The Positive Role of Conflict in Workplace Culture

What does a vibrant, innovative and high-performing workplace culture look like through the lens of the employee? A factor that consistently rises to the top in research and in practice is this: an individual’s sense of being heard, appreciated, and contributing constructively to something important. Employees want to feel that their work means something and their ideas matter. They want to feel they are being respected by their peers, their superiors and the leadership of the company. They feel inspired by an environment in which teams are working together to achieve common goals.

Let’s look at its opposite – a workplace environment where:

  • individuals or teams do not feel encouraged to speak up and share ideas.
  • management is not transparent and mistrust prevails.
  • an undercurrent of disrespect, bullying or harassment runs through the organization.

The results are just what you would expect: disengaged employees, low productivity, high sick days and turnover, and stagnant growth. This workplace culture is plagued byunmanaged conflict.”

Unmanaged conflict almost always results in negative outcomes that can be measured in dollars. We often introduce leaders of teams to our Cost of Conflict Calculator™, a handy (and free) online tool which uses real data collected from the team conflict experience and ties it together with industry estimates of data such as average wages, turnover costs, absenteeism, etc. The results are an estimate which, in most cases, shows enough evidence to provide proof of a need to change.

The systems and skill sets used to mitigate situations of unmanaged, negative conflicts also can work to create the foundation of healthy interpersonal relationships which underpin a strong workplace culture.

What is conflict?

Conflict naturally occurs when two or more people have divergent ideas, needs and wants – which one could say is almost always! Conflict is normal, inevitable, every organization experiences it, and it is in fact a necessary part of teamwork and innovation. When conflict is harnessed and managed (known as constructive conflict), it becomes a powerful tool for nurturing a workplace that encourages creative ideas, active and inspired participation, and open and respectful communication.

Harnessing the power of conflict is a proactive approach which boosts employee satisfaction, engagement and performance in these important ways:

  • Encourages open communication and innovation by establishing systematic rules of respectful discourse
  • Optimizes team dynamics to move collaboratively on effectively solving problems and making decisions
  • Ensures transparency and trust among peers, as well as up and down the organizational ladder
  • Deflects potential negative conflicts before they become larger issues that poison a healthy workplace culture
  • Invites fresh and holistic approaches that keep the organization nimble, cutting edge, relevant and growing

How to make conflict a positive partner in your workplace

Understanding the importance of making conflict a positive partner in your business is the first step. Crucial to success are these guiding principles and values to be accepted and incorporated into organization-wide behaviors:

  • Trust
  • Transparency
  • Respect for differences and other points of view
  • Safety – an environment that makes it safe for dissent and open opinion
  • System to proactively welcome and capture ideas
  • Training, practice and support in team-building, problem-solving, respectful discourse, conflict management

1. Shift the leadership mindset. Leadership sets the tone for the entire organization to embrace the concept of constructive conflict in a sustainable way. Rather than seeing conflict as something to be managed to reduce disagreements, understand conflict as the powerful business tool it can be. Owning the concept in the C-suite is key for constructive conflict to work, as it engenders the guiding principles listed above on a systemic level, from the top to the trenches.

2. Identify the systemic issues that are causing destructive conflict. Too commonly, leadership institutes a stop-gap policy to solve the problem at hand. However, behind most disputes is something deeper – a system, policy or workplace cultural norm – that hasn’t been addressed. So destructive conflict rears its ugly head over and over again.

3. Institutionalize mechanisms for managing conflict. Embed the attitude of constructive conflict into your organization’s everyday work life. Create the systems to support conflict competency throughout the organization:

  • Train the leadership team and managers how to anticipate and engage conflict for positive outcomes.
  • Establish clear rules of engagement on a company policy level.
  • Nurture teamwork, mutual trust, open communications and creative input.
  • Ensure that management is “walking the talk” to provide a positive model to employees through ongoing training and regular check-ins.

4. Implement a plan for workplace teams to:

  • Address disputes and disagreements before they become problems. Open, honest communication often uncovers these differences in a healthy way which can be diffused, often just interpersonally or within the team.
  • Encourage a healthy exchange of ideas and needs, within a respectful – and safe – environment. Don’t squelch the capacity to contribute! This is where the talent you hired truly shines in expertise and innovation.
  • Empower individuals with skills such as meeting etiquette, giving and getting feedback, trusting and respecting others, and quality problem solving. Behavioral change does not happen overnight, nor will everyone be on the same page at the same time. Rules, boundaries, agreements, and accountability for each, will guide the behavior in a responsible direction.

Through the power of constructive conflict, an organizational culture of engaged, passionate, purposeful, loyal and connected employees can be sustained in ways that are measurable in profits and immeasurable in quality of contribution to the greater whole.

The Key to Boosting Employee Engagement

It’s Not What You Think…

The Key to Boosting Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a hot topic in business these days, and for good reason. To put the issue into stark perspective, here are two statistics for you: 70% of U.S. workers have been found to be either not engaged or actively disengaged at work (Source: Gallup “State of the American Workplace” 2014 report); and increasing employee engagement investments by 10% can increase profits by $2,400 per employee, per year (Source: Workplace Research Foundation). Corporate learning researcher and advisor, Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte, notes that “engagement has not gone up for the last 20 or 30 years.”

It Goes Much Deeper

What is the key to increased employee engagement? Higher compensation, company outings, and better food in the cafeteria help, but achieving sustainable success goes much deeper than this. For us, conflict advisors who work with individuals, leaders, and teams on-site in all kinds of organizations, what consistently rises to the top is this factor: an individual’s sense of being heard, appreciated, and contributing constructively to something important. Employees want to feel that their work means something and their ideas matter. They want to feel they are being respected by their peers, their superiors and the leadership of the company. They feel inspired by an environment in which teams are working together to achieve common goals. Richard Branson puts it this way: “A company is people … employees want to know… am I being listened to or am I a cog in the wheel? People really need to feel wanted.”

“The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers.”
-Sybil F. Stershic

To understand what an engaged, productive workplace looks like, let’s look at its opposite:  a place where individuals or teams do not feel encouraged to speak up and share ideas; where management is not transparent and mistrust prevails; where an undercurrent of disrespect, bullying or harassment festers. We see this in dysfunctional client situations and it’s called unmanaged conflict. The results are just what you would expect – disengaged employees, low productivity, high sick days and turnover, and stagnant growth.

Embracing Constructive Conflict

Conflict naturally occurs when two or more people get together, so the problem is not conflict per se. In fact, the key to lasting employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity? Constructive conflict!  When you make conflict a positive partner in your business, you not only head off the kind of conflict I just described, but you nurture a workplace that encourages creative ideas, active and inspired participation, and open and respectful communication. Create and encourage these cultural norms and you’ll be head and heels above most workplace environments.

The tools and skill sets used to mitigate situations of disputes and negative conflicts also can work to create the foundation of healthy interpersonal relationships, the underpinnings of an engaging, positive and productive work environment. ‘Harnessing the power of conflict’ is a proactive approach that boosts employee engagement in these important ways:

  • Encourages open communication and innovation by establishing the rules of respectful discourse
  • Optimizes team dynamics to move collaboratively toward achieving common goals
  • Ensures transparency and trust among peers, as well as up and down the organizational ladder
  • Deflects potential negative conflicts before they become larger issues that poison a healthy work culture
  • Supports management with research-based tools and training

“Constructive differing is productive—out and out conflict is not.”

Understanding the importance of making conflict a positive partner in your business is the first step toward boosting employee engagement. One very productive next step is to assess how your workplace team and employees are doing on the positivity/productivity scale. The Team DiagnosticTM is a convenient online diagnostic tool you can use to show how your team compares to a proven model of team effectiveness, through factors that optimize productivity and factors that optimize positivity.

Addressing and improving workplace engagement and culture issues is challenging work, but profound outcomes are possible when shared learning and mutual experiences are nurtured and appreciated.

How have you used Constructive Conflict and what were your outcomes? I welcome your comments on social media.

Adapted and reprinted with permission from resologics.com.

Culture & Conflict: Keys to a Smoother Organizational Change Effort

Seasoned leaders know that the road to a successful change management process is not always a smooth one. Strategy, structure, tech, resources, and capacity all may be in place and positioned for an effective effort. However, what are often missed are factors that can be crucial to success and that can blindside the unwary leader. In two words: Culture and Conflict.

Conflict is an inevitable part of change

Conflict is a natural aspect of any change process, and well-managed constructive conflict will in fact accelerate and enhance success. In my experience working with clients who are leading a change effort, unmanaged conflict can create a ‘speed bump’ that can slow the process to a near stop—and leave long-term damage in its wake. As we delve into the issues our clients are having, we often discover that the roots of the conflict and the negative, conflict-causing system are found deep in their organizational culture.

Conflict-engagement deficiencies in an organizational culture can become a major roadblock to forward movement. Here are three examples in our line of work:

State and City Police

In the US, a very visible example of a change process in progress is that undertaken by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, put forward by the President’s administration in 2015 and now being acted upon by the US Department of Justice.1 It has run headlong into a number of systemic conflict issues that are slowing down the change, evidenced by actions seen between a variety of police departments across the country and the communities they serve.

Changing a culture on such a grand scale is an enormous task. And, dealing with the inherent conflicts involved is no simple task. It’s easy to get lost in the issues that surround this change and confuse whether they are cultural or conflict issues, or perhaps something else. Examples include gun control, proper training, excessive use of force, prosecution of officers, oversight issues, racism, profiling techniques, and body cameras, and the list goes on. The 21st Century Policing Final Report does a good job addressing how change can happen, outlines steps to get there, and takes at least some of the confusion out of how conflict can be addressed in the long term. Implementation can’t come fast enough.

Merger & Acquisition

A somewhat simpler example is the recent international merger of two organizations whose leaders didn’t anticipate the conflict dimension of the change they would go through in bringing together the two teams. Eighteen months into the merger—after successfully melding complex products, finance methodology, branding messages, site locations, and a whole business’s worth of other areas—they discovered that they had never developed a solid way to talk about what matters most to them. Conflict had never been normalized, anticipated, and—dare I say—embraced. They found themselves in a situation where they had no normal process in place to discuss difficult issues, and members of the leadership team had come to the point of losing trust in one another. Interpersonal crisis management had become the norm.

Good people were lost. Lots and lots of money was wasted. Called in late to this situation, our work continues here, supporting them in creating a culture that embraces difficult conversations early and is conflict-competent in every way possible.

Organizational culture is often long-standing, entrenched, undocumented, hard to explain and, for those in the middle of it all, difficult to see.

Hyper-growth

What I consider a terrific example of conflict, culture, and change merging in a perfect dance involves an organization we have been working with for about two years. They are a tech company emerging from a small team of about 30 to an anticipated team of about 100 over the next year. The change is in scaling and, in particular, in the management structure changes needed to get to that scale.

This team has in place a number of things we believe will help members thrive through this change: they are aware that they are in a period of change and that their culture is important to them; they measure culture and conflict capacities; they train for, engage in, and use conflict to their advantage; they act early on conflicts headed for negative outcomes; each and every person in the organization has a coach; and they deploy our contract Ombuds services to help everyone see conflict as a normal, positive part of the culture. In this case, the change process is being accelerated, rather than delayed, by conflict. When fully developed conflict engagement is in motion, it is a beautiful thing to be a part of.

Why assess your organizational culture?

Organizational culture is often long-standing, entrenched, undocumented, hard to explain and, for those in the middle of it all, difficult to see. These natural blinders present a challenge to even the most clear-eyed leader. This is when an objective, data-driven assessment is highly useful.

Here’s how an assessment can smooth the way for your change effort:

  • You gain a visual profile of your operating culture in terms of behavioral norms. These shared expectations have a significant impact on your organization’s ability to solve problems, adapt to change, and perform effectively.
  • When you see your organization’s values “come to life,” you are better equipped to identify the sources of conflict and pinpoint the barriers to engagement and healthy communication.
  • You’re put in the driver’s seat to develop strategies for building a high-performance culture, and to benchmark and monitor the changes over time.
  • You’re not “guessing” anymore. Assessment tools are not simply anecdotal, but rather are rigorously researched and tested. Also key is for these assessments to be analyzed and interpreted by an outside, impartial expert.

Your best assurance of success in your change effort is to head off conflict speed bumps by assessing your organizational culture early on in your process. We use Human Synergistics’ Organizational Culture Inventory® (OCI®), a reliable and validated survey,2 to help our clients understand the nature of their current culture and identify the kind of culture they want to create. Regardless of your choice of assessments, not only will this smooth the way, but it also will help to sustain the outcome you’ve set out to achieve.

As a conflict advisor, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing a client come out on the other side of a change effort with a stronger organizational culture that engages its workforce, welcomes healthy, safe communication and creative conflict, and ignites innovation for continued growth.

Some parting thoughts

Where does conflict fit into your organization’s culture? How comfortable are you working with conflict in your team? What steps can you take to increase your level of comfort?

I welcome your comments and ideas via social media. All my best to you and your team.

 

Notes: 
1 Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, May 2015, Washington, DC, Retrieved from http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/TaskForce_FinalReport.pdf

2 Cooke, R.A. & Szumal, J.L. (2000). Using the Organizational Culture Inventory to understand the operating cultures of organizations. In Ashkanasy, N.M., Wilderom, C.P.M., & Peterson, M.F. (Eds.), Handbook of organizational culture and climate. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.