someone, listen to what they’re saying and watch their non-verbal cues. The majority of why conflicts are not solved is because no one listens. Active listening demonstrates empathy and understanding of others’ viewpoints. (Everyone thinks differently). You want to create a positive environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their views without getting criticized.
Trust Building: Trust allows for everyone to depend on one another, share information and collaborate. You want to lead my example to which everyone around you is putting in the same effort. When trust is built, both you and those you work with feel supported and valued and respected. Establishing trust from the beginning will create a culture that reduces the likelihood of conflicts from happening.
Establish Clear Goals, Roles and Responsibilities
When you’re able to set clear expectations, you avoid conflicts. If there’s too much confusion and misunderstandings, unfortunately conflicts will happen. By clarifying what’s going on, you can create a positive work environment.
Clear Goals: You should set both short-term and long-term goals that are clear and detailed. Setting clear goals can give the whole team a sense of direction and make sure everyone is working towards the same goal. When everyone knows that one specific goal, conflict will less likely happen.
Defined Roles and Responsibilities: First, before giving anyone responsibilities, you, as the business owner, need to write out all the roles and responsibilities for each person. Make sure it’s clear and detailed. (This is your “handbook”) After you have written out all the roles and responsibilities, you then want to give those responsibilities to your team members. When your team knows their specific roles and understands how they can contribute to the overall goals of the business, it enhances clarity and collaboration.
Others include regular communication and updates as things do change, making sure everything is being communicated. This can happen in meetings and one-on-ones. As always, review! As the business grows, goals and roles may change. By staying up to date with everything that's going on in the workplace and being proactive, it’s less likely conflicts will happen.
Develop a Conflict Management Plan
Having a clear plan for how to handle conflicts is an important part of preparing for them, as it gives an organized way to deal with them when they happen. A conflict management plan lists the steps to take, the people involved and the actions that need to take place. It gives you and your team a plan to follow to handle disagreements and limit conflict within the workplace.
Below is an example of what it can look like for you and your team:
Event (what happened)
Plan: What will you do? Ex: Have a 1:1 meeting with the individual
Personal Responsible: Who's conducting the conflict management plan. Ex: Team Lead
Resolve Date: When do you want this resolved by?
When you are creating a conflict management plan, here some strategies:
Establish Clear Guidelines: When establishing clear guidelines, you want to define the process reporting conflicts, who is responsible for facilitating to achieve the solution and the expected timeline on when you expect the conflict to be resolved. By establishing these guidelines, you’re giving your team expectations on how to solve the conflict.
Communication Channels: As you set up the guidelines, ensure you have a way to facilitate meetings. By having these channels set up, you can ensure that conflicts will be addressed in a timely manner. Also, make sure all is confidential and is part of a specific team such as the leadership team and/or team success manager.
By developing a conflict management plan, you are showing that you care about those you work with and want to address conflicts in a fair manner. This will reduce conflicts and increase productivity while preserving relationships within the business.
Resolving Conflicts in the Workplace
It will not happen overnight, but if you have the right systems set up, you’ll end a conflict before it gets out of hand. As we discussed, you can prepare for a conflict, but once you’re in that spot of trying to resolve the conflict, how will you go about doing so? Here are some strategies to put into place to help you get from a “storm” to a calmness in the workplace and to create a more productive work environment.
Active Listening and Effective Communication: Yes, this is going to be repetitive because the only way you’re going to solve anything is to actively listen and communicate with those around you. Active listening allows you to give your full attention to the concerns and perspectives with all those involved.
These are some key aspects of active listening:
Being Present
Withholding Judgment
Reflective Listening (Paraphrasing)
Empathy and Validation
By practicing active listening and effective communication, you can create an environment where conflicts can be addressed in a constructive manner.
Identifying the Root Cause of the Conflict: How do you solve a conflict if you don’t know where it's coming from? You don’t! To resolve a conflict, you need to know the root cause of it rather than assuming. You want to ask questions and have conversations with those involved to get to the bottom of it. By getting to the root cause, it will help come up with a good solution.
Encourage Open Dialogue: Give a space in which everyone can express their thoughts. Everyone is going to have different perspectives and here you want to use those active listening skills. This helps create an open space for problem-solving, brainstorming and coming to a point to end the conflict.
These strategies allow individuals to understand each other, work together, and find long-term solutions. This makes for a positive and productive place to work.
Adapting and Moving Forward
Sometimes we may feel it can be hard to move forward but it doesn't have to be that way. Take the conflicts that happen as an opportunity to grow. You want to create a productive workplace environment where everyone can freely speak their mind, that’s why you should have the open door policy in place.
By creating a safe space for all you work with, everyone else will be encouraged to follow through with their commitments and have a productive work environment.
But how can you adapt and move forward? Here are some strategies that will help you do just that!
Embrace a Growth Mindset: It's important to embrace the growth mindset especially moving forward after a conflict. Everything that happens is seen as an opportunity to learn and grow from.
Learn from the Conflicts and Embrace the Feedback: Oftentimes, people don’t like to hear the “negative” or bad feedback but if you don’t know, you don’t know. You can reflect on the experiences, ask others for their perspective and implement what you’ve learned. Now when you’re in one-on-ones with your team, listen to them, listen to their concerns and figure out how you both can learn from the situation.
Assess and Adjust: If something is not working or no one can come to an agreement on how things should be done, it's possible you need to step back and take a deeper look into what’s going on. Not everything is going to be set in stone. Sometimes it's best to adjust what’s going on in your business.
Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement: You want your business and your team to succeed, right? Well, allowing for continuous improvement will cultivate success. You want to encourage feedback, create a learning environment and celebrate progress.
When you adapt and use these strategies, you can communicate about disagreements, take advantage of growth opportunities, and move forward in the workplace.
Time to Navigate Workplace Conflicts
You see, conflicts are going to happen but they don’t need to become a big deal to which it becomes more of an argument. There are ways you can navigate workplace conflicts where everyone comes to a final agreement.
How are you going to navigate workplace conflicts?
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