Resolving Conflict Between Managers

A reporter recently reached out to me to ask me how I would approach resolving conflicts between managers. Here is my response. 

1. How do you resolve conflicts between managers in the workplace?

Ideally – you shouldn’t have to. Managers should be adults who know how to resolve disagreements civilly and effectively in the best interests of the organization.  But – if they aren’t good at resolving differences and it turns into a conflict, then yes, upper management (usually HR) has to get involved.  

If I were coaching managers on how to deal with this (and I do have online courses that teach this), the first thing I do is encourage both compassion and responsibility.  The other person probably means well and if you can get out of your head enough – you can listen to their objections and help resolve the disagreement by making either a compromise or sorting it out – as adults do.  

The first approach is to always assume both parties mean well and have valid reasons for their actions – and to figure out what those are. Often – just encouraging both sides to view each other as allies and not enemies is enough to jump start the process.

If one side refuses to do this – then – you have a problem. 

2. Why do you need to resolve conflicts swiftly? 

Disagreements should not escalate into conflicts and if they have – you have a problem.  Dealing with it swiftly is important because a) you don’t want it to escalate further and b) the longer it goes on – the harder it is to bring the parties back into allyship to resolve it. Once disagreements turn into conflicts – tribal thinking takes over and people can really solidify their opinions that the “other” side is evil or insane. If allowed to fester, those biases will negatively impact all work going forward. You need you team to think of themselves as being on the same team – not enemies.

3. How can you avoid conflicts in the first place? 

Foster a humanistic workplace. Reward managers for collaboration. If you keep getting conflicts – either the managers shouldn’t be managers or your reward system within the organization is rewarding the conflicts or both.  Sears is a famous example of this.  They made managers compete with one another instead of rewarding them for collaboration and the result was disastrous.

More practically – practice and encourage – collaborative problem solving as the cultural norm within the organization. 

4. What are some other ways in which you can foster a healthy work environment?

Actively reward collaboration and happy employees.  Keep reinforcing compassion for people who disagree and the dignity and worth of every individual in the company.  Also – not everyone is cut out to be a manager. If someone just can’t handle the pressure and doesn’t know how to positively reinforce people – teach them – explicitly – how to do this. 

5. At what point does HR need to get involved in a conflict between managers? 

As soon as it becomes obvious – that this is a conflict and not simply a disagreement.  If managers can’t resolve disagreements without it becoming a conflict – then something is wrong. Get involved.  Treat both sides with dignity and recognize their worth and help them see that in each other. 

6. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Learning how to deal with conflict, and bullying are basic management skills. Train your new managers on how to handle interpersonal problems. If you don’t train them – don’t expect them to magically – know how to handle difficult interpersonal situations. 

Learn more by taking one of my HRCI & SHRM approved courses at https://humanistlearning.com/

How should HR deal with a stubborn boss?

Question:

How should HR deal with a manager who refuses to see the world from other people's perspective? We are talking here about a manager who works at the company, but not the HR professional's direct manager. In other words, a member of management whose stubborn behavior is causing problems within a particular team, and perhaps one whom an employee has raised a complaint about.

Answer:

There is what ideally should happen – and what will realistically happen. And the HR professional has to decide – which they are going to fight for.

A manager who refuses to see the world for another’s perspective – is simply a bad manager. Let’s be clear about this.

What ideally should happen Is coaching – to help that manager be a better manager.

Realistically  – someone who is an adult – who refuses to see things from other’s people’s perspective – probably isn’t going to respond well to coaching.  You have to want to improve what you are doing to actually improve.  And if they have a habit or an attitude – of not listening to constructive feedback – there is really nothing someone who doesn’t have authority over them can do.

Which leaves HR in a quandary. They know they have a manager that isn’t really a good fit for the job, but they don’t have the authority to deal with it.  Which means – to deal with it – they have to get buy in from upper management to work to fix the problem.

Ideally – an HR professional should have a working relationship with upper management to be able to consult on staffing issues – including management staffing decisions.  Ideally, they should be able to use those relationships to point out the staffing problem and suggest ways to fix it – that would then be implemented. Those remedies – would start with coaching and potentially end in the re-assignment to a more appropriate position (that makes use of their expertise – if they have any) or firing of the manager who isn’t doing a good job being a manager if their only skills is – management.

Realistically – most HR professionals don’t have that sort of relationship with upper management. They are not considered trusted partners. They are viewed as paperwork pushers that help make sure staffing accounting is complying with the law and payroll etc and that benefits are being administered.

How can they fix that? By actively talking about these things with upper management. Is that scary? Yes. But there is only one way to get upper management to view you as an equal partner – and that is to act as if you are an equal partner.  Does this carry risk?  Of course, it does. But nothing is going to change – if you don’t change it.

The alternative is to just allow the company to suffer as a result of the bad manager.

If you want training on how to handle difficult conversations or on how to train someone to behave better - I have HRCI & SHRM approved courses - here:
https://humanistlearning.com/programsoffered/

How to motivate a bully - not to bully - HR edition

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how to convince a bully to not bully.

The problem of bullying is my area of expertise. I take a behavioral approach. In general – convincing a bully to not bully is not something that can be done easily and even if you could convince them – it probably wouldn’t change their behavior. So what should you do instead?

There is an assumption in most anti-harassment and anti-bullying programs that is that if we could just convince the bullies to not bully – the problem would go away. That’s why most sexual harassment training programs are basically 2 hours of “don’t do it – it’s illegal.”  Obviously – that doesn’t work.

Even with a person who is motivated to change – change is hard because it’s not just a matter of wanting to change. It’s about actually changing behavior. Extinguishing unwanted behavior is the hardest of the behavioral conditioning techniques to master.

The good news is that you don’t actually need a bully to want to stop bullying to make them stop bullying.  You can train them to stop by not allowing bullying to work.  (Note: This works for most people – but not all – some are not in operant control of their behavior and they will blow out spectacularly).

Instead of trying to convince someone who doesn’t want to stop – to stop. You train the people who want them to stop – on how exactly to make the unwanted behavior stop.  Focus on helping the victims learn what they want to learn and supporting them and the bully – through the behavioral change process. This helps remove the reward for the unwanted behavior and rewards the behavior you do want.  This isn’t easy to do and any behavioral modification trainer will tell you but it can be done.

The key is for management to understand how this behavior extinction is going to play out so they can support it until the unwanted behavior is extinguished and replaced with more pro-social behavior.  AND management needs to know what to do if it turns out that person isn’t in control of their behavior – which is rare – but does happen.


PS – I just wrote about this on my blog since I keep getting calls from companies wanting me to train a problem person – but refusing to educate themselves about what needs to happen. They just want an outsider to fix this person – and really – unless they educate themselves – it’s not going to happen. http://humanisthappiness.blogspot.com/2018/10/who-should-you-train-when-you-have.html 

In the meantime, if you are finally ready to learn what actually has to happen to make bullying and harassment stop in your workplace - take my online class for HR professionals which is approved for both HRCI & SHRM recertification credits so you can educate yourself. https://humanistlearning.com/workplacebullying1/

If you are an employment lawyer - I have a CLE program for you too. https://humanistlearning.com/stop-bullying-in-the-workplace-for-lawyers/

And finally - and most importantly - hire me to do a staff training - start with your leaders and we can work our way down to line staff. And yes - you can use me for your sexual harassment training and onboarding programs.
https://humanistlearning.com/sexual-harassment-compliance-training/