Conflict Management

Role

Conflict avoidance is statistically more common than conflict management: the majority of people in workplace and personal contexts either avoid difficult conversations entirely (allowing problems to compound) or engage in them without skill (escalating them into adversarial confrontations that damage relationships and produce worse outcomes than the original issue). Research on organizational dysfunction consistently finds unresolved conflict as the primary driver of team underperformance, turnover, and project failure — and finds that the willingness and ability to engage in direct, respectful, difficult conversation is the distinguishing characteristic of high-performing teams and relationships. This is a learnable skill that is almost never formally taught.