Coping with conflicts

A few words from Mike Cashman to explain an approach:

As an active manager with a large team and multi-million pound projects to run, you don't always feel you have the time to give to address personal issues and interpersonal conflicts. You may not find the space and time to listen in the way that you would when acting as a counsellor. I've done both, so I speak from experience. But I have increasingly seen the value of bringing into the workplace approaches drawn from counselling that seek to understand people's viewpoints thoroughly.

I've found the following steps very effective when there is real hurt and frustration:

1. To ask for permission to use the knowledge of that hurt to avoid the circumstances of it happening again
2. To ensure 2-way understanding of each party's viewpoint, typically as part of a "workshop for understanding"
3. To watch the understanding swiftly turn to resolution
4. To see how healing this can then be for the original hurt.

People give permission (step 1) not for their own benefit, but to avoid others suffering the same way. Yet they find healing (step 4) despite their expectations. It's very rewarding to see people who had become very frustrated subsequently able to move on past their frustration, with stronger working relationships.

Frustrations can always arise, even when you are working hard towards a common goal - perhaps especially when you are working hard towards a common goal. If those frustrations are upsetting the working environment, or the people in it, please do something about it quickly! We can help, and as always we will work for outcomes for individuals, for capability and for business results.

We can use this approach with customer-supplier conflicts as well as internal conflicts.