Conflict is a reality of life and particularly of a leaders role in a business. Dealing with conflict in ways that turn it to a positive outcome is another post for another time.
When conflict within an organization is handled poorly (as it often is), it wastes time, impacts the quality of decisions, demotivates people, can impact safety and health, and cause other bad things to happen. Minimizing conflicts in organizations is the best starting point. Get good at this and the need to deal with conflict is greatly minimized.
These six leadership actions create an environment that reduces conflict:
- Involve employees in decisions that affect them, particularly when organizational change is happening.
- Use a good team chartering process to clarify roles and reduce the related ambiguity between who is accountable for what and the authority to accompany that accountability.
- Focus on consistent, accurate communication that makes access to information easy and has an awareness for emerging conflict.
- Standardize the best process for dealing with conflicts to produce positive outcomes.
- Acknowledge and reward teams for accomplishment and positive engagement.
- Eliminate extremes such as overload, underload, and inconsistent direction.
If your organization is plagued by interpersonal conflict and is disrupting your day-to-day operations, it’s your responsibility as a leader to initiate a change. Give me a call and let’s see if I can help.
Image source www.flickr.com, labelled for reuse
