HR professionals, executives, and business owners alike want to find the secret sauce of conflict resolution – one thing they can do that will make their team get along and collaborate better. Conflict is a part of every workspace – in fact, every relationship. Solving that conflict takes more than just adopting a policy. It requires dealing with your employees as people and helping them participate in the process of resolving their disputes.

This is the final post in a four-part blog series on conflict resolution in business and what to do about it. In Conflict Resolution in Business Isn’t What You Think, we addressed common misconceptions about conflict resolution in business. In The Acceptance of Conflict in Business, we considered the upside of conflict in the workplace as a catalyst for improvement. Then in How Revealing Oneself Becomes Easier, we addressed how developing a vulnerability-based trust can help teams resolve conflict.

Conflict Resolution is an Interpersonal Process

Conflict resolution isn’t a policy or a procedure. It is an interpersonal process between two or more ordinary people. When coworkers come into conflict, they can feel upset, angry, scared, and defensive. This can make it hard for your team members to communicate, let alone solve the problem.


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This is where a conflict resolution facilitator can step into help. Conflict resolution depends on the participants having established a trusting relationship with. A facilitator meets with each individual involved in the conflict individually to develop that trusting relationship. Then, with that trust established, he meets with them together, applying the secret sauce of conflict resolution to get to the heart of the conflict and move the parties toward resolution.

The Secret Sauce of Conflict Resolution is Getting to the Root Causes

In the individual meetings, the facilitator talks to each participant, and more importantly, he listens. The secret sauce of conflict resolution is understanding the root causes of the difficulty and hard feelings. That requires giving each participants the space to express their feelings.  The facilitator will get them to open up and talk about what has happened that offended them, insulted them, or made them angry. That requires a lot of questions, a lot of listening.

Anger is a top-level surface reaction. In most cases, that emotion is covering other things. But those deeper things can only be uncovered once those surface feelings have been expressed and received by someone able to hear them and empathize with them. Only then can the participants reveal the root causes for why they are having difficulty getting along, and their own contributions to the conflict. In other words, it is not what another employee is doing to the participant, but instead, how the participant is reacting to what they feel is happening between them and their coworker.

For example, if Joe feels like Kayla is giving him the silent treatment, he may interpret her silence as saying Joe is not worth talking to. But what if Kayla is actually scared in interpersonal relationships and holds back? By understanding that root cause – Kayla’s insecurity – along with what made Joe interpret that silence as judgment, Joe and Kayla can start to improve their interpersonal communication and work better together.  Often, it is only by recognizing their own contribution to the conflict – in this case the interpretation of Kayla’s silence – that an employee can begin to participate in conflict resolution.

Helping Coworkers to Participate in Conflict Resolution

It is very hard to get to the root causes of one’s own emotions. There are all kinds of strategies that employees use to address conflict on their own – some more effective than others. But the biggest, most effective strategy is conflict resolution. This often requires the employees to participate in dissipating the tension and bringing an end to the dispute.

To do that, they will generally need an independent and objective listener to help them break down their defenses and see themselves more clearly. Working with a facilitator will help the employees break down the strong connections between their emotions and the root causes of the conflict. Only then will they be able to identify their own contributions to the conflict and find a successful conflict resolution strategy.


David Stanislaw is leadership and executive coach with over 30 years’ experience helping managers and leaders manage teams effectively and resolve workplace conflictContact us to meet with David and bring on a thought partner for your business goals today.