If you are a leader, you have undoubtedly experienced the frustration of dealing with two employees who are unable to get along with each other. Most often, the disagreements are petty in nature. Nevertheless, they consume your time and exhaust your emotions. Fortunately, it is possible to avoid common intervention mistakes that leave disputing employees disgruntled and their conflicts unresolved.

Conflict-resolution experts advise managers to adopt a facilitator's role when handling employee disputes. Leaders, they say, should serve as mediators and not like judges. Yet surprisingly, recent research reveals that managers largely ignore that advice. Instead, most leaders take charge and determine the outcome of employee disagreements.

Why? Our normal tendency is to view conflicts as problems we need to fix -- after all, that's part of our job. Leaders are supposed to be problem solvers and, as such, are expected to settle issues in ways that best meet the organization's interests. But managers, pressed for time and concerned about fairness, often rush to conclusions that leave everyone unsatisfied while permitting the underlying discord to fester.

Here's a simple technique I successfully used to get employees to reconcile their own disputes. The parent company of the bank where I worked was headquartered 200 miles away from our office. Whenever I had two employees at odds, I put them in a car together and sent them to the head office for a meeting. There's nothing like seven hours in a car to force employees to have a conversation. I figured that they would either kill one another or come back as friends -- or at least friendly. As you might expect, during the long day they eventually found common interests to discuss and forgot about their dispute.

Workplace conflict is inevitable. To address it effectively -- and reduce the frequency of new clashes -- leaders must learn how to intervene effectively and guide disputing workers to their own solutions. When you put employees on the road to fixing their own problems, they will usually find their way back.

Labels: employees, group dynamics, leadership

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"Each day brings you opportunities to raise important questions, speak to higher values, and surface unresolved conflicts. Every day you have the chance to make a difference in the lives of people around you." -Ronald Heifetz, Leadership on the Line

Driving change upward is often a high-risk, low-reward game. Top executives customarily drive change downward. Nestled in their corner offices, those bureaucrats are less in touch with technology, customer wishes, or workforce capabilities than employees who are working on the front lines. For a company to remain competitive, new ideas must originate from all levels of the corporate hierarchy. But rising up to promote change might earn you an ill-favored reputation as a rebel. Policy makers -- especially those entrenched at the top of a bureaucracy -- are probably the people who established the very practices you are trying to change. Having the audacity to suggest improving or abandoning long-standing procedures is politically dangerous, and, quite often, when suggestions are well received, the bureaucrats take credit for those ideas, anyway.

So is it really worth the risk? Yes, if the changes you advocate are equally important to the values of your employees and your organization. Those common values provide workers with the meaning and connection they need in their jobs. What's more, pushing for change separates leaders from bureaucrats. It divides those living by their organization's values from those simply offering lip service. It will help you make a difference.

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