Recently, I’ve been talking with a lot of HR professionals who are being pulled into workplace conflicts: someone isn’t being a team player, someone is overstepping their role, someone is bullying a peer, someone has stopped talking to their colleague…
“Can’t you talk to them for me?” is a plea they often hear. These are skilled professionals who know their role isn’t to be a messenger. So they gently push back, offering talking points for the person to try instead.
I call this conflict coaching, and on its own it rarely works. It’s shadow boxing as opposed to stepping into the ring.
Recognizing this as a challenge they faced, a large architecture firm engaged me over the summer to help its team of HR Business Partners learn to facilitate live dual-party conflict conversations.
The workshop was a success. Through the fishbowl method of role-playing, participants recognized the internal narratives that pulled their attention away from listening to the parties, explored a shared language for navigating conflict, and practiced a framework for guiding these conversations.
The participants were appreciative, and the sponsors agreed that the engagement delivered exactly what they’d asked for. But the comment shared by one individual about what they learned gave me pause:
“I hope I never have to use it.”
Gulp.
Even with advanced skill building, it can still be uncomfortable to experience other people’s conflict. Here’s what may prevent this team (and perhaps yours) from putting these skills into practice:
The desire to fix things quickly. Humans are built to connect with others, and connecting by helping is truly gratifying - perhaps especially so for those in functions like HR. But in conflict, jumping straight to solutions can reduce the likelihood of a sustainable outcome. The counterintuitive trick for the facilitator is to resist the desire to fix and instead slow things down. This will create space for the parties to co-discover and then co-create their own solution.
The belief that all information must be in hand before proceeding. Some of my workshop participants said the role-plays “felt messy” because they’d normally have “lots more information” before meeting with the parties. But conflict rarely comes with a single, agreed-upon version of events. We may know what each person has reported, but those accounts reflect individual realities. The facilitator’s job is to help the parties create a shared understanding of the situation. Lacking that, there is little hope for changing the status quo.
The comfort of controlling the process. While there are best practices for facilitating these conversations, the process ultimately belongs to the parties. The facilitator’s job is to support them, not steer them toward a specific outcome. That means entering with genuine curiosity, assuming you don’t yet know enough, and inviting the parties to help clarify what’s happening.
I often say that the source of the mess contains the seeds of the solution. As professionals, we must resist the urge to be the experts who fix things. Instead, we must meet people where they are and thoughtfully join them in the exploration.
Because the best way to resolve conflict in the workplace isn’t sidestepping it. It’s wading through it.