When you lead people, you are sure to encounter conflict. Whether between other people on your team or between you and someone else, conflict insists on your attention because it affects productivity and morale – two things you are responsible for as a leader. Aware of that responsibility, good leaders learn to lean into conflict and get it resolved because that’s good for business; it’s also good for the team and the leader’s wellbeing.

Most people, instead of resolving conflict, tend to avoid it. If a situation risks losing a friendship or being liked, most people will try to manage conflict, or at least control the effects of the way conflict makes them feel. Some try to avoid conflict by pretending it isn’t present and hoping it goes away. Others like to take sides, hoping to build likeability and rapport with their friends. Many try to smooth things over by attempting to manage people’s emotions. Still others are passive aggressive about how they want their teams to behave by hinting around instead of never really coming out and expressing what they want.

But that’s not leadership; it’s politics.

Rather than rely on your instincts to resolve conflict among your teams (which almost always looks like the description above), a leader is intentional about a plan of action whenever dissension arises.

If you want to resolve conflict like a leader, then here are 3 mindsets for you to to consider and adopt:

1. Disagreement does not have to become conflict.

1. Much “conflict” is the result of two people who do not know how to disagree with one another.
2. Disagreement is bound to happen, but it doesn’t have to turn into a fight to be right, to exercise power, or to make one better than the other. These are all internal, unresolved, personal struggles that fuel conflict whenever a disagreement is present.
3. As a leader, you must coach your people to disagree for the good of the organization:
   ⦁ Do you encourage your people to voice their opinions and ideas, even if they are not in agreement with someone else’s?
   ⦁ What “tone” do you teach your people to use when they disagree with one another?
   ⦁ Is compromise an acceptable, even desirable outcome?
   ⦁ Do you, the leader, praise and reward good solutions that come from disagreement?
   ⦁ If two people can happily disagree and remain friends and colleagues, what does that look like?
   ⦁ When you can encourage disagreement so that it does not turn into conflict, you are leading your team and organization in a healthy, productive way.

2. You cannot resolve conflict that is not your own.

There is only one way to resolve conflict: The involved parties get together, express themselves unarguably, listen to one another deeply, and then come to an agreement that they are both willing to keep with one another.

If you read the paragraph above once again, you’ll notice that nowhere does it say that a third party should mediate. (That’s you, dear leader!) If you try to get involved with conflict that is not your own, you’ll make it worse. Much, much worse.

A good leader doesn’t even try. It’s not your job to manage everyone else’s feelings about one another. There is only one thing that you, the leader, should be concerned with, and that’s mindset #3…

3. You want productivity; you do not want to babysit.

If you are a leader or manager, your only concern should be that your team produces what it’s supposed to produce. Your people do not have to like one another or become best friends who meet at the bar after work (but it’s nice when they do!). Your people are all going to have different backgrounds, education, expertise, family dynamics, and internal issues. If you try to manage all of their feelings and experiences, you’ll turn into an amateur psychologist who sloppily and ineffectively becomes the therapist or parent that your team member learns to depend on to make him or her feel better. There’s a codependency that happens when you are their hero, continually having to rescue them from being a victim.

If this is you, then you are not their leader; you are their babysitter. You don’t want that, do you?

Instead, don’t you want your people to do their jobs and do them well? If so, then lead and manage so that can happen and stay out of everyone’s emotional dysfunction.

Only when you accept and adopt these mindsets within yourself can you be a leader who resolves conflicts rather than immerses yourself in them.

You should only get involved when conflict affects productivity. Here is how a leader does it:

4. Go to all involved.

1. If A and B are fighting about something, then get A and B both together to get it resolved.
2. Non-leaders tend to go to A to find out A’s experience and side of the story. The non-leader then goes to B to hear theirs. Then they go back to A to share B’s grievances, and back to B to share A’s. The non-leader then comes up with some sort of half-solution that he shares with A. If A grudgingly agrees, then the non-leader goes to B and tries to gain his commitment to it. A and B settle down for a while, and the non-leader sighs in relief, having avoided another confrontational catastrophe.
3. What a mess!
4. If you are a leader who wants to actually gain resolution in a conflict, then get A and B around the table with you and deal with the conflict directly with everyone involved at the same time. Doing this will save you the time and trouble of chasing truth around the office. A cannot say something that isn’t true because B is actually there to refute it. Neither A or B can claim that you are on their “side” when you are meeting with them both simultaneously.

5. Use Assertive Inquiry.

1. Assertive Inquiry is a technique that was created by the organizational psychologist, Adam Grant. Assertive inquiry means that you enter a conversation or meeting with the confidence of knowing what you want or want to say (assertive), and also the curiosity and humility to ask the others present about their ideas and opinions (inquiry). The result is peaceful compromise that accomplishes infinitely more than what usually occurs in a boardroom.
2. When it comes to resolving conflict, a leader is both assertive and inquisitive.
3. Get everyone involved around the table and be assertive about what you want and then coach them how to do it. Things like:
4. “This is how we disagree in this office.”
5. “We will go directly to the one involved instead of talking about them to everyone else.”
6. “When disagreeing, we will be candid and speak unarguably.”
7. “We will remain open to the opposite side of the story we tell ourselves.”
8. “We will treat one another with respect.”
9. “We will not let this affect our work.”
10. “We will behave professionally in the office.”
11. And so on.
12. After asserting and coaching what you want, ask each of them if they are willing to commit to it. This is the inquiry part.
13. “Behaving professionally in the office means that we don’t swear at one another when we disagree. Kevin, can you commit to that? Lisa, can you also commit to that?
14. ”Be sure to pause and wait for their agreement or disagreement. It’s in that time of pause that you will know whether or not they truly want to commit to something, or if they still have things left unsaid. If that’s the case, go back to the assertion part and give them space to assert themselves completely.
15. But don’t leave the table until you have agreements from everyone as to how you are going to behave going forward.

6. Hold each other accountable for your agreements.

1. The hard work is done! Now all you have to do is hold everyone accountable for the agreements they made when you met with them.
2. When you resolve conflict like a leader, your conversations stop being about the subjective “he said, she said,” or feelings and emotions, or friendships and collaborations. Instead, your conversations are about objective agreements and productivity. You are relating to your people as a leader, not their babysitter, and everyone will enjoy the ease with which conflicts get resolved.