Posus advises leaders to broaden their approach to conflict, adopting strategies to manage conflict before it happens, during and afterwards.
For example, Posus says leaders can ask employees before there is a conflict about their preferred way to receive feedback, what they have learnt from previous conflict, and what they want from a leader in the event of a conflict.
During conflict, leaders can listen, be silent, summarise what they have heard, and ask those involved what they would like to happen.
After conflict, leaders can open a conversation about how it was managed, lessons learnt and how they can improve their conflict management skills.
Participants then discussed in groups how to apply this approach to four steps in making conflicts constructive:
Despite the two hour session full of tips, statistics and practice, Posus warned participants against walking back into the office and implementing new conflict resolution strategies.
Instead, he recommends taking the ideas back to foster discussions about how to approach conflict, and encouraged participants to use their own reflective and critical thinking skills to judging the approaches that might work best in their own work environment.
Managers need to improve; 44% of employees rate their managers conflict resolution skills as poor.
On the upside, employees hate conflict just as much as managers, and will typically support any efforts their leader makes to improve.
This article first appeared on LeadingCompany.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
