How leaders can effectively manage office/work-place conflicts?

One of the most important and often discussed topic in any organization is how to reduce conflicts between team members and how to deal with employees’ manipulative tactics. Needless to say that it is leaders responsibility to manage their team’s conflicts and create healthy, collaborative and harmonized environment for the team. The only question is: How to do that effectively?

In my role as a leader, manager or consultant I have dealt with many conflicting situations, irrespective of region or country, at the bottom of it, they are almost the same. I drew some common behavioral characteristics and mechanism to deal with conflicts/issues. The same I will discuss here -

In any leadership role – where you are managing certain number of team members/resources – conflict bound to happen because of different personal styles and individual’s hidden goals. You like it or not, you want to deal with it or not – it’s just there. We can close our eyes and act like it’s not there but there comes a time when unresolved little issue become a monstrous conflict and it becomes utmost priority to deal with it immediately. So why wait? Why not being pro-active and resolve issues – be it small or big?

Some potential sources of conflicts at workplace are:

• Unacceptable language
• Any form of harassment
• Use of office email/printers for excessive personal use
• Lack of talent (not being up-to-date with the changes in a particular segment that employees are working in, not being abreast with new tools and technologies leaving certain employees behind in terms of new skills)
• Manipulative tantrums like crocodile tears, blame shifting etc
• Competitive environment
• Jealousy
• Ego
• Monopoly (Some employees are working since last few years already with the organization and want to ascertain their power at any cost)
• Performance discrepancies
• Inappropriate appraisals
• Favoritism (some team members are given more importance over others irrespective of their knowledge and commitment)
• Salary / perks or allowances issues
  (to name a few)

There are other factors also, though less obvious, where behavioral patters over long terms becomes source of permanent disagreement or conflict, they are:

• Taking credit of others work
• Body language that shows signs of indifference
• Not taking messages for other employees
• Poor personal hygiene
• Being totally blind about team members genuine problems like being sick etc
• Not inviting all the team members for project completion lunch
  (to name a few)

Conflicting situations often lead to resignations from great employees as often employees who concentrate on their work don’t have much time to involve themselves with so called office dynamics (someone taught me not to use office politics word anywhere :). These great employees' are also not the type of people who would stay at any organization where leaders are not able to understand these conflicting scenarios and do not deal with them, leaving them feel aloof and ultimately leads to resignation.

Leaders should not ignore underlying tension brewing in the team and should often have one-on-one meeting to understand possible conflicts and become proactive to resolve it or at least deal with the problem upfront before it’s too late.

Some common ways to deal with conflicts are:

• Be clear about expectations and deliverables from the team members
• Define acceptable behavior at workplace and communicate policies and procedures
• Keep complaints box where employees can drop in complaints anonymously and in case of multiple geographic locations create a platform where complaints can be logged without complainant’s name being displayed mandatorily
• Have a meeting with all team members (be it personally or virtually depending on the situation) and assure them that you are here to encourage great work, communication and healthy work environment and any issues can be discussed in private. This may sound very obvious but more of the times, it doesn’t even happen. This occasionally leaving employees unaware of the leader’s personality and does not give confidence to employees to raise their voices
• Treat every employee (team members) with same importance, and respect their views/ideas
• Define chain of command to allow communication flow effortlessly, make sure that team members under this chain of command is changed periodically so that there is no grouping formed
• Showing no interest in office gossips, be professional and to-the point
• Don’t encourage backbiting in the team
• Being aware of the tension brewing and acknowledge/identify the team member causing tension in the team
• Act as a mediator and talk with each member of the team individually to understand the situation fully
• Collect ideas from team members to make workplace better
• Bring both sides of members issues in a common platform and allow them to speak
• Always investigate conflict by using standard defined procedure and log it in a system so that other employees see that you – as a leader - are serious about resolving issues.
• Escalate conflicts to senior leadership if required, and follow-up

Managing conflict at workplace is an integral part of leader’s daily activity and an inherent part of people management. After all, leader is there because of the team, so, good communication, constant feedback, ongoing improvement tactics, mentoring, training and coaching can help managing conflict. Not to forget that recognizing good work by employees, applauding their success and sacrifices can bring at-home feeling in the employees. Resolving conflict at an early stage before attitudes have hardened is a great remedy for conflict resolution.