Managing Conflict in a Leadership Role

“One of the most difficult challenges leaders of all organizations face is managing diverse perspectives.”

I grabbed this from a recent Harvard Business Review piece. Frankly, it could have been written by just about any of the organizational leaders I work with these days.

We all know that having people on a team with different viewpoints is healthy and lends itself to diversity and productivity. On the other hand, we also know that a harmonious culture is pretty important in the workplace. So in a time like the present, when people seem to have a lot of intense opinions, leaders are fine-tuning the ol’ balancing act.

A survey conducted in 2021 found that 89% of respondents from all kinds of companies and industries regularly experience conflict at work. The percentage of people professionally coached to deal with conflict on the job is much lower.

Yet while many people prefer to avoid conflict when they can, it’s a simple fact of leadership that learning to deal with interpersonal conflict is part of the job, and it must be modeled from the top. Managed properly, differing viewpoints are really at the core of the theory “the sum of the parts are greater than the whole”.