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How HR Can Help Leaders Turn Conflict Into Collaboration

Forbes Human Resources Council

Senior Vice President at VRM Mortgage Services overseeing Human Resources and VRMU.

These times offer great opportunities for human resources leaders to emphasize to their organizations the importance and value of turning conflict into collaboration. But what's at the core of conflict? Why is it valuable, and how do we turn conflict into collaboration?

One of my favorite writers and philosophers is Margaret Wheatley. She wrote that in times of fear, “people will withdraw further into self-protection and strike out at those different from themselves.” So, could personal fear of loss be at the core of conflict? You bet! Let's explore some examples.

In 1982, the personal computer was named “Man of the Year” by Time Magazine. This designation was one of the markers of an epic shift from the industrial age to the information age. I had the opportunity to see its impact on the workforce. This shift affected organizations across the world. However, within the organization where I was working at the time, employees resigned rather than face the prospect of retraining for the inevitable changes that would take place in their roles.

In addition, at the time, Edward Cornish, then the president of the World Future Society, predicted an enormous loss of jobs because of the proliferation of desktop computers. What was the fear? Perhaps it was moving outside their comfort zone. Nearly 40 years later, we know that more jobs were created and that our current cellphones can operate with more capacity and functionality than the desktop computers of that time. In fact, we generally don't leave home without them.

The industrial revolution took us away from working at home. Yet, the information age made it significantly easier to work at home. However, some argued that if we allowed employees to work from home, we would not be able to tell if a person was really working, there would be too many distractions and contact with co-workers would be lost. What was the fear? Perhaps it was a loss of control.

Nearly 40 years later, organizations that had not prepared their teams to work from home have encountered enormous business continuity issues as a result of shelter-in-place orders associated with the coronavirus pandemic. Now, we have experienced a huge experiment that negates all the arguments made in the 1980s against working from home. In fact, Twitter has since announced that its employees can work from home forever. 

A leader of mine once gave the entire HR team a placard that read, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” Answering this question can help us to learn the value of turning off fear in the face of conflict and it can help us to engage the executive function of our brains more effectively. The preceding examples offer valuable insight into the value of conflict. Conflict offers the opportunity to think about things from a perspective we may have never considered.

Take, for example, the “old woman, young woman” illusion. In this illusion, you may only see one or the other. However, the illusion contains both images. It just depends on how you are looking at it.

The next time we as HR leaders deal with conflict, rather than exercising an either/or mentality, it may be wiser to engage in both/and thinking. For example, we may receive feedback in an employee survey regarding the fairness of a process. Rather than thinking, “This feedback is coming from someone who has an ‘ax to grind’” (i.e., we are right, and they are wrong), perhaps we should engage in an exploration regarding opportunities for improvement (i.e., they may be grinding an ax, and they may also have a point).

Collaboration is a genuine effort to create something together. “Col-lob-o-ration” was one of my favorite terms learned from a former employee, who had the knack of identifying when she was being handed her head and being told what to do rather than engaging in a truly genuine effort to cocreate work. Colloboration looks and feels like a power play in an attempt to maintain control. Some may regard the recent clearing of peaceful protesters from Layfayette Square in D.C. as colloborative rather than collaborative. So, how does one turn conflict into collaboration?

Wheatley suggests that HR leaders can help leaders engage in humility, curiosity and a willingness to listen. Changing conflict to collaboration demands that those who are engaging in conflict recognize that the world doesn't look the same to any two people. Therefore, to reach shared meaning and to attain the ability to cocreate, HR leaders have to set up conditions in which dialogue can take place without judgment, defensiveness and desire to control. Consider that Netflix and Apple are the likes of the innovative opportunities that could have resulted in corporate success and survival for Blockbuster and Nokia if internal conflicts had been turned into collaborative efforts. 

HR is uniquely positioned to be the arbiter of conflict because they generally are familiar with people and their character from perspectives that executive leaders may not always see. Therefore, this role should never be missing when it comes to collaboration around corporate strategy and product development. It should never be an afterthought, as in, “Oh, it’s now time to staff this project.” At that time, I would say that is a potentially critical error.

In order for HR to help leaders turn conflict into collaboration, HR must be a trusted partner and positioned as part of the key decisions at the beginning, not at the end, of the process, and they must be influential.


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