No one enjoys dealing with disagreements and conflict, yet it’s not uncommon for conflicts to come up in complex decision making cycles. People have diverse interests, information and opinions, and a rigorous decision making process, done right, encourages those perspectives to come to the fore.
But managing conflict in a positive manner is a key skill to master, especially as you progress in your career. By reframing conflict as an opportunity to learn, rather than a personal attack, you will improve your and the group’s decision making as a whole. This is a core executive skill, and one which if you master, will lead to you being seen as a facilitator who moves groups to the best outcomes.
Mastering this type of communication is a hugely important skill that helps improve your relationships with people around you, understand diverse perspectives, and ultimately make better decisions with more buy-in from others.
In this article we’ll run through some of the most powerful techniques you can use to improve your communication with stakeholders and those around you.
Why is addressing conflict so important?
Lots of people don’t like conflict and look for ways to minimize or avoid it. The best communicators can navigate through tension in a firm, but respectful manager, and demonstrate a few characteristics:
- They dig deep to understand what’s really going on
- They understand how people feel about issues
- They make articulate, well reasoned decisions
- They tailor their message according to their audience
Beyond this, great communicators don’t take things personally. Whilst they have opinions, these are not entangled with their personal identity. Rather they are on a hunt for the truth, and searching for the best solution for the organization as a whole.
In a business context, it’s natural - even important - for people to have slightly different interests at heart and prefer different approaches. For example:
- Sales and marketing people tend to favor solutions that lead to the best commercial outcomes.
- Engineers will tend to favor solutions that are scalable, secure and reliable.
- Designers will tend to favor solutions that solve user needs and are aesthetically pleasing
Handled the wrong way, this could cause an ugly disagreement about what a product team built. But handled the right way, this can spur a conversation around novel approaches that deliver on everyone’s interests and are better overall.
Being able to calmly address conflict and reach decisions with high degrees of alignment has a number of benefits:
The best decisions are built on diverse points of view
This is fairly intuitive. If you make decisions without consulting your colleagues, then you’re likely to miss insight and concerns that they would raise. By including colleagues from other functions (e.g. design, engineering, marketing, sales), then you’re more likely to get robust solutions that work for everyone.
There’s also good research to support this, with estimates indicating that inclusive teams make better decisions 87% of the time. That doesn’t mean you should be deciding by consensus, but you should be making informed decisions once you understand all the relevant facts and perspectives.
Organizations run on collaboration
Regardless of what you decide on, in an organization you’re unlikely to be able to see it through without the help of others. While you can sometimes order people around, this clearly doesn’t lead to the results you’d get if everyone was intrinsically motivated to help. Without buy-in plans get blown up, drama ensues, and things don’t happen.
Generating political buy-in to a decision is a key factor in whether your plans are successful, and independent of how theoretically sound your decisions are.
Empathy builds deeper relationships with more trust
When you tackle difficult topics with empathy and respect, you strengthen your relationships and the level of trust you have with those around you. People will trust you more if they feel you have their interests, and the interests of the organization as a whole in mind, and aren’t purely self-motivated.
Tackling tough conversations unlocks growth
“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”
- Tim Ferris
If there are topics that you are unwilling to address, then inevitably you get boxed into situations that you aren’t comfortable with. Being willing to have tough conversations breaks you out of the status quo and allows you to keep growing, both as an individual and as an organization.
Pre-empting conflict
Often conflict is a positive dynamic where people with different expertise and perspectives can collaborate to make better decisions.
However, occasionally you get conflict where the quality of your work is in question. An example of this might be the CEO shredding your product roadmap because she doesn’t think you’ve done sufficient discovery.
Needless to say, this sort of conflict is bad for the company and bad for you personally, and you want to avoid it at all costs.
There are two key steps to this:
- Understanding expectations: what does prepared or good look like to this organization?
- Meeting these expectations: how can you present your work to meet or exceed those expectations?
Understanding expectations
Different organizations have different standards for decision making and approaches to how they communicate investments and sign off resources.
Especially when you are new in role, you want to understand how to communicate and make your case for decisions:
- What does good look like when it comes to decision inputs?
- How have decisions been made in the past?
- What level of evidence do stakeholders find convincing when they think about investing?
- What expectations do others have when you present a proposal?
Common requirements, especially for topics which require a formal decision making process, are impact modeling, direct customer feedback, quantitative analysis, and so on. There might also be topics around presentation of findings: in some organizations you might be expected to present short written proposals backed up by an evidence based business case.Amazon’s Working Backwards or PR FAQ process is a famous example of this.
Until you understand this well and move to meet those expectations, you’ll find yourself coming under critique.
Ask your manager and peers for as much context as possible until you understand the organization and can judge things yourself.
Meeting expectations
Once you understand the expectations around making proposals, being data-informed and decision making, then you need to meet or exceed them.
Senior leaders are particularly sensitive when they feel that thinking is not robust. That typically means that the proposed course of action doesn’t have a clear rationale or a strong enough evidence base.
There’s no shortcut to doing the work here, but you can check where you stand by:
- Trusting your gut on whether you think you’ve prepared well enough
- Comparing your level of prep to similar decisions that have been made
- Asking peers to review your work and give you feedback
- Being proactive and open about where you don’t have as much evidence as you’d like
- Positioning stakeholders as thought partners that can help you problem solve, not deciders who you need to convince
How to work through conflict to a decision
With the best preparation in the world, you can’t avoid conflict every time. Sometimes people have different views and priorities. This isn’t a bad thing.
Again, we’re not advocating for making decisions by consensus, but rather understanding varied fact bases and perspectives so you can make the best decisions possible.
Here’s an effective five step process to tackle conflict productively:
