Conflict management

Who did not find, was in the middle of a conflict or had to resolve one in your professional career?  You will not escape conflict in your organization or work environment. In my view it is inevitable. Mainly because the objective, values and needs of groups and individuals in any organization do not always coincide.

In my view, sometimes, conflict may be a sign of a healthy company. Boring agreement on everything is unnatural and debilitating. There should be fight of ideas about tasks and projects and disagreements should not be suppressed. They should come out into open, because is the only way in which you can ensure that the issues are explored and conflicts are resolved.  This post is about managing the conflicts or better to say trying to manage the conflicts.

Every reader could have his/her own experience and way of resolving the conflicts he/she was involved or he/she saw in his working environment.

You can use, let´s say, a peaceful co-existence where you aim to smooth our differences and emphasize the common ground. It is well known we are encouraged to learn to live together. There is a good deal of information, contact and exchange of views and individuals move freely between the different teams, for example, between your headquarter and the affiliate or between sales and marketing departments. This is a pleasant ideal but it may not be practicable in many situations.

It is also known that conflict is not necessarily resolved by grouping people together. Improved communications and briefing groups could be a good idea but are useless, in my opinion, if management has nothing to say that people want to hear. And there is also the danger that the real issues, submerged for the moment will surface again in the future.

Other possibility is to get compromise. In this case the issue could be resolved by negotiating or bargaining and neither party wins or loses.  In this situation there is no right or best answer. Agreement only accommodates differences. As you can imagine real issues are not likely to be solved.

Based on the above the best approach would be to find a genuine solution to the problem rather than just accommodating different points of view. And as I said before sometimes conflict situations can be used to advantage to create better solutions. This situation has to be generated by those who share the responsibility for seeing that the solutions work. So what would be the sequence of actions in this case? First, those concerned work to define the problem and agree on the objectives to be attained in reaching a solution. Second, the group develops alternative solutions and debates their merits. Third, agreement is reached on the preferred course of action and how it should be implemented.

The conclusion could be that conflict is in itself not to be deplored. It is an inevitable concomitant of progress and change. What is to be disapproved is the failure to use conflict constructively. Effective problem solving both resolves conflicts and opens up channels of discussion and cooperative action. Take this into account in your next situation!!!!