Leaders have an inherent responsibility to make sure their employees are heard. If individual team members cannot resolve their conflict, then conflict resolution falls to the leaders and that demands attention and a platform for resolution.

Workplace communication training can offer a versatile, detailed, and nuanced platform for businesses dealing with continued conflicts. Team members need to know that if they voice concerns, they will be heard. Leaders need to respond to their concerns in a practical and fair way.

Without this ongoing open dialogue, developing businesses may run into constant turmoil that will continue to slowly and deceptively erode their organization from the inside. How can business leaders navigate the tough and tumultuous waters of conflict resolution?

Managing Respect

The main principle of resolving conflict often comes back to respect, which is often egregiously mishandled by business leaders. Respect is not bought or obtained with force. It is a valuable key to setting a foundation of good conflict management.

As a leader, every decision you make will accumulate a level of respect that is received organically. You manage respect by seizing on opportunities to genuinely help employees and the organization as a whole.

Respect is often intricately tied to the management of conflict. If the involved parties do not respect you, there is little hope for proper closure to a conflict.

If that is the case, then the conflicting parties will continue to disagree, perhaps vehemently, largely because they have no respect for the individual mediating and resolving the conflict. They have no trust that it is going to get done.

But, if you can build respect, you will manage to avoid and minimize the onset of many conflicts.

Self-Created Obstacles to Proper Conflict Resolution

Your responsibility to identify and respond to conflict is often overshadowed by self-created obstacles. You need to get over these personal hurdles or else you’ll be trapped by your own constraints.

This happens when leaders are busy with their image, narrowly focus on avoiding a negative reputation, or diminishing conflict because it is challenging or could adversely affect their achievements.

Empathize and Know Your Employees

Leaders can get over their self-created hurdles and manage their respect through training and instructional practice. A key element of workplace communication training is empathy.
It revolves around knowing your employees. This includes knowing what they want, what they care about, how they respond to conflict, and other factors.

A company leader is served well by developing a foundational knowledge of conflict resolution that can communicate issues as they arise, open the right doors to the right parties, resolve them, and track the progress with an open line of dialogue.

He or she must know their people, and that can only be achieved by really empathizing with their needs and spending the time and energy to familiarize themselves with as many of them as possible.

Workplace communication training can enhance open communication. Employees can work comfortably, knowing they will be heard if anything does arise. Leaders will be armed with responsive and logical strategies to diffuse issues before they become toxic.

Ultimately, everyone benefits from a humanity-driven system for understanding and handling conflict. Existing conflicts will often naturally fade away because you have a system that your people trust in and they know that you empathize with them.

The Stitt Feld Handy Group has created a series of training materials for business leaders that revolve around building a strong framework of empathy and engaging with employees. For information about our training services or courses, contact our team at contact@adr.ca or call (416)-307-0000.

To learn conflict resolution skills that you can use at work and in your personal life, please visit our Alternative Dispute Resolution Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.

To improve your negotiation skills and get the results you want while negotiating, please visit our Become a Powerful Negotiator Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.

To gain skills to handle difficult conversations and difficult people with confidence, please visit our Dealing With Difficult People Workshop page to learn more about upcoming in-person and instructor-led online sessions.