Destructive conflict shows up in many settings: national hostilities, political or ideological disagreements, social media rants and comments, popular television shows encouraging tension, family disputes, and organizational disagreements. A Stanford survey of CEOs found that nearly 43 percent of CEOs rated “conflict management skills” as the biggest need in their job. And a CEO Benchmarking Report from the Predictive Index found that 36 percent of CEOs say that their number one challenge is dealing with interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. Fifty-eight percent of CEOs reported mediating interpersonal conflicts among team members at least once a month.
 

Destructive conflict in organizations can lead to a hostile, dysfunctional, and unproductive work environment. Such work environments are far too common and negatively impact mental health, retention, productivity, culture, and business results. To overcome these challenges, business and HR leaders need to sharpen their peacemaking skills. Peacemaking business and HR leaders turn destructive, polarizing conflicts into innovative, constructive, and collaborative discussions.

So, how do the best leaders become peacemakers? They keep the right mindset about conflict and turn the most destructive conflicts into collaboration.

Mindset

1. All organizations have conflict. Leaders need to embrace that conflict is normal, healthy, and a fact of life. Successful organizations do not lack conflict; rather, how leaders manage conflict affects the organization’s ability to successfully deliver results. When conflict arises, peacemaking leaders recognize a team’s struggle to collaboratively solve problems. They then give the team tools to navigate their differences and find innovative solutions.

2. Great leaders don’t avoid conflict; they step into it. Transforming conflict into collaboration should be a priority for any business leader, particularly HR leaders, who should model peacemaking and design and deliver HR practices that institutionalize it. Of the five major styles for handling conflict (avoid, accommodate, compete, compromise, and collaborate), we’ve found that the predominant style is avoidance. When leaders avoid conflict, it festers, and leaders signal to managers and employees that conflict is scary or problematic. When a conflict can no longer be avoided, leaders resort to accommodating (if leaders desire to be loved) or competing (if leaders prioritize being right).

Neither of those is ideal, either. The best leaders see conflict as an opportunity to engage, listen, take in new ideas, and wrestle with problems until they find solutions that work for everyone (collaborate). They see conflict as an opportunity to grow and innovate, not as a flaw or something to be avoided.

Want to know your conflict style? You can take a test here.

Peacemaking Skills

1. Prioritize relationships. People make up organizations. And people thrive or wither depending on the health and strength of their relationships. But unfortunately, relationships are at the root of most organizational conflicts. Organizational leadership guru Jim Ferrell has worked with Withiii to show that when we approach conflict as a relational problem and not just an individual or structural problem, the quicker and more easily we get to the root of conflicts and break down barriers to collaboration.

Strong relationships revolve around respecting differences, sharing information, working together harmoniously, and making collaborative decisions. And those relationships start at the top. If your relationships are fractured, you must start there.

2. Listen to learn. Conflict often turns destructive because we make assumptions about those we disagree with. Often, we assume people resist us, instead of our ideas, and we attach bad motives. When we do this, we falsely see others and invite the very situation we assumed: they resist us and not just our ideas. When people disagree, ask questions. Lots of them. Seek to go deeper. Listen to others’ positions and then find out the why beneath them. Why are they interested in pursuing a different path? What values are informing their position? How do they define these values or pursue them? What sort of cultural and religious worldviews might be affecting how they see the issue or the conflict? What needs are they concerned about fulfilling? Figure 1 illustrates the levels we can explore to better understand others, leading to solutions that work for everyone.
3. Don’t call others out—call them in. If someone in the organization has engaged in bad behavior, we may be tempted to either ignore it (avoid) or crush the person. Do neither. Calling them out damages a relationship. But calling them in for a conversation invites people to be accountable for their actions by reaffirming that their actions affect everyone in the organization. Lorretta Ross writes:
 

4. Invite reconciliation. There’s a tendency for leaders to want to settle conflict as quickly as possible by agreeing on a solution and moving on without addressing the underlying relational issues. We do so at our own peril. We might temporarily “solve” a problem only to have it resurface again and again. Problem solving isn’t really problem solving without reconciliation. Conflict mediator Donna Hicks (in her outstanding book, Leading with Dignity) writes:
 
When people don’t feel seen, listened to, or treated fairly, the quickest way to reconcile this is to give them the very thing they feel deprived of. When we ensure that during conflict employees feel recognized, understood, and safe, we improve mental health, retention, culture, productivity, and business performance.

5. Lead by example. Leaders are just that: leaders. If you haven’t been listening, start listening. If you’ve offended someone, apologize. If you’ve made a mistake, own it. If you turned a disagreement into a personal attack, call yourself in and reframe it. Leaders set the culture for their organization. How leaders handle mistakes, disagreements, and conflict will set the tenor for an entire organization. In fact, leaders should ideally be practicing these principles consistently for three months before teaching them to managers and employees.

When leaders model peacemaking by managing conflict, others will learn from their example. Then, when it comes time to teach or create a new culture, employees will follow because they’ve seen it working. Ideally, HR professionals model peacemaking, coach others, and design HR practices that institutionalize peacemaking.

In a world and organizations with too much toxicity, polarization, and hostility, changing the mindset about and mastering the skills of conflict resolution helps HR and business leaders become peacemakers.

Resources

• Chad’s weekly newsletter, The Waymaker
• Books: Dangerous Love and Seventy Times Seven.

Author Bio

	Chad Ford is an Associate Professor at Utah State University and the Heravi Peace Institute.
	Dave Ulrich is Rensis Likert Emeritus Professor, Ross School of Business, at the University of Michigan and Partner, The RBL Group.

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