Understanding Conflict situations

 Understanding Conflict situations 

(Emotional Management for Personal & Professional Growth Series)
 

As we discuss conflict dynamics and an effective way of managing conflicts at the workplace, let us understand the different elements that lead to various conflict situations. The awareness of different conflict situations will help adopt different approaches to make win-win solutions from the differences.
 

 
 
Goal:
 
The requirements or priorities may be different between people. For example, as a manager, you want to fix a problem with a quick-fix solution, whereas your junior colleagues would like to solve it in a structured way, which may take time. Even though you are in the same function, the approach to the problem leads to differences between two people.
Sometimes, the goal itself would be different. For example, your finance head wants to reduce the inventory to reduce cost, and your production head intends to increase it for a better service level.
So, the priority for each people differs, which leads to differences. More accurately, you pinpoint the priority differences and align the focus will help you to manage the conflict well.

It would help if you had a different approach and skillset to manage the conflict.
 
Relationship:

As discussed earlier, any significant differences leave a scar on the relationship; that is why people do not like to get into conflict most of the time. Some relationships are essential for our well-being and would like to continue forever. Some of the relationships are not that important, and we may be ready to forego.

Being aware of the relationship aspects will help you to improve your tone, communication style in managing the conflict.

Power:

In conflict management, the perceived or actual power plays a significant role in managing the conflict well. The power is nothing but the ability to get things done. In any conflict situation, how you are placed among others is an essential criterion to choose your approach.

For example,

when you are dealing with your junior colleagues, you have more power. You can manage any differences relatively well with your experiences, share perspectives with the right intention, and so on.

Suppose you are the functional head and have differences with your counterpart or colleagues from different functions. In that case, you need another skill set to manage the conflict because the perceived power is equal among you and your colleague.

You may have differences with your boss or your customer; you need different approaches to manage the conflict as the perceived power is less.

 
The key point is that we need to be aware of which part we need to address in the conflict, whether goal differences, dealing with different powers, or maintaining the relationship or the combination of all. That forms a conflict situation, and each situation calls for a different approach.
 
That awareness will help you to choose suitable approaches to deal with the differences.

The ultimate objective of conflict management is to get things done and maintain the emotional balance among the stakeholders.
 
Let us look at some of the practical approaches to deal with the differences in the coming weeks.