How to deal with conflict at work more effectively is a topic that comes up regularly in my workshops and coaching sessions. If you’ve spent any time on a family holiday this summer, there’s a reasonable chance you’ve had some recent experience of conflict.
Perhaps one of the family wanted to arrive at the airport three hours early while someone else believed arriving as the gate closed added an exciting element of jeopardy. Perhaps you’ve negotiated competing demands for restaurants, activities and sunbeds, or found yourself explaining to a hot, tired child why the fact that they had an ice cream 20 minutes ago has some bearing on whether they need another one now.
Family holidays are basically conflict management workshops with better weather and considerably more Aperol spritz.
Then we return to work, and apparently, we’re equally successful at resolving things.
According to the CIPD Good Work Index 2024, one in four UK employees experienced conflict at work in the previous year. Interestingly, when people were asked how they dealt with workplace conflict, the most common response was beautifully British: nearly half simply let it go.
Which sounds mature and emotionally intelligent until you start wondering whether we really let things go, or more truthfully, put conflict in a small internal cupboard marked FINE and revisit them at 3am six months later.
In workshops, we can help people understand their natural conflict style, practise different ways of responding and develop useful communication techniques. All of this gives us more options for handling disagreement well.
What happens afterwards, when someone leaves the workshop armed with all that lovely new knowledge, walks into a difficult conversation and discovers their nervous system has an entirely different plan?
Why dealing with conflict at work is a vital skill
At its simplest, conflict happens when people have different needs, opinions, priorities or perspectives, which makes it both normal and inevitable. Put several intelligent people with different responsibilities, experiences and objectives around a table and we’d probably be more concerned if they always agreed.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni puts absence of trust at the bottom of the model, followed immediately by fear of conflict. When people trust one another enough to disagree, challenge ideas and say what they really think, the team has access to more information and perspectives.
Without that, we can end up with what Lencioni calls “artificial harmony”. We’ve probably all sat in one of those meetings where everyone politely agrees and nobody raises the obvious objection, only for the real meeting to begin in the corridor, on Teams or over coffee.
Healthy conflict is about being able to disagree without automatically treating disagreement as a threat to the relationship. That’s when dealing with conflict becomes a behaviour-under-pressure issue rather than simply a communication skill.
Understanding your conflict management style helps, up to a point
One of the models I use in workshops is the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which describes five approaches we can take when our needs or opinions differ from someone else’s: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating.
There are plenty of resources explaining the five conflict styles in detail. For me, knowing the definitions is the starting point. None is inherently good or bad and each can be useful in different circumstances.
Avoiding isn’t necessarily avoidance.
Although occasionally it is avoidance dressed in a sensible cardigan.
The real skill is behavioural flexibility: being able to choose the response that best serves the situation rather than automatically reaching for the one that feels most familiar.
This is usually the point in a workshop where everyone nods wisely, identifies their preferred style, considers situations where another approach might work better and completes an action plan absolutely convinced that Future Us will handle the next difficult conversation differently.
Future Us then meets an irritated senior stakeholder at 10.03 on Tuesday morning and discovers that Present Nervous System did not attend the workshop.
How to access more choice when the pressure rises
We can know exactly how we want to handle conflict and still struggle to do it when the stakes rise.
Imagine you’ve recognised that your natural tendency is to accommodate. You know that when something genuinely matters, you need to hold your position more firmly. You’ve practised what you want to say and perhaps even written BE MORE ASSERTIVE on your workshop action plan and underlined it twice.
Then someone senior or more experienced challenges you in a meeting.
Perhaps their tone changes, you weren’t expecting that question or you’re suddenly acutely aware that everyone else around the table has gone quiet. Before you know it, you’ve agreed too quickly, softened what you were going to say or started explaining your point in so much detail that even you are beginning to wonder what it was.
Alternatively, you say nothing and come up with the perfect response approximately four minutes after the meeting ends.
Your capability is still there. Your access to it has changed.
Research into social evaluative threat gives us an interesting clue about why. Studies have found that experiencing social threat can affect working memory, one of the cognitive capabilities we rely on to hold and work with information. Being challenged publicly, disagreeing with someone more senior, risking disapproval or worrying that we’ll look incompetent can all raise the perceived stakes.
When that happens, our range of available behaviours can narrow. We might become more forceful or quieter than usual, rush to make everything OK, over-explain or agree when we’d rather say no.
This is why learning how to handle conflict well is important, and why knowledge alone isn’t always enough to change behaviour.
Knowing you have five options is only helpful if your nervous system gives you a choice of which one to use.
And telling yourself to “be more assertive next time” is somewhat inadequate.
Women, workplace conflict and keeping the peace
I’m curious about this when working with women because many of the women I coach are extremely skilled at reading a room, noticing what other people need and maintaining relationships.
Those are valuable leadership capabilities. The opportunity is noticing when those strengths stop being choices.
Some women may recognise themselves as the person who smooths things over or keeps the peace, whether that’s at work, with friends or in their family. And while being a mother certainly isn’t every woman’s experience, I suspect plenty of those who are, could add Chief Conflict Resolution Officer to the list of roles nobody warned them about.
I notice this in me and my own family when I’m surrounded by the male species. Flip, even the dog is a boy.
My natural conflict style tends towards accommodating and collaborating.
My husband’s? Compete. Always.
This has provided me with years of valuable (subjective) research material and my workshop participants with considerable entertainment. Sorry, not sorry, dear husband.
What matters in terms of resolving conflict is whether we can recognise when our usual response isn’t what the situation needs and access another option when it does.
How to deal with conflict at work more effectively when it matters
Understanding your natural conflict style is a useful starting point. The next step is learning what happens to that style when the pressure rises.
Before your next difficult conversation at work, prepare what you want to say and notice what usually happens to you when conversations become uncomfortable. Do you speed up, go quiet, over-explain or agree too quickly? Do you become more forceful, or so focused on the other person’s reaction that you lose track of what you wanted to say?
Then consider what response would serve you best in this specific situation. You might need to hold your ground, ask more questions, collaborate, compromise or genuinely decide that this isn’t a battle worth having.
Finally, think about what will help you stay connected to what you know when the pressure rises. That might mean rehearsing your opening sentence, deliberately slowing your breathing, grounding yourself physically or simply recognising the physical sensations that tell you the stakes have started to feel higher.
The aim is to create enough space between what you feel and what you do that you have a choice. If this is a new way of responding, it will naturally feel uncomfortable at first.
Learning how to deal with conflict more effectively is about developing behavioural flexibility so that you can access more than one way of responding when you need it. With that flexibility, you can become brilliant at crucial conversations and more fearless about having them.
If you already know what you should do in a difficult conversation, yet find something rather different happens when you’re actually in one, that’s exactly the territory I explore in Steady Under Pressure.
It’s a focused 1:1 session for capable women who want to understand what gets in the way when the stakes rise, so they can access more of the capability they already have in the moments that matter.
Because sometimes you don’t need another communication model.
You need Present Nervous System to come to the workshop too.
Further reading