Conflict Management Skills: The New Strategic Advantage
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An active conflict is a crossroads. Skillfully managed, an active conflict can propel an organization down a path of new opportunities, awareness, and ideas. Handled badly, a dispute can quickly cause distraction, raise stress levels, and create barriers to good things like productivity, communications, and creativity.
Much has been written on the great benefits of dispute resolution, and of the potentially transformative power of high-quality interventions brought in to play when circumstances have already become contentious and disruptive. As an antidote to the destructive problems of organizational conflict gone wrong, responsive mediation, coaching and similar supportive efforts are proven methods of returning a working team to a successful path. The value of getting back to work, having harnessed the catalytic energy of opposing ideas, can’t be overstated.
But what is the value of taking a more proactive approach to dispute resolution? Is there a way to quantify the return on an organization’s investment in training and support for the purpose of developing conflict competency skills and systems before a dispute arises?
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When we join a company, partnership or team, our expectation is that everyone involved will exhibit professional behavior toward us and each other. Instead, it’s highly possible that we may become one of the more than 60 million adults in the United States who are affected in some way by bullying behavior at work.
What kind of behaviors are we talking about? Our definition is any interpersonal behavior that causes emotional distress in others sufficient enough to impede their productivity or disrupt organizational functioning. It isn’t just a personality conflict — it’s a chronic pattern of disrespectful behavior.