Can You Really Manage Conflict?

Yes. You can manage conflict. But first you have to know what it is, what it isn’t, and what it can be. Sound confusing? Let’s look at some ways to make managing conflict relatively easy.

Conflict is:

• Always dysfunctional
  
• Unhealthy
  
• A by-product of organization life
  
• Unavoidable but manageable
  

Conflict is not:

• Something to be avoided or suppressed
  

Conflict can be:

• A deviation from the status quo
  
• A means to develop organizational systems
  

There are many ways to deal with conflict in your organization, whether it’s a church or faith-based organization, a nonprofit or small business…it’s all the same. There’s a right way and a wrong way and we’ll look briefly at both.

What you don’t want to do is avoid or ignore an issue. There are lots of reasons you may want to sidestep a conflict: it may seem trivial to you, you may not think it’s timely to address it, maybe the folks involved need to cool down. Or you may even think there’s actually no solution or that addressing it will disrupt your already busy workplace.

Watch out for the tendency to “accommodate” the issue by getting involved in self-sacrifice. You may think it’s okay to lose the “battle” as long as you win the “war” and that in doing so you’ll minimize your losses, but that’s just not true. You’ll never maintain harmony or stability in a workplace where there is unresolved conflict.

Tomorrow’s blog will look at why you shouldn’t force a resolution much less compromise when it’s just wrong to do so. We’ll also look at the need for collaboration to reach an equitable solution.