Take It On Early—Before It Escalates

Google “conflict resolution” and more than 50,000,000 possibilities come up. There are mountains of books, blogs, seminars, and so on, about sources of conflict and how to resolve them. The thinking is that every leader needs a level of competency in conflict resolution because if more than one person is involved—conflict is inevitable. True? The answer is “yes, but….”

“Yes” is true when the conflict arises because of personalities, competition, or values. Leaders have to step in early and sometimes hard to resolve conflict before it escalates and causes damage to the organization.

The “but….” is true when conflict arises because of a disagreement about facts, perceptions, solutions, and so on. The leader’s job at that point is to resolve disagreement before it escalates to discord, which can lead to division, which can result in damage to the organization.

It is a lot easier to do disagreement control than damage control.

Here are a few questions that will help:

What are we actually disagreeing about?
What is the actual problem?
What are the true facts about the problem?
What are our different perceptions about the facts?
What do we need to do to come to agreement about the facts?
What are some solution options based on agreement about the facts?
What is the best solution?
What communication would have helped to resolve/prevent this?

Understanding the “what and why” of a disagreement will often keep it from escalating to discord in which careless, personal words often make resolution much harder.

I’m no Albert Einstein, but he once put it this way:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

Disagreement is easier to resolve then discord.

Discord is easier to resolve than division.

Division is easier to resolve than damage.

Okay leader, the sooner you take it on, the easier it will be!

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