5 ways to manage conflicting priorities when you work in HR

If you work in an HR role with a site and a head office one thing you cannot get away from is having two masters. You have your General Manager (or similar) leading the site and then you also have a role as part of the HR function for the overall business. The two are not always compatible.

I remember standing in the middle of a factory at peak season, with labour shortages, and trying to persuade the Manufacturing Manager to let people be released from the production lines to do the employee survey. There were two aims here, one was to get employee feedback across all sites at the same time, the other was to keep the factory running and service the customer (with limited people available). Both were right and both were important to the business, but they conflicted at a moment in time and and they made things difficult for me as the HRBP in the middle trying to balance both!

So how do you get better at managing those conflicts?

1.?????Think ahead, and come up with a plan. If I am honest I knew that the problem was coming with the employee survey! I stepped in too late to solve the problem. If had pre-empted the challenges better and stepped in earlier when I saw that things weren’t on track things would have been different, not perfect, but better.

2.?????Decide who the key decision makers are, on both sides of the issue, and try to get support and understanding before the problem arises. With the benefit of hindsight, I could have done more to explain the challenges to both the factory managers and the central team before the situation became desperate.

3.?????Listen. It sounds so simple. ?It’s easy to tell someone what has to happen but listening to what other people are up against and trying to do everything possible to work around that can go along way to getting support and commitment to action.

4.?????Compromise. What can each stakeholder manage to give and how can that be done in a way that is acceptable and makes the problem more manageable?

5.?????Do not make it personal. It can damage relationships if you get into a stand-off around a particular issue and make it about the person. 27% of employees say they have seen personal attacks arise from conflicts. If you stay focused on the problem in hand and look for solutions then whatever the outcome, you get to move on with the relationship intact.