How to manage conflict on your team when you’ve been avoiding it forever

Every year, U.S. companies lose $359 billion in productivity to conflict between employees. While healthy conflicts can boost innovation and creativity, left unchecked they can also impede collaboration, cut into productivity, and even harm employees’ mental and physical health.

Yet despite these costs, many leaders struggle to even talk about it. Especially in companies with cultures that prioritize “making nice,” avoiding conflict can become so normalized that managers and employees alike end up waiting far too long to acknowledge and address conflicts on their teams. As a result, solvable problems fester, minor disagreements boil over into major confrontations, and ultimately both employees and their organizations suffer.

The good news is, these conflict-avoidant cultures can change. Through my 30 years working as an executive and team coach for Fortune 500 companies and startups, I’ve identified four key strategies to help leaders overcome a tendency to avoid conflict, embrace healthy disagreement, and empower their teams to do the same:

1. Identify and prepare for likely points of conflict

While conflict may seem unpredictable, it can, in fact, be forecasted just like any other operational risk factor. As such, just as companies plan for new technology rollouts, industry shifts, or corporate reorganizations, so, too, can they identify events that are likely to spawn conflict—and plan ahead accordingly.

Common events that tend to spark conflict include technological advances that upend people’s roles and sense of value to the organization, promotions or succession plans that result in a former peer becoming a boss (and thus potentially sparking hidden resentments), or rapid team growth that muddies role breakdowns and leaves people with more responsibility than they’re able to manage.

When leaders identify these likely points of conflict, they can proactively organize open discussions with the employees and teams likely to be affected. In this way, rather than letting people be blindsided by conflict, leaders can ensure that teams are aware of potential issues and create space for people to air different opinions and discuss potential solutions before the conflict escalates.

For example, I worked with a midsize biopharma company that was planning a strategic shift toward launching more clinical studies while reducing its scientific discovery efforts. While this change was necessary for the company to grow, many of its employees were unfamiliar with the extensive resources required to ramp up clinical trials—a transition that was likely to substantially impact people’s work in ways many couldn’t understand or foresee.

With inflection points that involve likely misunderstandings, conflict easily erupts. By forecasting these sources of conflict, the organization was able to proactively educate the impacted teams on rebalancing scientific discovery and clinical efforts, resources, and priorities.

Leadership carved out time for a series of cross-functional meetings to help teams anticipate issues and discuss how they would work through them. Prioritization was discussed as a team, and employees were empowered to come up with solutions before problems even arose. As a result, instead of being surprised when conflicts emerged, the organization was able to act preemptively through well-planned and timely conversations.

2. Invite a neutral partner to unearth conflict

When employees disagree with their managers, understandably they may be reluctant to speak up, even if leadership explicitly asks them to. As a result, leaders are often the last ones to know when a conflict has been stewing. To address this, a neutral third party can serve as a helpful partner in unearthing conflicts and pushing people to share differing opinions.

Research has shown that teams often benefit when someone is assigned to be a “deviant,” or to make waves and push the group to explore new ideas. Inviting someone from outside the group—whether a trusted mentor, an employee from another team, or an external consultant—to explore potential sources of conflict can be a powerful way to ensure that people share the hidden issues they may be harboring.

I’ve seen this countless times in my own experience. In one case, I worked with a CFO who was convinced that the executive team needed to refocus on strategic priorities by reducing the number of meetings they held. No one seemed to push back on the idea, and she quickly initiated a meeting reduction plan. But as soon as the CFO left the room, the chief growth officer piped up with a strong disagreement. She felt that because the company was currently downsizing, it was especially important for the executive team to get “in the weeds,” and so she argued that cutting back on meetings was a risky move.

I immediately encouraged the growth officer to share her concern with the financial officer, and while the conversation between the executives started as a conflict, they were soon able to reach a compromise. Because I was an outsider, the CGO was willing to speak up in front of me, making it possible to bring a conflict to light that the CFO would otherwise have been completely unaware of.

3. Normalize experimentation

As teams and organizations evolve, norms around conflict and communication will inevitably have to evolve too. Rather than deciding on an approach to managing conflict and then never revisiting it again, effective leaders embrace the uncertainty of the modern business world by building cultures that normalize experimentation on an ongoing basis.

For instance, an informal standup meeting that helped a 10-person startup air its grievances may not be the best conflict management tool when it grows into a 200-person business. A brusque communication style that encourages open discussion in one context may falter when a company acquires a business with a less direct culture. To get ahead of new sources of conflict, it’s vital to put systems into place that ensure consistent experimentation with and evaluation of new approaches to conflict management.

Of course, this will look different in different organizations. I worked with one global pharmaceutical client that was struggling to adapt to rapid growth as the demand for a blockbuster drug skyrocketed. The HR team, skeptical about changing processes that had worked for decades, began to butt heads with legal, who preferred new processes and increasingly looked down on HR as less business savvy. Resentment and distrust quickly festered into heated conflict.

In my work with leaders, experiments began with cross-functional team interactions. Replacing monthly, hour-long meetings with two weekly, 15-minute check-ins dramatically improved communication between HR and legal. Leaders experimented with the practice of expressing one shared problem to initiate the meeting, then requesting team insights for solutions.

Soon cross-team engagement skyrocketed, tasks and handoffs no longer fell through the cracks. Through a willingness to experiment and iterate on established work practices, a worst-case conflict scenario was averted.

4. Make space for personal values

When we think about values at work, we often jump to company values: those verbose lists of corporate jargon that you might have listed on your website or plastered on the office wall. To be sure, these corporate values have a place. But when navigating conflict, it’s essential to make space for the diverse personal values that each individual brings to the table, rather than assuming that everyone shares a set of generic, company-approved ideals.

For instance, one team member may value challenging conventional wisdom and taking risks while another values safety and stability, which could result in conflicts over strategy development, execution, problem-solving, and decision-making.

More often than not, conflict erupts (and lingers over the long haul) when people’s deeply held personal values remain unspoken and, as a result, are inadvertently violated. These violations destroy trust, making people that much less likely to confront the issue and ultimately sparking a vicious cycle in which conflict lingers, goes unaddressed, and continues to grow.

To short-circuit this cycle, leaders must work to understand the personal values that underlie the conflicts on their teams. After all, it is our most deeply held beliefs that shape our actions and feelings, and so it is only by engaging with them that leaders can hope to resolve interpersonal conflicts.

While focusing on corporate values can sometimes feel like little more than a platitude or shallow condolence, exploring people’s personal values will both empower leaders to get to the heart of the matter and help them build trust and common ground, ultimately paving the way for more authentic and enduring resolutions.

For example, in my work with leadership teams, I always conduct a personal values exercise early on, revisiting the resulting assessment and insights throughout my work with the team. This crucial step surfaces values as leaders’ less visible motivators. These unspoken yet powerful influencers shape our expectations of others, drive important decisions, and dictate whether or not we are truly available to listen to differing points of view. This awareness helps leadership teams lean into helpful values, judge others less, appreciate each other more, and achieve better outcomes through intentional conversations.

Managing conflict is hard. It can be messy, frustrating, and uncomfortable. As such, it’s understandable that so many leaders try to avoid it. And yet, ignoring conflict doesn’t make it go away—it only makes it worse. By using the strategies above, leaders can build teams who understand conflict instead of fearing it, and who are prepared to acknowledge and address their disagreements head on.