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Megan Leatherman, a human resources consultant in Portland, Oregon, joins the HR for Small Business podcast to discuss conflict management in the workplace. In the episode, Megan gives examples for how conflicts start and how to identify it, and she also shares tips on how best to manage conflict.
Resources
Email Megan Leatherman at megan.leatherman@gmail.com
Conscious Communication by Miles Sherts
Staying With Conflict by Bernard Mayer
Brandon: Welcome everybody! This is Brandon Laws and this is the HR for Small Business podcast. I am with Megan Leatherman today, she is an HR consultant in Portland, Oregon and graduated with a Master’s in Conflict and Dispute Resolution from the University of Oregon. Welcome, Megan!
Megan: Hi Brandon, thank you for having me.
Brandon: So you’re an expert in conflict resolution and that is our topic. Could you describe some examples of conflicts that come up in the workplace?
Megan: Yeah, there are a couple different levels of conflicts that can come up in the workplace. One of course is the sort of supervisor-employee conflicts about, say, communication or expectations for the job. There are peer-to-peer conflicts, coworkers who maybe have confusion around who’s responsible for doing what or if an employee is promoted ahead of another. There are more serious conflicts related, say, to discrimination or harassment. And then there are organization-wide conflicts that can be related to a company’s transition or growth or changes happening at a higher level. So there are a couple different examples I can think of, but those are some.
Brandon: Why don’t we pull the thread on that. You mentioned a few reasons why conflicts actually start, but it sounds like from a supervisor to an employee or peer-to-peer the amount of conflicts and the reasons why would be pretty vast. Maybe give some examples of ones you’ve ran across in the last few years.
Megan: Yeah, I can think of a few different sources of conflict. One is about resources, so these are tangible things like your pay rate, office space, or your benefits package. There are conflicts related to relationships, which is what most of us think about when we hear the word “conflict.” That’s the kind of interpersonal tension that comes up. There are conflicts related to processes, so how work is done or how information is shared in the workplace, conflicts about data, so who has access to what kinds of information, and then conflicts about values, the deeply held beliefs we all have about the world. If you’re working with someone who has very different values, conflict is kind of a natural thing that’s going to come up between the two of you.
Brandon: Yeah, conflict is pretty inevitable. Of those ones you just listed, what do you think is the easiest one to resolve, if there is an easy one?
Megan: Probably things like processes or data, those are usually pretty easy to structure or at least make pretty clear—get it in writing, have a map of how a process is working. Things like resources, people feel very strongly about how they’re paid and how they’re compensated. So those often become pretty personal. And then relationships get messy and values, values are definitely the most difficult one to resolve. So I’d say data or processes are usually the easiest.
Brandon: Yeah, it seems like the reason why is that it’s pretty black and white, it’s very objective versus the values part. I mean, everyone has different values, or the relationships are always different, so that seems like it would be pretty complicated to solve the relationships or values problem. In your mind, with the relationships or values—
the tougher ones—how do you go about resolving some of those issues?
Megan: Yeah, so sometimes there is no resolution, right? So that’s why we use the term “conflict management.” You’re really just kind of managing this thing that keeps coming up. But to get at a real resolution, things you can do are kind of focusing on trying to resolve the conflict at the lowest level. So before HR or anyone else gets involved, really equipping your managers or your employees with the skills required to manage the conflict themselves.
If the conflict has just already been escalated, ideally you have an HR team or a person in HR who is capable of coaching or noticing what the underlying issues are. HR can perform a kind of pseudo-mediation with all of the parties or meet with them separately in what’s called a caucus and kind of figure out how to get things going.
And then of course, if things just get larger and more sensitive, there are professional workplace mediators. And then, obviously, litigation is kind of the last most escalated way to resolve issues. But if you can get at it at the lowest level and get at some of the underlying issues, that’s usually the most sustainable and the best for everyone involved.
Brandon: It seems like the best route would be for the two parties or multiple parties involved to solve it themselves or manage the conflict themselves. But how, if both parties are stubborn like I am, how do you recognize that either we’re on totally opposite sides of an issue and maybe I should be the bigger person and start trying to resolve this and
manage it?
Megan: I think there are a couple different things you can do. Asking really open-ended questions like, “Tell me more about why you feel that way,” or “How does this situation affect you? What do you think would help move us forward?” Those things kind of get the conversation going. I think managing your own emotional reaction to conflict is really important, even if you’re not involved as a party to a conflict, you’re kind of just a third party observer. You still are probably getting kind of escalated, right? It’s stressful to be around conflict. So if you can manage that, deescalate your system, and get out of that fight-or-flight mode, you’re going to be way more open to ideas or other ways to problem solve. Getting your creative juices going so that you can kind of see the larger picture, thinking outside the box about ways to resolve issues, is something that’s really important. I think people are talking more about how to include creativity more in our workplaces and I think it’s helpful not only for conflict resolution but also for your overall productivity and wellbeing as an employee.
Brandon: When conflicts arise and the two, or multiple, people are in it, what typically happens when a third party steps in and they sort of recognize that there’s an issue? What is usually the first sign of something going wrong in the workplace, where a third party does need to step in?
Megan: Well, usually we can recognize either harsh language or curt tones or the way someone is communicating. Sometimes that can be overt and seemingly kind of aggressive between two people. Other times it could be just an employee avoiding another employee, right? A lot of us avoid conflict like the plague because it’s scary, so if you’re noticing that one of your team members is constantly avoiding someone or avoiding a task or any other piece, you can maybe kind of assume that there’s something there that’s scary or not something that they want to deal with. I think people are usually pretty nervous about acknowledging that there’s conflict going on, but you kind of have to name it before you can start fixing it.
Brandon: So as, let’s say, a supervisor observing a conflict happening between a couple of your employees, what are some good questions to ask to either person, party, whatever it is, to really pull the thread and start managing the conflict?
Megan: I mean I think questions that start with how, why, what, as long as it’s coming across as really supportive and not like you’re an inquisitor, questions that come across as supportive and open-ended and allow employees to fill in the blanks to talk about how something is affecting them or how they’re relating to another coworker. Obviously it’s important that there’s a really supportive foundation there already, they should feel comfortable talking to you about this kind of stuff. If that relationship isn’t there, it’s going to be pretty tough, and you’re probably not going to get a lot of information using those questions. But if that’s there, you can really get at the root of what’s going on.
Brandon: Yeah, and the word you said—supportive—kind of sticks out in my mind. As a third party observer, somebody that’s trying to manage the conflict, you don’t want to necessarily fix the problem, you want to support them so they can fix it themselves so they can learn from it. So, at this point, some of the examples you’ve run across in your conflict and dispute resolution experience, can you walk us through some examples of maybe some weird conflicts that didn’t really have a good ending?
Megan: Yeah! Well, I can think of one that I mediated between an employee and a supervisor. So the supervisor was quite a bit younger than the employee, they were two women, and both of them had very direct, harsh communication styles—which totally works for some people, for others it’s pretty off-putting. There was just very palpable tension between the two of them. The employee was working part time in a role that was essentially a go-between between a former career that had been really successful and retirement. So this was kind of supposed to just be a fun gig she was doing until she was ready to fully retire.
Their tension was really impacting their team and the team’s performance. They just could not work well together. So the department manager approached me, he found out I have advanced training in mediation, so we agreed that we would conduct a workplace mediation for these two employees. In the mediation was me, the department manager, the employee, and the supervisor, and we just went through a very typical mediation, which we hadn’t done in my workplace up until then. Essentially, we started with unstructured time for each of them to share what brought them to the table. They had some very structured back and forth about what they’d each like to see differently. And then we spent a large chunk of time coming up with a written agreement to outline how they would communicate and work together.
So after the mediation, I followed up with the written agreement and scheduled a check-in for a couple months later. I know both of the parties left feeling better about their working relationship, but a couple months later the supervisor actually, I think as a result of kind of getting through this process and thinking critically, decided that she just wasn’t up for managing people, so she actually transitioned to a more professional, non-managerial role, which was not an outcome I was expecting. But it seemed like it kind of brought up some clarity about what each person wanted in their workplace.
Brandon: It sounds like you really led each person to make the decision for themselves, but then on the outcomes side it’s not what you expected at all.
Megan: Right.
Brandon: So if it had gone the way you’d hoped, what would it have been?
Megan: Well, I guess it really was for the best if the manager just came to that decision that it wasn’t the right role for her. I had envisioned, you know, a much better working relationship, some structured check-ins about how both parties were doing, but I think, for the employee, it really made her feel supported and like the organization was invested 
in making her workplace better and making her relationship with her supervisor work. So I felt really good about that piece.
Brandon: You recently did a training on conflict management and you mentioned something about interest-based solutions to conflict management. Could you talk about that a little bit, and maybe some of the approaches that come along with it?
Megan: In the conflict resolution world, we talk about positions and interests. Your position is what you’re demanding, what you’re asking for in, say, a negotiation or any kind of conflict you’re having. The interests are the underlying why’s behind that position. Why are they asking for a pay raise, why are they asking for more time off—it’s the bottom of the iceberg that you may not see initially because what they’re presenting is their position. So in order to come up with a sustainable agreement that’s really going to address the concerns of each of the parties, you want to get at those interests. Ways you do that are asking those open-ended questions, really giving the space for people to talk about why they’re asking for, say, a pay raise. And again, thinking creatively, being supportive, managing the emotions that are involved in conflict. We see that a high emotional IQ results in better management and I think being attuned to your employees’ needs or to what your peers are saying or are concerned about is really going to help you understand what’s going on beneath the surface and get at some of the root causes there.
Brandon: That’s interesting, I didn’t even think about it that way. So the interest-based questions would help kind of shed some light on why they’re even taking a position in the first place.
Megan: Yeah, exactly.
Brandon: You’ve seen it work, right? Otherwise, what sort of questions would a typical third party default to if they weren’t attuned to the interest-based solutions?
Megan: It would probably just be a lot of questions about someone’s position. So if someone is asking to transfer departments, I’m sure you would ask why, but it depends on the tone that you use. Sometimes that can feel kind of accusatory or pretty direct and non-inviting. They might ask Which department do you want to transition to? or Who do you want to be under, who do you want to report to, what kind of work do you want to do? Just kind of a lot of questions that are pretty surface level and related to the position itself instead of Tell me why you wanted to bring this up now. Are there things that are happening with your supervisor that feel concerning? What’s the best case scenario that you’re thinking about? What would make you feel really satisfied? Just more open, more creative questions that people might not have rehearsed, safe answers to to get at why they’re asking for what they are asking for.
Brandon: This has been an amazing conversation and such good information. What else, if anything, would you want to tell listeners about conflict management. Maybe if they’re involved in a situation, how they can help manage it.
Megan: Yeah. I would say don’t be afraid. This is something that’s going to keep coming up. It’s just the natural tension that comes up between people working together. It happens at every level in our human interactions, so just being comfortable sitting with it and not trying to avoid conflicts that seem really serious or problematic. I would again say to get creative in your work life. For me, I do floral design on the side and that really gets my brain working in a different way and seeing problems differently—I really feel strongly that that’s important. It also rejuvenates you so you can act as that source of calm in the midst of the storm that’s happening. Things like deep breathing during a conflict, grounding exercises—which, if folks don’t know, that’s things like feeling yourself sitting in your chair and just checking in with your body about how you’re feeling. There are lots of websites that are great and have a lot of information. There’s a website called Mediate.com, there’s an Oregon Mediation Association that does awesome trainings for folks, even if you’ve never mediated or talked about conflict management before. There’s a book called Conscious Communication by Miles Sherts. Staying With Conflict is another book by Bernard Mayer that I really like. And there are lots of great workplace mediators in the Portland area who can act as a resource as well if something feels really out of control. And, Brandon, you’re welcome to list me as a resource as well!
Brandon: Absolutely! If you could list a way for people to get in touch with you, that’d be amazing.
Megan: You can reach me, I’ll give you my personal email, it’s megan.leatherman@gmail.com. And I love talking about this stuff, so I’m happy to act as a resource.
Brandon: I can tell you love it, because you’re great at it and you sound like you know what you’re doing, and I love the resources as well. Really appreciate you joining us for the podcast, we’ll hopefully catch up again.
Megan: Thanks Brandon!
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