✅ FREE ACCESS: Mindset Mastery: 7 Productivity Keys For High-Performing Leaders
Have you ever felt frustrated by conflicts in your workplace? Have you wondered if there are actual methods to establish professional boundaries, manage disagreements, solve problems in real time, and cultivate a culture of care?
Today, we’re going to learn 4 proven strategies to manage conflicts in the workplace for those specific issues.
But before we get into it, make sure you grant your lifetime access to our free Workbook: Mindset Mastery: 7 Productivity Keys for High-Performing Leaders.
This is your chance to make the mindset shift you need to manage conflicts in the workplace by using the 7 mindset keys of the 1% top-performing leaders.
How to Manage Conflicts Through Boundaries, Disagreements, and Genuine Care
The daily grind can often transform into a battlefield of conflicting egos and opposing viewpoints, leaving you exhausted and demotivated.
By specifying professional boundaries, facilitating constructive disagreements, addressing problems in real time, and fostering a culture of genuine care, you’ll be equipped with the tools to not just manage, but truly master conflict in any workplace.
Specify Professional Boundaries
The first proven way to manage conflict in the workplace is by specifying professional boundaries.
There are two situations where you need to do that.
- When the workplace has already established professional boundaries as part of its culture.
- When the workplace hasn’t established those boundaries as part of its culture.
Specifying, professional boundaries when they exist
In the first situation, when the workplace has already established professional boundaries as part of its culture, you only have to make sure those are clear to you by acting them out.
That alone will give people around you the right idea of how aware you are about those boundaries and how much you value them, meaning, they should also stick to them when working with you.
In other words, communicating professional boundaries with your actions is an effective way to avoid conflicts in the workplace.
Because there’s already a workplace culture backing you up.
But what happens when those professional boundaries are not part of the workplace culture?
Specifying, professional boundaries when they don’t exist in the workplace
In this case, it won’t be enough to act things out because people don’t know what to expect.
The rule of thumb here is that you should never leave anything to chance.
You have to establish your professional boundaries explicitly beforehand, and you have to require acknowledgment from everybody involved.
It’s even better if you do this in written form and request people’s acknowledgment also in written form, so you can always recur to that as a reminder of a previous understanding.
Facilitate Disagreements
The second proven way to manage conflict in the workplace is by facilitating disagreements.
Why? Because every idea, plan, or project gets more sophisticated after being exposed to conflicting ideas.
That happens because what survives that iteration is a more polished version of it.
The most fundamental thing to understand here is that people don’t disagree with you, they disagree with your ideas.
People disagree when their belief systems clash with others. That’s it. You get that right and a whole bunch of conflict is avoided.
When you facilitate disagreement, you disarm the tension of people that are feeling that their belief system is being stressed without a fight.
By giving them the right to express themselves, be authentic, and contribute to the matter at hand, that fight becomes unnecessary.
How do you facilitate disagreements?
Make sure people have the freedom and the encouragement to express their opinions, and they don’t feel afraid of any retribution for their different opinions.
Clarify that presenting divergent ideas promotes betterment and improvement to the matter at hand.
Address Problems in Real Time
The third proven way to manage conflict in the workplace is by addressing problems in real-time.
There are two principles you have to understand about problems.
- The more time the problem lives, the bigger it becomes.
- Problems corrupt our perceptions.
Here’s an example of how these 2 principles act together:
Let’s say there’s a crack in a glass window. If you ignore that crack, it won’t disappear. It will become bigger instead.
Also, the moment you see the crack for the first time is when it will bother you the most.
If you don’t fix it right away, it’s more likely that you will get used to it and never fix it before the window shatters.
What’s the conclusion?
The best chance you have to fix any anomaly is now. It’s when the anomaly is in its simplest form and you are motivated the most.
A problem avoided is a problem postponed. If you deal with potential conflicts in the workplace when they are still small cracks, you will prevent major breakdowns.
Care
The fourth proven way to manage conflict in the workplace is by simply caring.
Write this down: You care about people when you care about what they care about.
The question is: Why should I care about caring?
And here it is:
If people don’t feel they matter, they won’t feel that the work they do matters. And if they don’t feel that their work matters, their results are compromised from the beginning.
Compromised results lead to conflict.
So if you care about the results of the work that you’re involved in, and you’re working in a team, the first thing you have to do is to develop genuine and reciprocal relationships with the people involved in the project, so you understand what they care about.
That will develop trustworthy relationships that naturally drift away from conflicts, even when there are conflictual elements around the workplace.
Thriving companies are made of connected people because connected people are not only people, they become a team.
