How To Not Strangle Your Coworkers: Resolving Conflict with Collaboration

src: How To Not Strangle Your Coworkers: Resolving Conflict with Collaboration - Arthur Doler - 2025-10-30

A disagreement becomes a conflict when:

1. it’s important
2. you are interdependent with each other
3. you both believe the evidence is on your side

Avoiding conflict does not benefit in the long term. Conflict is beneficial for us. Psychological safety must be established at the interpersonal level:

1. set the stage: frame the work, emphasize purpose
2. invite participation: demonstrate situational humility, practice inquiry
3. respond productively: express appreciation, destigmatize failure, sanction clear violations

Conversational receptiveness: use H.E.A.R technique:

• Hedging: use hedging words, like “perhaps”, “sometimes”, “maybe”
• Emphasizing Agreement: find statement you agree upon and stating those out loud
• Acknowledgement: active listening; instead of thinking about the thing you’re going to say next, you actually process what they’re saying and then restate it back to them in your own language
• Reframing to the Positive: look at the positive aspect
  • Ex: instead of “I hate it when people interrupt me”, “I really love it when people let me finish my thoughts”

Confrontation styles:

• avoiding:
  • strictly passive approach
  • hope that problems solve themselves
  • change subject, skip meeting or leave the group altogether
• yielding:
  • passive, pro-social approach
  • solve conflicts by giving in to others’ demands
  • could be either genuine conversion or superficial compliance
• fighting:
  • active, pro-self approach
  • use competitive powerful tactics to intimidate, mandates, challenges, accusing, complaining
• cooperating:
  • active, pro-social and pro-self approach
  • identifies the issues underlying the dispute & works to identify a solution for both
  • attempts to get both sides to consider each person’s outcomes
• conciliating
  • a mixed approach
  • attempts to win over others by accepting some (but not all) of their demands

“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”

Note

The speaker talked briefly of Double loop learning. Interesting concept