The Importance of Managing Conflict in Organizations

I got into the conflict resolution field in the early 1990s, completing a Master’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University. I went on to do that work internationally for about seven years, before I switched to working inside organizations. So I’ve been a conflict guy for a long time.

Unsurprisingly, you’ll find a few questions about managing conflict and having difficult conversations in the culture assessment that Maddie and I created, and in the work I’ve done in the last 10 years, conflict has come up a LOT. Why? Well, for some important reasons.

Conflict makes change hard. There is a statistical correlation in our culture data between managing conflict and embracing change, but this also just makes intuitive sense. When things change, some people will like it and some won’t, so there naturally will be conflict. If you avoid the conflict, or solve it half way, the change is going to stall or fail.

Conflict creates inefficiency. The default approach to conflict in organizations is to avoid it, but that only makes it worse, and now you’re spending time you don’t have dealing with angry employees who had a chance to resolve this early on, but didn’t. All that takes you away from the work you should be doing, and you end up behind schedule

Conflict drives good people to leave. Everyone hates workplace drama, and if you have too much of it, your good people are going to start looking around. Life is short, and people spend most of it at work, so if you create stress by mismanaging conflict, you’ll lose your top talent.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! There are plenty of easy-to-learn tools out there for having productive conflict conversations, and if you and your colleagues would practice them, things would be moving a lot more smoothly.

The good news is, there are tons of online training programs out there. This was one of the unintended benefits of the pandemic—everyone in the business (including me) put up an online conflict training, so now they’re pretty cheap. My course has a half-day of content in it, and it’s currently being sold for $88! (And I think you can get volume discounts on that site if you want to train multiple employees.)

Get people trained in managing conflict. It will pay big dividends down the road.