Being Good At Conflict Is The Hot New Work Skill

But while the majority of people run from heated conversations, Tim Duggan leans in. The author and co-founder of Junkee Media says now that conflict is a fixture of modern life, ignoring it is no longer an option. Particularly, in the office.

“Conflict is the most important skill that we’re going to need for the future,” he declares. But he adds: “It is the skill in the workplace that we are the worst at.”

In researching his book, Clear In Tension, he’s learned that conflict can be harnessed for good, and can drive business growth if done well. “It’s actually a process, it’s a skill, it’s a muscle,” he says. “We can practice it, and the only way to get better at conflict is by actually embracing it.”

Conflict In The Workplace Isn’t Always A Bad Sign

Duggan defines conflict as two opposing ideas coming together and meeting in the middle, whether it’s as fight, an argument or run-of-the-mill disagreement. Having grown up in a conflict-avoidant household, he felt unprepared when encountered it at work.

“For 15 years, I ran a small to medium-sized business with some of my friends, and we built up to about 60-70 full-time staff, and we had a lot of conflict,” he recalls. “We had conflict intra-department. We had conflict between co-founders. We had conflict between us and clients. It was like most small to medium-sized businesses. Conflict was everywhere you looked.”

Like many SME owners, he had no formal leadership training and defaulted to pursuing harmony. “I thought that the point of conflict was to try and get a win-win where everyone had this compromise,” he says. But he eventually realised that didn’t work and made ‘getting better’ at conflict his personal and professional mission.

Over three years, he met negotiation experts from Oxford University and conflict navigation gurus Amy Gallo and Esther Perel, and even qualified as a nationally-accredited mediator. The experience confirmed conflict can have upsides and mustn’t always be resolved. “It’s about disassociating that solely negative view of conflict, and viewing it as having both healthy and productive elements, as well as unhealthy and destructive elements. Not just automatically assuming that all conflict is bad,” he says.

Some Generations Avoid Tension More Than Others

Duggan says it’s no surprise 80 per cent of the population will avoid conflict if given the chance. “Most people are ill-equipped to deal with conflict. Most of us haven’t had training. Most workplaces don’t elevate the topic of conflict as being something that is of a primary need.”

And yet, it’s a crucial skill, he argues, in a multi-generational workforce. “Every generation does approach conflict differently,” he explains. “Generally speaking, the younger you are, the more averse you are to conflict, and the older you get, the more comfortable you get with it.”

He doesn’t blame young people for shying away from conflict, since society has conspired against them by providing fewer opportunities to practice. Instead of interacting with someone in a restaurant, food is home-delivered or ordered through QR codes. Couples can break up via text message rather than in person. AI can write an apology email without enduring the awkward thought process.

“All of these things are taking away some of those uncomfortable, hard-friction moments in our life, and it might sound good to take them away, but taking away friction everywhere means we’re less equipped to deal with it when it does come up in everyday life,” he points out.

Too Much Agreement Can Be Bad For Business

Instead of striving for harmony in the workplace, Duggan advocates for the right type of tension. “It’s a terrible sign if there’s no conflict,” he argues. “There is always conflict whether it’s spoken about or not. And when you are not speaking about it, when you’re trying to pretend like everything’s fine, that is a real potential for a toxic work environment.”

Duggan says some leaders avoid conflict in an attempt to comply with workplace safety laws governing psychosocial hazards. But this overlooks the fact that conflict needn’t involve emotion. “It doesn’t need to be about arguing with somebody and saying you’re right and I’m wrong. Conflict can be about discussing and debating ideas. It can be about negotiating. It can be about compromise. All of these things are different elements of conflict, and any small business that doesn’t have conflict is a bad small business,” he says.

He describes conflict and negotiation as two sides of the same coin. “The same principles for negotiation – things like separating what someone is saying, which are their positions, from what they mean, which is their interests – that’s exactly the same as a conflict. In a conflict, you need to understand not only what someone says on the surface, but why they’re saying it underneath,” he explains.

Duggan says managing conflict well is important in any organisation but handling it badly is more noticeable in an SME. “There is less room to hide in small businesses. You have to work alongside these people. You can’t just go to the office and hide on a different level than everyone else if you’re in conflict with somebody,” he points out.

Clear Structure Is Essential To Handling Conflict Well

As with any workplace skill, Duggan says managing conflict is easier when there is a process to follow, rather than winging it each time. He’s developed a five-step process so that employers and employees have a structure to fall back on when the ’emotional hijacking’ of increased heart rate, sweaty palms and irrational thoughts occurs.

Using the acronym CLEAR, the first step is to clarify what matters. This means pausing to think, before tension mounts, about where the conflict sits and what is important. The second step is to listen generously, which some people find harder than others. “That involves sometimes shutting up,” he says, “and if you’re a small business owner, not speaking or asking questions to encourage someone to speak, so you can actually understand what the conflict is about.”

Step three requires people to explore what’s underneath and determine the real reason the opposing party feels so strongly. This means separating what someone says from what they mean. The fourth step is where progress becomes evident, as people align to find shared elements of the debate upon which both sides can agree.

The final step is to end the conflict by resetting one’s story. This can be done in three ways: resolving it; repeating it, by performing some of the steps again; or releasing tension. Duggan says as people become consistently better at handling conflict, trust develops, which is crucial to business growth and a strong team culture.

“Someone says, ‘I’ve got an idea,’ and someone else says, ‘Yeah, I reckon I can make that idea better by doing this,’ and someone says, ‘I don’t know if that’s right. How about this?’ And you argue back and forth. That is where innovation and creativity and new ideas and spark and energy all come from,” he explains. “That is why healthy conflict in the workplace can actually be the best thing for it.”