Workplace disputes Archives

Workplace disputes

Home / Workplace disputes

woman-throwing-autumn-leavesjakob-owens-uE_N2i6-TRM-unsplash

How to get unstuck from a conflict

If you’re feeling stuck in a conflict situation it’s not your fault. Sure, you’re part of what’s going on, but you need to know that it’s not all about you. In this post I share some starting points for getting unstuck and changing the conflict.

Know that’s it not you

The first part to get unstuck is to let go of guilt and stop beating yourself up for being in this situation. Know that being affected by a conflict is in no way a comment on your worth or value as a person. Conflict is normal and inevitable and will happen.

Conflicts between people nearly always connect to bigger systems that need addressing.

They point towards a reality that is being highlighted.

I wish someone had told me this when I started out in the world of work around twenty years ago. I had landed my dream job pioneering a brand new initiative. It was exhilarating and exciting. It was also complicated, unclear and full of tensions.

At the age of 22, my ego told me that I was entirely to blame and what a terrible person I was for not being able to handle it better.

Hindsight tells me that there were cracks in the way the project had been set up from the start. Anyone else would have faced similar issues. I had no clear manager, a totally over-ambitious brief that kept changing, no clear decision-making process and six people advising me from six different perspectives! No wonder I was conflicted.

Ask for support

Asking for support is vital. The longer you try to battle on alone, the worse things are likely to get. Many of us have been schooled to prize independence – me included. When it comes to handling tensions, crises and change, we all need support. The kind of support you need most will depend on the nature of the conflict and your exact situation.

Examples include:

Someone external to facilitate a difficult conversation.

A meeting with your manager to get more clarity.

A team conversation with clear guidelines and a skilled chair.

Pushing for training to develop everyone’s skills.

An independent mediator to help you have ‘that’ conversation.

121 conflict coaching.

Trust your judgement about what support you most need.

Talk about it

This sounds so blindingly obvious it almost goes without saying. Except it doesn’t.

People e-mail, text, direct message or simply avoid each other. Often they have stopped talking. Perhaps they tried talking and it went horribly wrong. Or maybe they avoided it altogether for fear of what might come up.

Or one person voted with their feet and decided to leave.

Leaving deals with the immediate issue but what is lost in the process? The opportunity to learn from the conflict, what it wanted to show us or to the organisation as a whole.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ve done all of those”, don’t be hard on yourself. Most of us probably have. At the time you were doing the best you could.

If you’re stuck in a conflict situation right now, talking can be one of the hardest things to do. It can also be one of the most transformative things you can try. Talking in a safe and supported context can get things unstuck in a way that you never imagined.

It can open up opportunities to learn about yourself. It can highlight ways in which the organisation needs to change and grow.

And remember you don’t have to go it alone. An independent facilitator, mediator or coach can be worth their weight in gold.

It takes courage, commitment and determination to ask for support and to talk when you’re in a conflict situation. However, these things are key to getting unstuck and moving forward.

Get in touch if this is you and you want that kind of help. You really don’t have to do it alone.

A revelation about working in teams

All of us have a preferred way of operating at work, our default mode, if you will. Mostly it is unconscious.

Often we make the mistake of thinking that everyone else sees things the same way that we do and this is where we can hit problems.

In my work training people to handle difficult situations, I use an excellent profiling tool that helps people to understand their natural communication and working style, especially when they experience a bit of tension.

Take the way a project is managed for example.

What is your starting point? One person will start out with building the relationships and gathering a strong network of people. Another might do a lot of background research on other similar projects, the history of the context or the latest research around the topic. A third person would start by getting down on paper the vision, strategy, goals, concrete outcomes and timescale. A fourth person might look at the core values and purpose and work on bringing together a team to work on building the project collaboratively.

You probably found yourself nodding at one of these examples and thinking, “well of course that’s the way to do it. Isn’t that obvious?!”. In reality, all of these approaches are valid and have different strengths to them.

The rub comes when two people with vastly different approaches are working together on a project, often for the first time. Add in different experiences, potentially different cultural backgrounds, workload pressures, diverse ways of communicating and handling disagreement and it’s no wonder that it can be a minefield.

If you’re in this exact situation and you’re thinking, “It’s me. There’s something wrong with me, I just can’t work with him/her,” I’m here to tell you that it’s not you. That bears repeating. It’s not you.

You probably just have vastly different styles to one or more of the others in your team, and you’ve probably never been taught the skills to handle those differences. Let’s face it, most of us haven’t.

It’s possible to work with people with very different styles to ours and to get on well. In fact, having diverse styles in a team setting is both a challenge and a huge potential goldmine. She will see things that you never would. He will stop you from wasting a lot of time (and therefore money) going down a rabbit hole. She will have the key connection that makes the programme fly. And so on.

For most of the people I’ve worked with, this is a complete revelation.

So what’s the difference between teams that manage to hold this diversity and make it work and those that crumble under the challenge? In my experience, there are three key pieces, self-awareness, skill and a commitment to work at differences. Where you have a team of highly self-aware and skilled people who are dedicated to sticking it out, style differences won’t lead to destructive conflict.

The good news is that all three elements can be learned.

People can grow in both self-awareness and their skill level with the right support, i.e. high quality training and ongoing coaching. Commitment to work through differences can be encouraged through developing an organisational culture that sees conflict as an opportunity for learning, growth and change.

How strong are these three pillars in your organisation? I’d love to hear!

Need help to build skills, self-awareness and confidence in handling differences?

Check out the Courses page of my website and look for Team Profiling here:

Courses

Communication / disagreements / style differences / teamwork / Workplace disputes - 05/03/2019

The power of a true apology – and why is it so hard to do?

The mediation session between Sarah* and Sandra* had gone well so far, but there hadn’t been quite the breakthrough that I’d hoped for. Sarah had admitted posting some things on social media about her work situation and had apologised to Sandra for this and for not talking to her directly. These were encouraging signs.

However, Sandra had not acknowledged the apology and I was starting to feel tired with the effort of encouraging them to hear one another more fully. I decided to call a coffee break and then check in with each of them individually. Privately, I asked them how they felt it was going, and reminded them of what they had said they wanted to get out of the joint session when we’d met previously.

Both agreed that they wanted to continue.

When I restarted the joint meeting, Sandra turned to Sarah and issued a whole-hearted and unqualified apology. Immediately, the tension began to dissolve and the conversation between them opened up.

They both shared openly what had happened and I was able to gradually guide them towards thinking about the future and how they wanted to move forwards. They reached a workable agreement and when I contacted them again a year later, they were happily working together.

In reflecting on this case, I was struck by the power of a true apology and also how rare it is. Courageously, Sarah had taken the first steps. Because it was genuine, it had the effect of transforming the situation once Sandra was able to hear it. So what makes a true apology?

These are some of the key elements. You can tell a genuine apology when it:

Comes from the heart, not from the head. This is hard to quantify but you know it when you see it and hear it.
Acknowledges the harm done to the other person or people.
Accepts and acknowledges your part in the situation – not necessarily taking full responsibility but admitting that you had a part to play.
Has no qualifications or justifications attached to it.
Comes with a willingness to hear the other person’s perspective. Again this is hard to quantify but it will emerge in the conversation whether or not this willingness is present.
Is offered voluntarily, never ‘required’.

The reverse is also true, you can recognise an apology that is not genuine when:

The body language betrays a lack of respect, such as arms folded, rolling eyes, tone of voice, tutting, despite the person ‘saying the right thing’.
There is no acknowledgement of harm.
The person does not accept the part they played in the situation.
They say things like, “I’m sorry if you felt that way…”, “I’m sorry it’s come to this but….” . These phrases are usually followed by an explanation, justification or qualification about why they behaved the way they did.
There is a lack of willingness to really hear the other’s perspective.

I also started to reflect on why saying sorry is so hard for most of us and I think there are a number of reasons for this.

We operate in a society that values expressions of strength and apologising is often seen as admitting failure.

As children, many of us were forced to apologise to our siblings or to friends before we were ready and before we were given a chance to tell our story. This was done with the best of intentions, usually to teach us social skills, and yet for many of us it felt deeply unfair because what we really needed was to be heard and acknowledged ourselves. The ‘sorry’ was probably needed, but later on when we’d had a chance to calm down and been listened to.

Finally, many of us have a deep rooted fear that in some way we are ‘wrong’, a failure, not good enough, an imposter and so on. At a subconscious level, we confuse admitting that we’ve made a mistake and done something we regret, with admitting that we’re fundamentally wrong as a person, something that deep-down many of us fear anyway.

A true apology comes from a place of strength and it takes tremendous courage and discipline. Never doubt the power it can have to transform a relationship.

**Not their real names. Names and some other details have been changed to protect identity.*

apology / Communication / disagreements / Mediation / Workplace disputes - 02/07/2019

Portrait of successful Businesswoman by the window

How to be clear about your role – and why you need to be

Over the years I’ve noticed that many disagreements at work begin with confusion about a person’s role and the expectations of the role. Often this has been going on for years and people are left floundering, getting on with the job to the best of their ability but with a nagging sense that they’re not doing enough. It can be a source of much stress and anxiety.

If this resonates, you’re not alone.

In the worst cases, people have gone into a role with a job description that is so vague it’s unsurprising that they are totally unclear. In one case, there was no job description at all. (Yes it does happen). More often, though, it is the understanding of what the job involves and which elements should be given priority that creates problems.

Let’s be honest, many job descriptions are more like wish-lists to Santa, spelling out every possible area of responsibility and task that the person might be expected to undertake. These days everyone is over-stretched, trying to cram more and more into their working days. Managers have crazy workloads that never really end and job roles morph and change over time to the extent that often someone ends up doing a completely different job to the one that they were originally employed to do.

Given these contexts, it’s not surprising this is a grey area that is ripe for tensions.

The challenge for the individual is to decide how they actually use their time. Conflicts can arise when colleagues or managers and staff have very different expectations about these things.

Some examples of areas of tension include:

Which project, programme or tasks should be prioritised.
Who is responsible for leading on a particular project or programme.
What support is given and expected in terms of supervision and mentoring.
How things are communicated and who is included in those communications.
When there is a difference of opinion or some concerns about a piece of work, how this is dealt with.
Whether or not home-working is permitted, and if so for how much of the time (in relevant industries).
How much to engage as part of a team and how much to ‘go it alone’.

So how to deal with this?

The key thing is to deal with the situation sooner rather than later. If it is avoided, it won’t go away, rather it’s more likely to grow and become a bigger problem further down the line.

In my experience as a mediator, there is no substitute for face to face, open conversation. Texts and e-mails are good for setting up these meetings but they almost never work when the discussion is ongoing and important. Although they seem to be efficient, e-mails end up taking up more time. Here are some top tips for anyone faced with this situation:

Bite the bullet and fix ‘that’ meeting with your line manager. It won’t be as bad as you think. If they are really busy, keep pressing for the meeting until you pin them down.
Prepare for the meeting by thinking in advance about what you really need and what you’d ideally want to get out of the meeting. Be specific.
Manage your state of mind and emotion. Use whatever grounding practices you have in your toolkit- mindfulness, meditation, prayer to also prepare your attitude to be open and receptive.
Go into the meeting with a humble and listening attitude.
Practice summarising what the other person says to check your understanding.
Ask questions and don’t be afraid to ask what an acronym or piece of jargon actually means.

Putting in place these tips will set the frame for some high-quality and open communication.

And hopefully, you’ll have more clarity at the end of it.

Communication / Workplace disputes - 12/05/2018

Contact Info

07855 567 563
laura@peacebuilders.co.uk
LinkedIn
@trickychats
/peacebuilderslaura

Send a message

Website by Libratus Design

Photography by Ingrid Turner