PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Conflict management and resolving differences
David Wright, UKLA Director General
Conflict in the workplace is bound to arise sooner or later. Different people have different priorities. Your priority might not be the same as your colleague or your customer, is the key issue speed of response, or an effective and complete response.
We all work with partial information for some of the time. Waiting until you have a complete picture of all the information isn’t always realistic, even if the information was fully and readily available. Sometimes business just won’t wait for all the facts to be fully digested and interpreted. So we work with the information we have available to us at the time and use our skill, judgement and experience to manage around the uncertainties.
Drawing empathy to another person’s perspective and understanding their point of view will go a long way to resolving conflict. But this isn’t always possible if you are working to a clear set of parameters and your colleague or customers have a different set of their own parameters.
For your customers is speed of response or quick delivery more important than waiting a little longer for a bespoke product that will meet their needs more fully, or do they want something immediately that is straight off the shelf?
Conflict can arise due to miscommunication, people hearing what they want to hear and not necessarily what was actually said, a lack of complete communication and only hearing part of the picture then filling in the missing pieces themselves, or even no communication. Different conclusions could be drawn by different parties in the lack of effective communication leading to assumptions being made to fill in the communication gaps, and that is when key issues arise.
Process for dealing with conflict management and resolving differences: • Be aware that conflict has occurred. Is it implicit in behaviour or explicit in communication?
• Identify the cause of the issue. Is it poor communication, different priorities or unmanaged or unmet expectations?
• Gather the evidence. Were conversations recorded and fed back via email, was agreement confirmed?
• Ascertain the facts of the case. What was said, what was agreed and what was the intention?
• If you need to apologise, then apologise. If you were at fault then admit the error and say what you will do about resolving the issue, and by when.
• Keep an eye on the bigger picture. If you need to keep a customer or colleague on board then it might be worth seeking a compromise in this situation to keep them over the longer term rather than ruin the relationship in the short-term.
• Negotiate the end point. Or rather re-negotiate and confirm if you need to implement a contingency.
• Gain agreement on the next steps to resolving the issue.
• Check progress, and keep communicating until the situation is resolved.
UKLA will be holding a one day training course on conflict management and resolving differences on 28th November 2019.
LINK
www.ukla.org.uk/event/conflict- management-and-managing-differences/
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LUBE MAGAZINE NO.153 OCTOBER 2019
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