Handling conflict well: five skills every leader needs

Gemma and I have added our third tool to the strategic toolkit we're building this series, and it's one I feel strongly about: handling conflict well. Conflict is something every leader will run into, over big things and small things, and how well you're equipped to handle it has a real impact on both how effective you are at work and how worn out you feel by the end of the week. It's often not the hard work itself that drains us. It's what we've had to endure alongside it.

Why conflict belongs in every leader's toolkit

There are two reasons I think this one earns its place. The first is that conflict is genuinely everywhere. We all come to work with a different lens on the world, different beliefs, different ways of doing things, and that difference creates the potential for conflict, big or small, most days of the week.

The second reason is more personal. Our relationship with conflict runs deep, often back to our family of origin. When I'm team coaching and I ask a room how they feel about conflict, the reactions are always mixed. Some people are entirely comfortable. Others visibly flinch, even at the word itself, and will use a milder word like challenge instead, even though they mean the same thing. That response usually says far more about what conflict meant in someone's early life than it does about the situation in front of them.

Gemma made a really good point too: as senior leaders, people look to us to model how to handle disagreement well. If a leadership team is in what she calls violent agreement on everything, that's not actually a good sign. It's often worth asking what that harmony is covering up.

Task conflict versus relationship conflict

One distinction I find genuinely useful is separating task conflict from relationship conflict. Task conflict is a disagreement about the work itself, and it can be a really constructive thing, a bit of grit in the oyster that helps create a better outcome. You can disagree entirely on the approach while still fully respecting each other as professionals.

I worked with a team recently where harmony mattered above almost everything else. It turned out that a few years earlier they'd had a director whose style was aggressive and blaming, where disagreeing wasn't safe. That director had long since gone, replaced by someone far more open, but the team had carried the old habit of just keeping quiet. My worry for that team wasn't that they were too nice. It was that they'd lost the bit of healthy task conflict that pushes a group towards a genuinely better solution.

Relationship conflict is different. It's when the issue sits between two people rather than in the task, and it tends to colour everything that passes between them, even work that should be straightforward. Gemma brought in a lovely idea here from the Strength Deployment Inventory: we see our own motives and intentions clearly, but other people only ever see our behaviour, and a lot of relationship conflict comes from misreading someone else's behaviour without knowing what's actually driving it.

The five Rs of handling conflict well

I want to recommend a book here, Smart Conflict by Alice Driscoll and Louise Van Hart, which sets out a five part model for thinking about conflict. The five elements don't come in a strict order, but together they're a genuinely useful checklist.

Reflection is about understanding your own conflict settings, the pre-programmed responses you bring into any difficult conversation, usually shaped by your family of origin and early experiences. I grew up being told not to argue with my brother because a parent had lost their own sibling young, so disagreement was something we simply weren't allowed to have. Knowing that about myself changes how I show up in conflict now.

Regulation is knowing how to check in on your emotional state and calm yourself before, during or after a hard conversation. I often ask myself what future me would want me to do in the next fifteen minutes. Gemma has a lovely image for the same idea, picturing whatever she's feeling as a balloon she can set down and pick back up later if she needs to.

Readiness is the more functional piece, gathering your evidence, thinking through your strategy, and importantly, rehearsing the actual words you're going to say out loud, including how you want to open and close the conversation.

Response is about choosing your reaction rather than defaulting to fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Gemma brought in Viktor Frankl's idea that there's a space between stimulus and response, and that space is where you get to choose. That's what we mean when we talk about presence in a leader, the ability to say I'm really not enjoying this, and still choose how you want to move forward.

Repair is understanding what it takes to rebuild a relationship after conflict has happened. Sometimes that's substantial. Sometimes it's as simple as naming what's happened and saying plainly that you want to get back to being open and candid with each other. For that harmony-first team I mentioned, the repair work wasn't really about the conflict itself. It was about repairing the relationship with conflict that a previous leader had damaged.

Being willing to be unpopular

There's one more thing I always come back to with conflict, right from someone's first people management role. As a leader, you have to be willing to be unpopular. You're not seeking it out, but you will regularly have to deliver news nobody wants to hear, and you have to be able to sit with that discomfort for the few minutes it usually lasts. The question I find useful is simple: how can I hold my nerve and say the unpopular thing when I need to?

Worth a listen if...

You've noticed a team that seems suspiciously harmonious, and you're curious about what that might be masking.

You want practical language and models for handling a genuinely difficult conversation, not just the theory behind it.

You're trying to understand your own relationship with conflict, and where those instincts might have come from.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.