Here's how you can refine your conflict resolution strategies as your business expands.

As your business grows, refining conflict resolution strategies becomes essential. Prioritize open communication by establishing clear channels for feedback and discussion. Invest in training managers to handle conflicts with empathy and fairness, ensuring they can mediate effectively. Regularly assess and update policies to reflect the evolving company culture and workforce diversity. Encourage a proactive approach, where potential issues are addressed before they escalate. Finally, foster a collaborative environment where employees feel valued and heard, making it easier to resolve disputes constructively and maintain a positive, productive workplace.

Where there is change, there is conflict. The key is to use the conflict to hear viable solutions from innovative, curious standpoints. Ensuring everyone gets a voice is challenging when your organization is expanding - perhaps rapidly. Identify a team of key communicators from each area to be represented. Instill the sense of conflict being used to escalate positive change. Just as in the teams construct, any viable entity will experiencing storming - so the best ideas can surface with regards to what's best for the organization. Allowing the viewpoints to be openly discussed, deliberated and developed or discarded moves the organization into healthy norming. The core group's verification / adjustments lead to positive performing.

As companies grow, cross-training can be both an end and a means to an end, equipping employees to handle tasks outside their primary roles and improving employee listening skills along the way. Intersperse skills- and roles-based cross-training sessions with opportunities for employees to interview each other about the joys and challenges of their jobs. While having cross-trained employees ready to step in during a crunch can sometimes prevent conflict, fostering genuine bonds between departments through informal interactions can be valuable in the long run. These connections build empathy and support, creating a foundation for smoother conflict resolution when challenges inevitably arise.

We have 2 ears and 1 mouth. Unfortunately, that is often an ignored fact in conflict situations. When people are passionate about their stance or preferred mode of proceeding with the work, they often listen to respond (or react, I should say), rather than listening to understand. Empathic listening recognizes that in growth situations, all will be espousing their particular idea of what is most important. When we can listen empathetically, we can listen between the lines. Often the symptom is what is discussed and not the root issue of the conflict. Pay now or pay later. Listen to understand and solve the issue; or band aid it and re-address it again (and perhaps even again!) Collaboration and cool heads win!

I wrote the book and developed the programs on POSITIVE Conflict Resolution. When organizations and their management / leadership are sick and tired of stress, lost revenues, low productivity, high turnover, a weak culture and an array of other negative impacts from conflict in the workplace, they reach out. I proactively reach out to organizations to encourage them to act responsibly, implementing our cost effective "POSITIVE Approach to Personal Leadership and Conflict Resolution" gamified, online learning. Conflict reduces individual performance by 50%. Multiply half of the salary of individuals involved in conflict by the number of hours the conflict exists. It's easy to see why the cost savings are impressive when being proactive.

Our ACE-ing Conflict system—Ask, Clarify, Express—is rooted in the work of top psychology experts. But the secret to actually using that expertise is that we’ve distilled it into three steps that people can remember in the heat of a conflict. For many, it is a paradigm shift, and becoming skilled at ACE-ing Conflict requires practice over time. But most folks love our learning process because it’s all about applying ACE to the kinds of actual conflicts they’ve experienced. Over time, folks begin to internalize the understanding that the strongest person is the one who can curiously listen to other perspectives without feeling threatened by them.