The Importance and Benefits of Conflict Management

21 أغسطس 2024

Many managers fear disagreements. They believe they are negative, cause problems in the team, and hurt people's feelings. Many managers avoid disagreements altogether instead of feeling uncomfortable and having difficult conversations, which leads to tension. Still, avoiding disagreements causes problems. When you mishandle them, they will become more severe among your team members. This unhealthy disagreement is characterized by disrespect for team members, rejection of compromises, fear, and acting with anger and restraint.

But differences must be accepted to be able to manage them effectively. It is the key to effective communication between high-performing teams. When a manager understands how to manage differences, team members will not be afraid to disagree and challenge each other. They will work in a team spirit to find the best solutions and make significant decisions.

The ability to trust each other enough to conduct discussions and cooperate distinguishes effective conflict management and is the main feature of high-performing teams. So, in this article, we review the importance of sound conflict management in the organization, its benefits, and some tips on doing it better.

The Importance of Managing Conflicts in Your Organization:

Many managers believe disagreements are always negative, and their results will inevitably be bad. In other words, they believe disagreements are a feature of poor relations between team members. They are not entirely wrong, as disagreements can be negative, and mismanagement is unhealthy and is a warning sign of tension that must be addressed between team members. Still, the disagreements that the manager succeeds in managing to bring many benefits to the team.

Benefits of Effective Conflict Management:

Teams will not be able to communicate effectively unless they have productive disagreements, so the manager's goal should be to provide a work environment in which differences are well managed. Teams that trust each other are not afraid to participate in constructive dialogues on issues and decisions that lead to the organization's success.

When differences are managed effectively, team members see them as a tool for exchanging ideas and offering opinions. They are an effective form of communication, not just sterile arguments they fear. Team members are calm and do not get entrenched in their ideas when they discuss them. They want to seek to absorb and overcome the issue at hand to reach an appropriate solution.

Good conflict management brings many benefits to your organization, including:

Enhance team performance, productivity, energy, and engagement.
Improve the leadership of the entire team.
Increase innovation and creativity.
Promote trust and communication among team members.
High rates of employee retention.
Reduced employee fatigue and absenteeism.
Promote communication and collaboration in the workplace.

Now that you understand the benefits of good conflict management, you need to know how to improve your skills in it. So, here are some effective methods to help you with that.

Strategies for Better Managing Disputes:

When accepting disagreements and learning how to manage them properly, managers must understand how they work. They start from the stage of fabricating harmony, which becomes the office's policy, and a kind of gossip, which turns into sharp disagreements, leading to the destruction of the organization.

People fabricate harmony when they appear to communicate, but in reality, they do not communicate and understand each other. They save face, behave politely in front of each other, and then spread gossip in secret.

This is not the level at which your team should operate. The team's maximum potential cannot be achieved in an environment where people fear that they will encroach on one another. Honesty has no place in such a toxic environment, and no real innovative work can be achieved.

On the other hand, destructive disagreements resulting from personal attacks on their colleagues and lack of respect must also be avoided. This type of disagreement creates a toxic environment that lacks productivity, motivation, and employee participation. To avoid the negative end of these unhealthy disagreements, many managers avoid dealing with them altogether and end up creating harmony.

Managers should manage disagreements in a way that makes their team members communicate. You and your team will find the synergy you need to reach high levels of innovation and productivity. Managers should encourage discussions and dialogues about ideas and issues to reach this stage of communication, such as asking for feedback from team members and encouraging them to express their ideas and opinions on different topics.

Here are some strategies to effectively manage conflicts and reach the stage of communication:

1. Understand your team's mindset:

Most often, negative disagreements arise from misunderstandings and contradictions between different people's personalities. When you understand the differences in your team's personalities, you can better manage their reactions and emotions to resolve the disagreements or prevent them from becoming toxic.

The best way to understand characters is through the Disk Tool (disc), an acronym in the English language whose initials are:

The dominant personality (Dominant).
Influential Personality (Influential).
Stable personality (Steady).
Conscious Personality (Conscientious).

It is a common personality assessment that helps to firmly understand individuals' known patterns of behaviors and emotions. It will help you identify the characteristics of each personality style, including your personality traits. It will also help you and your team members change how you communicate to meet the needs of other team members. This will enable you to understand what individuals need based on their personalities to successfully manage conflicts because you will prove to your team members that their voices and feelings are respected. Adapting to different personalities is another strategy to promote conflict management.

2. Adapting to team personalities:

The ability to adapt to the different personalities of team members is a characteristic of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to identify and manage the emotions and feelings of others around you. Understanding the emotional reactions of others enables you to manage emotional responses. Emotional intelligence also allows you to see and accept the views and opinions of others.

Managing conflict well is key to managing emotional responses so that others don't get out of control and being able to check other people's feelings.

3. Introduce coaching to your team on how to better collaborate:

As a manager, your role is not only leadership, but it also includes coaching. Giving your team members guidance on working together can be very helpful. Some team members may need to be more assertive, while others should be more cooperative. You should identify areas where team members can improve and help them achieve this.

As you introduce coaching to your team members, it is also important to encourage them to share their feedback and ideas. You can take the role of a mediator in these early stages, and eventually, the team members will gain better habits in dealing with conflicts, which allows them to manage them smoothly on their own without referring to you.

These three conflict management techniques will help you reap the benefits of being well-managed.