ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so Alison, today we’re going to focus on conflict in the workplace. Now, some of this conflict is driven by external factors. We live in very divisive, partisan times, and that can spill into the office. Part of this is driven by internal conflict. The question is how do leaders respond? When does conflict rise to the level where leaders need to get involved, and how do they resolve them in ways that keep the company moving and keep the culture intact?
ALISON BEARD: This seems like a really relevant topic right now, because there are the typical internal disagreements that might happen between managers fighting for resources or C-suite execs debating strategy, which happens all too often when there is economic turbulence and uncertainty. But then as you say, there’s also these outside forces that are seeping into the daily running of business. A recent study from the Society for Human Resource Management found that a full 76% of workers had witnessed acts of incivility in the last month.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, and you can’t ignore it. This kind of conflict can damage a culture, can make workers feel that they don’t want to be in this workplace. So obviously, there’s the human cost of all this, but this kind of conflict, this kind of contentiousness can also cost a company and workers in terms of both productivity and money. There are ways to handle these conflicts. You are not born with the skill. You can learn the skill, and I think we’re paying more attention to leaders who are able to handle conflicts effectively.
ALISON BEARD: I imagine that emotional intelligence is a big part of being able to manage conflict, defuse conflict, but it’s not the only piece?
ADI IGNATIUS: No. So, there’s something called conflict intelligence. My guest today is Peter Coleman, professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He also directs their Center on Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. He wrote a recent article for HBR called “The Conflict-Intelligent Leader.” I spoke to him to figure out how do we develop that skill? How do we apply that skill? How do we get better at managing all of these conflicts within our organization? So, here’s my conversation with Peter Coleman.
All right, so your premise in the article is that conflict in the world is on the rise, clashes over politics, race, gender, and so on, and so is conflict at work. So, I’m interested in the culture of conflict, I guess. I’ve worked for different kinds of companies, some that love the fact that they’re no jerks, and that that is part of the secret sauce. I’ve worked at other companies that think, “No, you actually want to encourage the flamethrowers not to be mean and uncivil, but to maybe bring a sharp edge that that actually might be how you get to a good place in terms of ideation or strategy or something like that.” What’s your view on that? What does a healthy culture look like in that context?
PETER T. COLEMAN: I’ll say what a mediator says, which is they’re both right. You want basically enough civility and rapport and decency and fun with your colleagues to be able to have psychological safety and be able to get things done and say things that are outrageous occasionally in terms of ideas. So, it’s helpful to have candor. It’s helpful to have people that are straight talkers. Sometimes that will challenge your ideas. But in times like this where our broader cultural ethos is so polarized and so oftentimes so triggering, people have less tolerance for that. So, I think it depends on the company. It depends on what your focus is, what you’re doing. But if you really want people who can think critically and challenge each other, you need to create the conditions where they can do that relatively safely.
That doesn’t mean no conflict. I’m a big fan of conflict. Let me put it that way, right? It is a driver of change. So, you want to have some optimal balance of both, and the particular balance of that will change from industry to industry and company to company.
ADI IGNATIUS: Okay. I understand the starting point. I understand the problem you’re trying to solve. I’m interested in the nature of the research you’re doing that’s trying to address how to deal constructively with conflict. So, just talk a little bit about the research and what you were trying to tease out.
PETER T. COLEMAN: I was trained by a man named Morton Deutsch who came out of World War II and really studied conflict, and he studied basically good and bad conflict, what he called constructive or destructive conflict processes. He argued that conflict is a natural thing. It’s part of our existence, and we need it in order to be able to learn and challenge one another and innovate and move forward, but it can go bad. So, you want to understand the conditions under which conflict goes in a good direction. We’ve built on their research, on his research and his student’s research, and that’s what we study. We study particularly the capacities of leaders to create conditions where they can encourage people to have conflict that moves in a constructive direction where they learn and be able to hold onto their relationships. So, it is trying to find that optimal balance that we study.
ADI IGNATIUS: Okay. So, what have you found? What are the attributes of a leader who is good at handling, diffusing, moving through conflict?
PETER T. COLEMAN: There’s a series of basic competencies that we’ve identified. Part of it is self-control. Part of it is having some capacity to know how you react, what triggers you, and to be able to be calm in difficult circumstances. That helps. We have a measure called the Conflict Anxiety Response Scale. It argues that when people are in certain kinds of conflicts, they tend to get anxious, and then they tend to get derailed in certain predictable ways. So, being aware of that is helpful. That’s a baseline, I think, is some self-awareness and ability to self-regulate, but then you have a next level of skills which are social skills. Can you negotiate effectively? That can be win-win negotiation where we problem solve together or more competitive negotiation where you advocate for yourself or combining both.
So, leaders that are particularly effective at this are able to find combinations of both where they advocate for a certain position, but they also listen and integrate new ideas. So, it’s more of a collaborative and a competitive process happening simultaneously. Those are critical. There are different levels of these skills. One is self-control. One is social control. Then it’s the capacity to use different tactics and different kinds of situations as they change. Ultimately, it’s helpful to have a sense of the whole. You may be at a time like we are where the political ethos is really severe, and having an understanding of that and recognizing that sometimes those issues trickle in and that they may require a different approach is critical.
ADI IGNATIUS: In your article, you used the term, and maybe you coined the term conflict intelligence. It sounds like emotional intelligence, but I think you mean something a little bit different. How would you define… What is conflict intelligence?
PETER T. COLEMAN: Conflict intelligence builds on emotional intelligence, because that is oftentimes the capacity to know yourself, regulate yourself when necessary, understand emotional dynamics. But it goes beyond that, because it really is the capacity then to – One tactic or strategy we talk about is adaptivity. Adaptivity is that sometimes you may have your go-to way of responding to employees or to clients. That’s pretty constructive, but sometimes you need to pivot. Sometimes you need to recognize, “No, this isn’t business as usual. This is something different. They’re being more contentious, peevish, problematic, and I need to really stand up to them.”
So, that capacity to adapt, which means to change your strategies to fit the situation in a way where you maintain integrity, so that’s critical. It’s not just adapting. It’s not just shifting with the winds. It’s having a sense of what is important to you, what your north star is, what you’re trying to do in this situation, with this relationship with this client, but also recognizing that sometimes you need to pivot and draw some red lines, and stand up for yourself.
ADI IGNATIUS: The way we’re speaking, so far, it seems like the CEO or the senior leader who is handling these issues is somehow above the fray or needs to try to be above the fray. That brings into this whole question about, that we’ve been having for a decade or so, whether CEOs need to weigh in on political and social issues at the moment. A few years ago, we would’ve all said, “Yes, they have to because their employees demanded, their customers demanded, stakeholders demanded, and their silence will be interpreted on social media probably negatively. So you need to enter the fray.” I don’t think there’s one right answer to this, but in the context that we’re talking about, what do you think about CEO activism these days?
PETER T. COLEMAN: I think it’s fraught because of the time we’re in. I mean, I am on faculty at Columbia University, and we know right away the trouble that Columbia University has gotten into by either speaking out or not speaking out, taking a side or not taking a side. So, it’s a very difficult time to walk that line. I do think, again, each company is different. People have to pay attention to their internal needs of their staff and employees and where they are. Particularly, younger employees are highly expecting their leaders to stand up for some issues. It used to be that organizations were less inclined to do so.
There was a tipping point around George Floyd’s murder where many leaders of different types of organizations would step up and say, “This is wrong, and we need to be really clear about that.” Now with the Supreme Court rulings around affirmative action and things like that, they’ve been backing up a little bit. So, it’s a fraught time to speak on political issues at that level. I think what you can do is speak to issues that are directly relevant to your work, to your space, to what it is you do, what it is you work with, your partners out there. I think that the more local you can keep it, the more reasonable it seems, and the less likely you’re going to step on one of these trip wires.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, so then the flip side of this is to what extent we’re comfortable with employees “bringing their whole selves to work.” I mean, I would say there’s certain things that felt semi settled that are now in play, and semi settled was you want your employees to bring their whole selves to work, because that’s how you get a healthy workforce, et cetera, et cetera.
Mark Andreessen said, “Why would I want somebody to bring their whole self to work? How does that help me? How does that help my company get things done?” We can debate whether or not that’s exactly how to get things done, or it’s not. But, to what extent do you help solve the conflict problem by telling people, “Leave some of that stuff at home. You don’t have to bring everything to work that you’re feeling and that you’re passionate about. There’s stuff for work, and there’s stuff not for work?” What do you think about that?
PETER T. COLEMAN: I think it’s important to have as much as possible transparent conversations around this issue and to help set expectations, because if you have a top-down policy that says, “Here’s a list of things you can’t talk about,” it’s really going to stop people bringing important parts of themselves to work that will help the company understand different markets, understand different issues that are out there, how prevalent they are. So, I don’t think that’s the way to go. I do think that the way to go is to be clear about what expectations are.
I also think it’s really important to set up norms and expectations about when, for example, meetings derail, right? So in my class, I teach a class in conflict at Columbia. As you can imagine, a lot of provocative issues come in. It’s very easy for the class or the court, a particular class to get derailed.
So, I set up a contract right away with students first day and say, “Look, things are going to come up. People are going to get derailed. Conversations will start in class that this isn’t a place to have it because we don’t have the time. We don’t have the facilitation, and it’s going to harm some people.” If that happens, then I maintain the right to pause it and say, “Pause this conversation. We’ll set up an offramp, set up a time when I’ll come, and we’ll talk it out, and we’ll spend more time to do that, but we can’t do that here because our work right now is this, and this is derailing us.” So, anticipating that and setting up those expectations and basically getting agreement with your employees that, “This is how we’ll work,” recognizes that things can go south.
We don’t want to shut those conversations down, but we want to have them in a way that can be fruitful. And oftentimes in a meeting of a half hour or 45 minutes with other things on the agenda, they’re not.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, it sounds like you would suggest companies do the same thing that you’ve done with your students – not when a thorny issue comes up, but before that
PETER T. COLEMAN: Preparation, absolutely. I mean, in the article, the HBR article that we’re talking about, I start with build the ground rules, build a sense of rapport and a sense of expectations, build the infrastructure for this. Particularly right now, this isn’t always necessary. It’s not necessary in every company, but because of the fraught times we live in, I think it’s really important that managers, leaders expect that things can go south and prepare for that. So, they have some options. It just gives managers a sense of efficacy and possibility, and they don’t feel like a deer in the headlights, which happens with a lot of university professors.
Something breaks out in the classroom. They don’t know how to deal with it. They don’t know what to say, and so they either shut it down, or they let it go too far. So, to anticipate that, I think, is really critical.
ADI IGNATIUS: So inside a business, how do you decide when a conflict requires this level of engagement or mediation? I mean, we’re talking about labor versus management, more subtle issues, the big political social issues. What’s the threshold for getting involved?
PETER T. COLEMAN: To me, what needs to set the agenda is what are we doing? What’s our objective here? What are we trying to do in this meeting or in this department? What is our focus, and is this relevant, and is this going to help serve our focus, or is this going to take us off in a rabbit hole that we really don’t have time to deal with effectively, and it won’t serve what we’re trying to do? So, I think managers having a relatively clear sense and checking this out with their staff and employees, and revisiting it once in a while about, “What is our MO? What are we really trying to… What is our North star? What are we trying to do?” Use that as a litmus test to think about, “This is really getting offline, or people are getting really heated, and I can feel that coming on.”
Some leaders are, again, much more empathetic, much more willing, able to read the room socially. Some aren’t. So if I’m not, I want to have somebody with me who is, and who can say to me, “Peter, this is an interesting conversation. I suggest we set this up on Saturday.” You can offload some of this. It’s not all on one person. You can have a team of people that are actually effective in different ways. That can be really helpful as well.
ADI IGNATIUS: Who are some of the great negotiators or examples of really difficult things that got resolved because somebody handled this well? Do you have one or two examples of someone who’s done it right?
PETER T. COLEMAN: So, I tend to work in international organizations, UN and UNICEF and places like that. So, I’ve had the pleasure and honor of working with George Mitchell. George Mitchell was a senator and was a judge, but then got involved in peace processes later in his life, and got involved, for example, in the Northern Irish Good Friday Peace Agreements, which was he went into a 30-year conflict with 3,500 people killed in the “troubles,” and wandered into this thing because Clinton asked him to be his envoy, and then spent two years there figuring out how to do this. He was a master, and he claims that he learned this in politics. He learned this as the majority leader in the Senate that he had to broker all of these really difficult tense conflicts, come to some understanding, and move people forward.
So, Mitchell is a great example. Mandela is also… If you’ve never read The Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela’s book is an extraordinary book about conflict. He speaks about conflict as a child all the way up to president of South Africa and beyond. He is a poster child for what we call adaptive conflict managers, because he used very different strategies, sometimes even contradictory strategies in the same move.
People like Indra Nooyi of Pepsi who came in and was dealing with an organization that was being derailed because there was this movement towards more healthful drinks and sodas and nutritional value foods, and she brought in to run and save Pepsi.
So, she had to do both, figure out, “How do you honor the new movement, and recognize our core business, and how do you manage that?” She really had parallel tracks about how she would negotiate those.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, one of the examples you mentioned in the article is Tim Cook at Apple, and that seemed to be a classic business conundrum where you have a conflict between the committed privacy advocates versus others who wanted to prioritize growth, which included extracting more and not less of customer’s personal data. That’s a classic, right? Has he approached the issue effectively? How do you look at him?
PETER T. COLEMAN: I think this was a big success for Tim Cook. I think that… Think about it. Because it was an issue that was tied to terrorism, there had been this act of terrorism, and the government wanted access to the phones of the supposed terrorists and wanted… This was really what it was about. So, you’ve got this macro political thing happening that is acute. They’re really putting pressure on Apple to give access to the data of these phones.
Where do you draw a line in that? I think he was masterful in, A, standing his ground and saying, “Privacy is a human right. Privacy is a critical issue, and it’s something that we, Apple, take very seriously. B, we recognize that creating some service-based products that will protect people’s privacy is also a revenue gain for us.” So, he was able to say no to the government respectfully, but also at the same time recognize that the need to basically create a revenue stream around privacy issues was critical. So, their move into AI and to the use of that to protect us on the phone became a really critical point in his tenure.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let’s do some one or two hypothetical scenarios.
PETER T. COLEMAN: Great.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right. So, let’s say employees of your company want you the CEO to support an LGBTQ initiative, but some executives fear a backlash among the conservative segment of your market that could cost you sales. 2025, what do you do with that?
PETER T. COLEMAN: Well, again, I would want really good minds in the room. I would want people that would be good advocates for one side or the other. For example, I have a colleague named David Schizer who’s at the law school, was the dean of the Law School of Columbia for a while. He’s a conservative lawyer, and he was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s clerk because she wanted to have the smartest conservative that she could find with a legal mind in her office to challenge her at every moment.
So if a thorny issue comes up like this, I feel pressure either internally within my organization to take a position or from the market itself, from the clients and customers. I want to be able to thread that needle effectively. There may not be a simple choice. You may ultimately have to take a stand somewhere, but I think you want to be very clear and transparent about your processes.
So, to do so, I think you need to have the different arguments, the trade-offs, the dilemmas you’re facing, and then ultimately take a stand. Take a position. So with universities, they had to become reconnect themselves to their mission of education, not advocacy. So, universities, I think, set a precedent during the George Floyd movement to make public statements. Now, there’s really a move for them to back off of that and say, “This is not what we do. We’re not supposed to tell people what to think. We’re supposed to teach them how to think.” So, that’s our MO. We need to back off of taking those positions. But again, for every sector, every company, every business landscape will be different. So, I think you have to take serious considerations. If you feel there’ll be blowback, we can’t always anticipate that, but it’s useful to have your best minds particularly challenging your decisions in the room.
ADI IGNATIUS: Let’s do another scenario, and this one I suspect is very common, even if it’s not aired. It could go either way, but let’s do it this way. I work for a white collar company. I am pro Trump. I feel like I can’t voice that in public. I don’t want to pound my chest and be radically pro-Trump, but I’m pro-Trump, but the language in the office is that obviously anyone who knows anything is anti-Trump. I feel I can’t be myself. I can’t speak up. That has to be common. Again, it probably goes both ways. What’s your advice for that?
PETER T. COLEMAN: My inclination is to say… I mean, look, sometimes it’s better to avert conversations over politics if possible, but if the climate has such that suddenly you feel this rift and you feel the us-them dynamic within your workplace, you have to take it on. The truth is there can be great benefits within that if you do it correctly, if you do it effectively. So, I do think that sometimes, you being involved as a leader in your voice and laying out your positions and hearing others’ positions, but really being able to do that and find some kind of balance or synthesis, it’s not easy, because politics is so tribal right now, and people are so passionate. So in order to do it, for example, if you’re going to have a town hall meeting, if you decide to call in a town hall meeting because you feel like this is really an issue that’s derailing people, then you need to set that up and do it well.
Over the last year, the faculty at Columbia, we’re really divided around Gaza, really hostile, attacking each other on social media. It became very destabilizing, and it became very personal. So, I organized a session where I had over 100 faculty in a room for three hours. I had the president and the provost come and sit there but not say anything. I said, “I want you to not be the problem. I want you to listen.” I set up some ground rules and say, “Okay, we’re going to talk, and I want everybody to talk from their personal experience, not their political opinions, but how is this personally affecting you? I want you to respect each other, and I want you to manage your time. Go.”
For three hours, we had this process that was very profound, to be honest with you. You had people that had stopped talking to each other, but really had no sense of how these issues were affecting them personally.
That process was a powerful process for us being able to start to come back together in some sense of solidarity, and recognize the humanity of each other, not just the politics of each other. So, I wouldn’t have done that. The college asked me to do that. I said, “I’ll only do it under these conditions. I have to be in charge. They have to agree to this, and then we have to follow these rules in order to make this a fruitful conversation.” It was, and then frankly, what the leadership did was a week later, they showed up at a faculty meeting and invited all the faculty back and said, “This is what we heard. These are our concerns from our position, and these are the things we want do to move forward.”
So, they were able to move into problem solving later, but not in the moment. In the moment, we had to allow people to speak and be heard.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, this could fall to the CEO, or it almost seems like every company, large companies, could use a chief conflict officer.
PETER T. COLEMAN: Amen. I can’t agree with you more. I do feel like oftentimes these days because of the tensions we’re experiencing in the workplace, that oftentimes these things break out, and we are not aware of who are the peacemakers? Who are the people around NHR, the ombuds, mediators or just people that are respected for their own reasons? Where are our assets? Who are the people that we could call and say, “We feel these divisions are happening, but you seem to be managing it well. How do you do that?” That’s a concept called positive deviance. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, but it is finding what’s already working to manage divisions and conflict well in your organizations, tapping into them proactively and saying, “Let’s think about what kind of infrastructure do we have to do this?” So, it doesn’t all fall on a leader or the leader, although I’d be happy to be a chief conflict officer, I guess. Let’s coin that.
ADI IGNATIUS: It sounds like you’re running for the job, for sure.
PETER T. COLEMAN: Right.
ADI IGNATIUS: So, you write that the best negotiators think in decades, not in… Okay, so let’s get super practical then. For anyone who’s listening to this and thinks, “I would like my organization to consistently display high conflict intelligence,” how do you do that? How do you build that organization?
PETER T. COLEMAN: Well, part of it, again, starts with leaders. It starts with how you model it, how you show it, the language you use around conflict. Part of conflict intelligence is simple. It’s really just recognizing that conflict exists, and it can be beneficial. It can lead to great things, innovation, new ideas, heading off, long-term problems, all of those things. Benefits can come from conflict. If you’re a conflict avoidant or really see conflict as a problem to put away, that in and of itself is a problem. Part of it’s a mindset, but also, part of it is a set of skills. It’s a set of skills about managers being able to manage their own emotions and anxieties and trip wires when they’re there in the hot seat, their capacity to be calm or to at least be mindful when they’re in that, their capacity to work on social skills, to be more adaptive and using different kinds of strategies, all of those things.
These are trainable competencies. These are not necessarily traits. Some of us are born and inclined to be peacemakers, but many peacemakers learned to do that. That’s what George Mitchell said. He didn’t do that. He was a judge. He was the decision maker, and then he had to go and learn how to negotiate. So, even adults can do this, and so there are competencies, basic competencies that we’ve spelled out that help you develop these skills. Leaders need to do it so that they’re modeling it, but ultimately, you can have trainings and tools that can help your staff and your employees change the culture.
So, that’s the short-term and long term. The short-term is that get the leaders thinking and effectively managing conflicts of their monolith. The long-term is you want to socialize people into your organization in ways that say, “Hey, conflict is necessary. It happens,” and it can be a powerful resource if we see it as such.
ADI IGNATIUS: If I’m running a company, I feel like my teams are feeling increasingly tense. Maybe it’s because there seems to be unprecedented, uncertainty, conflict, partisanship in the world. What could I do proactively to help ratchet things down and improve culture to the extent that I can?
PETER T. COLEMAN: Well, so one, again, some of the things I’ve said, particularly modeling, I think of managers, leaders, is helpful because it does establish a certain climate. Social modeling, as we know, is such a powerful influential tool, but there are some bottom-up things. I’m going to give a plug for a group that I’ve been working with for a couple of years called Rapport. This is something Van Jones set up, and this is all like in-roll, workplace flow, nudges. Rapport is it’s like a daily check-in that people have that takes 10 to 15 seconds, and it allows them to talk about their workload, to talk about their energy load and any concerns that they have. So, instead of getting a quarterly survey or an annual survey, bi-annual survey, that is too late where you realize, “Uh-oh, we’re on fire.”
You can see trends at the team level, at the department level all the way up. So, you get this real-time information, but it also allows employees, a, to say, “Yeah, I’m struggling with this,” and it gives managers context. If I have an employee that suddenly is chronically late, and I’m pissed off about this, and then I learn from this information that his kid’s sick, and he’s got serious problems at home that he’s not comfortable talking about, but he’s willing to share this way, it changes the dynamic. So, this is a thing. Rapport is a thing. It’s, again, a AI tool that we’ve been building, which is an attempt to work bottom-up in a daily way to track employees’ concerns and grievances, workload and energy, and then use that information in a either localized way with teams and groups, or a macro way to understand the company so that you can, again, anticipate problems before they become too big.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, Peter, look, I just want to thank you for being on IdeaCast. This is a fascinating conversation, and I think you’ve given everybody a lot to think about.
PETER T. COLEMAN: Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun, and I really appreciate your questions. I think it brought it into a practical realm, and that’s where conflict is these days.
ADI IGNATIUS: I hope you get that job as chief conflict officer.
PETER T. COLEMAN: Thanks. I’ll let you know.
ADI IGNATIUS: That’s Peter Coleman, professor at Columbia’s Teachers College, where he heads up the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution. He wrote the HBR article, The Conflict Intelligent Leader. Next week, Alison will speak with Leslie Perlow on how even the busiest people can find more joy in their day-to-day.
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