How to handle conflict and difficult conversations
When we ask people, before they start a programme, what are their toughest influencing situations, the same answer keeps coming up: how to handle difficult conversations and disagreement.
Most of us default to one of two unhelpful patterns: avoiding the conversation altogether, or doing it in a way that damages the relationship. Neither actually resolves anything. Navigating conflict well is a specific, learnable set of behaviours.
What’s really causing conflict at work
The argument on the surface is rarely the whole story. The pushback on a deadline is often about feeling disrespected. The objection to a new process is often about a change that went badly three years ago and was never addressed. Most of us respond to the surface argument, answer the stated objection, and are then baffled when the other person still isn’t satisfied.
The solution isn’t a better argument. It’s a better diagnosis. Pausing to ask what a disagreement is actually about, before responding to what’s being said, changes the whole conversation.
We go into this in more depth, including how to spot when you’re arguing the wrong point entirely, in the real cause of most workplace conflict.
Nice isn’t the same as kind
Nice smooths things over and avoids the conversation that would actually help. Kind is harder, and rarer, and it’s usually what the relationship needed all along, a direct, respectful conversation.
Most workplaces reward nice and rely on kind. We look at the difference, and how to build the confidence to choose kind more often, in why nice isn’t the same as kind.
How are you listening?
A difficult conversation often has less to do with what you say than how you’re listening to the other person. Most of us, under pressure, listen to win the point or to fix the problem, rather than to actually understand what’s being said. That shift, from listening to respond to listening to understand, can change how we navigate conflict.
We break down the different modes of listening in why we’re worse listeners than we think.
Why solving it for them can backfire
There’s a version of ‘helping’ that undermines trust: jumping in to fix someone’s problem before they’ve finished explaining it. It feels generous but it often isn’t received that way, and over time it can teach people to stop bringing you their problems at all.
We look at why this instinct is so hard to shake, and what to do instead, in stop trying to fix it.
Build the skill
Handling conflict well isn’t about becoming a different version of yourself. It’s a set of specific behaviours that can be learned and practised like any other skill.
We run open programmes throughout the year, in 3-day face-to-face and 12-session virtual formats, built around exactly this kind of situation. If influencing upwards is where your own gap sits, we’d love to hear from you.
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