Poor conflict resolution skills can cause long-term damage to a workplace, which is why it’s important to truly understand what poor conflict resolution skills look like so you can start to find healthy ways to resolve conflicts at your company.
Examples of Poor Conflict Resolution Skills
Some examples of poor conflict resolution skills include:
- Conflict between employees that goes ignored by management and is allowed to continue until it festers and becomes a more serious problem. A manager just burying their head in the sand and not wanting to deal with the conflict that is occurring is one of the biggest problems I’ve seen in my experiences.
- When a manager just calls everybody together for an “airing out” of issues between employees, without really knowing how to handle the situation. This free-for-all approach usually ends up making the conflict even worse.
- A manager taking the approach of ordering the conflict to stop or telling employees if the conflict doesn’t stop, discipline will be taken.
- Disciplining employees without ever finding out what the cause of the conflict was and planning an appropriate solution.
- A manager not making efforts to identify the real cause of the problem, which will increase the likelihood that the problem will resurface. Managers need to get to the root cause by doing a little more investigation.
- A manager failing to communicate to employees involved in a conflict of the effect it is having on the overall work environment and on teamwork. I see this being missed a lot of times and it’s a shame because it’s really a great opportunity to bring all the employees together to say “We all have a common goal here and that is to get work done for our organization without conflicts.”
- Managers not taking conflict between employees seriously.
- Managers taking one side over another.
- Managers jumping to conclusions before hearing all sides of the story.
- A manager failing to get agreement from involved parties regarding what the problem is that is resulting in the conflict.
- Managers not getting the commitment of the employees involved to resolve the problem or conflict. Without their commitment, conflict resolution is easily forgotten and the end result is more conflict.
- Managers not checking back in with employees after a conflict is resolved to see how things are going and if what they did was truly effective.
Using Healthy Conflict Resolution Skills
If healthy conflict resolution skills are used to resolve issues between employees, then the results often include:
- The employees involved in the conflict can get past their disagreement and become productive.
- The overall work environment becomes more productive because there’s no more drama or conflict going on around everyone, since conflict often causes a lot of distraction and negativity.
If there’s conflict going on everyday, it’s likely that employees are paying more attention to that than they are to their work. To some employees, conflict can be entertaining, but to most employees, conflict is very frustrating and irritating. But once the conflict is resolved, the overall productivity of the group will improve as well as the group’s morale.
I think when good conflict resolution skills are used in resolving disagreements, employees work with confidence knowing that conflict will always be resolved constructively and effectively when it does occur.
In my next Insight, I will give you some examples of healthy conflict resolution skills and how they can be used in your workplace.
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