Have You Built Up Your Conflict Intelligence?

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Adi I'm adi ignatius. I'm alison beard and this is the hbr ideacast. All right, Jen, 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. And 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? This seems like a really relevant topic right now because, you know, there are the typical internal disagreements that might happen between managers fighting for resources or a 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 sort of 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. 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. I imagine that emotional intelligence is a big part of being able to manage conflict, defuse conflict. But it's not the only piece. No, I mean, so there's something called conflict intelligence. And 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. And 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, you know, I'm interested in the culture of conflict I guess I've worked for. For different kinds of companies. You know, some that love the fact that they're no jerks and that that is part of the secret sauce. And I've worked at other companies that think, no, you actually want to encourage the flamethrowers not to be, you know, mean and uncivil, but to maybe bring a sharp edge. 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? You know, what does a healthy culture look like in that context?

I'll say what a mediator says, which is, they're both right. You know, you want basically enough civility and rapport and decency and sort of fun with your colleagues to be able to have, you know, 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 kind of 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 you're. Do you know, 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. And 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 kind of optimal balance of both, and the particular balance of that will change from industry to industry and company to company.

Okay, so you're, you know, 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 talk a little bit about the research and what you're trying to tease out.

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, you know, 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, you know, students research. And that's what we study. And 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. And so it is trying to find that optimal balance that we study.

Okay, and so what have you found? What are the attributes of a leader who is good at handling, diffusing, moving through conflict?

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 sort of 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 kind of next level of skills, which are social skills. You know, can you negotiate effectively? And that can be kind of win win negotiation where we problem solve together, or more competitive negotiation where you advocate for yourself or combining both. Right. So leaders that are particularly effective at this are able to sort of do fine combinations of both where they advocate for a certain position, but they also listen and integrate new ideas and. Right. So it's more of a kind of 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. And 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 sort of different approach is critical.

In your article, you use 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, you know, what is conflict intelligence?

Conflict intelligence builds on emotional intelligence because that is the sort of oftentimes the capacity to, you know, 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. And adaptivity is that, you know, sometimes, you know, 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 kind of 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. Right. So that's critical. It's not just adapting. It's not just shifting with the winds, is 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.

The way we're speaking so far, it sort of 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. And that, you know, that brings into this whole question about that we've been having for, you know, a decade or so, whether CEOs need to weigh in on political and social issues at the moment. You know, a few years ago, we would have all said, yes, they have to, because their employees demand it, their customers demand it, stakeholders demand it, and their silence will be interpreted on social media probably negatively. So you need to kind of enter the fray. You know, I don't think there's one right answer to this, but. But in the context that we're talking about, what do you think about CEO activism these days?

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 aside or not taking aside. 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, are, you know, 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 the many heads, leaders of different types of organizations would step up and say, you know, this is wrong, and we need to be really clear about that. And now with the Supreme Court rulings around affirmative action and things like that, they've been. They've been backing up a little bit. So it's a fraught time to speak on political issues at that level. I think you know, you, 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 tripwires.

Yeah. Well, so then the flip side of this is to what extent we're comfortable with employees, you know, quote unquote, bringing their whole selves to work. And 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, you know, a healthy workforce, et cetera, et cetera. You know, Marc Andreessen said, why would I want somebody bring their whole self to work? How does that, how does that help me? How does that help my company get things done? And we can debate whether or not that's exactly how to get things done or it's not. But, but, but, you know, to what extent do you solve the, help solve the conflict problem by telling people, yeah, leave some of that stuff at home. You don't have to, 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?

I think it's important to have as much as possible transparent conversations around this issue and set expectations. Because if you have a top down policy that says, you know, 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 sort of 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 to get derailed. And so I set up a contract right away with students first, you know, 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 kind of pause it and say, pause this conversation. We'll set up an off ramp, 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. And 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, 45 minutes, with other things on the agenda, they're not.

So it sounds like you would suggest companies do the same thing. Not when a thorny issue comes up.

But before that preparation. Absolutely. I mean, in the article, the HBR article that we're talking about, I start with sort of, you know, build the ground rules, build a sense of rapport and a sense of, you know, 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, and 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.

So inside a business, you know, how do you decide when a conflict requires this level of engagement or mediation? I mean, we're talking about, you know, labor versus management, more subtle issues, the sort of big political, social, you know, what's. What's the threshold for getting involved?

To me, what needs to set the agenda is what are we doing? Like, what's our objective here? What are we trying to do in this meeting or in this department? You know, 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 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, you know, what is our North Star? What are we trying to do? And use that as a litmus test to think about, you know, this is really getting offline or people are getting really heated. And I can sort of feel that coming on. You know, some leaders are, again, much more empathetic, 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, you know, 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.

Who are sort of models, you know, who are some of the great negotiators or examples of really difficult things that got resolved because somebody handled this well. Do you have. Do you have one or two examples of someone who's done it right?

So I tend to work in international organizations, UN and UNICEF and places like that. And so I've had the pleasure and honor of working with like, George Mitchell. And George Mitchell was, you know, a senator and was a judge and but then got involved in peace processes later in his life and got, well, for example, in the Northern Irish Good Friday peace agreements, which was, you know, he went into a 30 year conflict with 3,500 people, you know, killed in the, quote, 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. And he was a master. And he claims that he learned this in politics. He learned this as the, as the majority leader in the Senate. Right. That he had to broker all of these really difficult, tense conflicts, come to some kind of understanding and move people forward. So Mitchell is a great example. Mandela is also, if you've never read 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. Right. 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 was running, brought in to run and save Pepsi. And so she had to sort of do both, figure out how do you honor the sort of new movement and recognize our core business and how do you manage that? And she really had kind of parallel tracks about how she would negotiate those.

So one of the examples you mentioned in the article is Tim Cook at Apple. And that seemed to be like a classic sort of business conundrum where you have a conflict between the sort of committed privacy advocates. Right, yeah. Versus others who wanted to prioritize growth, which included extracting more and not less of customers personal data. Yeah, that's a classic right. Has he approached the issue effectively? How do you look at him?

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. And this was really what it was about. So you've got this kind of macro political thing happening that is acute. They're really putting pressure on Apple to sort of give access to the data of these phones. And how, where do you draw a line in that? And 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. And B, we recognize that creating some kind of service based products that will protect people's privacy is also a revenue gain for us. So it was able to sort of say no to the government respectfully, but also at the same time recognize that the need to, you know, 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. Right. Became a really kind of critical point in his tenure.

Let's do some one or two hypothetical scenarios.

Great.

Okay. So, 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 the, of your market that could, could cost you sales, you know, 2025. What do you, what do you do with that?

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 Schizzer 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. Right. So if a thorny issue comes up like this, I feel pressure either internally within my organization, you know, 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. And 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, you know, like with universities, they had to become reconnect themselves to their mission of education, not advocacy. And so universities, I think, set a precedent during the George Floyd movement to make public statements. And now there's really a move for them to back off of that and say, this is not what we do. Right. We're not supposed to tell people what to think. We're supposed to teach them how to think. So that's our M.O. we need to back off of taking those positions. But again, for every sector, every company, every business landscape will be different. And 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 a room.

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. And I just, I feel, you know, I can't be myself. I can't speak up. That has to be common. And again, it probably goes both ways. What's your advice for that?

My inclination is to say, I mean, look, sometimes it's better to avert conversations over politics if possible, but if the climate is such that suddenly you feel this rift and you feel the US Them dynamic within your workplace, you have to take it on. Right? And 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 and 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, right? Because politics is so tribal right now. People are so passionate. So in order to do it, you know, like, for example, if you're going to have a town hall meeting, if you decide to call a town hall meeting because you feel like this is really an issue that's derailing people, then you need to sort of set that up and do it. Well, over the last year, the faculty at Columbia were really divided around Gaza, really hostile, attacking each other on social media. It became very destabilizing, and it became very personal. And 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. And 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. And for three hours, we had this process that was very profound, to be honest with 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 kind of 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 sort of follow these rules in order to make this a fruitful conversation. And 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 to 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 so.

This could fall to the CEO or. It almost seems like every company, large companies could use a chief conflict officer.

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're not aware of. Who are the kind of 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 wall 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 cheap conflict officer, I guess.

Yeah, it sounds like you're running for the job for sure.

Yeah.

Okay, so. So let's get super practical then. You know, for anyone who's listening to this and thinks, yeah, I would like my organization to consistently display high conflict intelligence. How do you do that? How do you build that organization?

Well, part of it again starts with leaders. You know, 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 ex and it can be beneficial. Right? It can lead to great things, innovation, new ideas, you know, heading off long term problems, all of those things. Benefits can come from conflict. If you're a conflict avoidant or you know, really sort of see conflict as a problem to put away, that is in and of itself is a problem. So it's part of it, 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, you know, anxieties and tripwires when they're there in the hot seat, right? 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. Right. Some of us are born and inclined to be peacemakers, but many peacemakers learn to do that. You know, that's what George Rachel said. He didn't do that. He was a judge, he was the decision maker. And then he had to go and like learn how to negotiate. Right? So even adults can do this. And so there are competencies, basic competencies that we've spelled out that help you develop these skills. And leaders need to do it so that they're modeling it. But ultimately you can have, you know, trainings and tools that can help your staff and your employees change the culture. Right. So that's the short term, long term. The short term is that get the leaders thinking and effectively managing conflicts of their model. It 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.

If I'm running a company, you know, I feel like my, my teams are feeling increasingly tense and maybe it's because there seems to be unprecedented, you know, uncertainty, conflict, partisanship in the world. What can I do proactively to help kind of ratchet things down and improve culture to the extent that I can?

Well, so one again is 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, 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. This is all like in role, workplace flow nudges and Rapport is a, it's kind of like a, a daily check in that people have that takes 10 to 15 seconds and it, it allows them to talk about their workload, to talk, talk about their energy load and any concerns that they have. And so instead of getting a quarterly survey or an annual survey, biannual survey, that is too late, right? You realize, oh, we're on fire. You can see sort of trends at the team level, at the department level, all the way up. So you get this kind of real time information. But it also allows employees a, to sort of say, yeah, I'm struggling with this and it gives managers context, right. If I have an employee that suddenly is, you know, chronically late and I'm pissed off about this and then I learned from this information that yeah, his kid's sick, you know, 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, you know, Rapport is a thing. It's a, again a kind of 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 in a macro way to understand the company so that you can again anticipate problems before they become too big.

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.

Well, thank you. It was a lot of fun and I really appreciate your questions.

Yeah, I hope you get that job as Chief Conflict Officer.

Thanks. I'll let you know.

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, Allison will speak with Leslie Perlow on how even the busiest people can find more joy in their day to day. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe to and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HBR Mobile app, the weekly Exclusive Insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR Online. Just head to hbr.org subscribe so thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Du, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Adi Ignatius.