Conflict as a Career Management Tool!

Clients often call me when they are facing a conflict of some type in their careers. Although a dictionary defines a conflict as a fight, battle, or a prolonged struggle between opposing forces, a more benign and psychological view defines it as an emotional distress due to the opposition of incompatible wishes in a person or between two parties. Regardless of its definition, how we deal with a conflict in our career can define the course of our careers and even our lives.

Let me explain!

When people confront a conflict, especially when it involves their superiors or even peers the normal response is to back down and let the matter take its own course. Many, then deal with its aftermath in a way that is compatible with their emotional makeup and their resilience. Although such an approach may be less stressful in the moment, it causes untold grief and stress of a different kind in the long term—its toxic fallout can be bad to your health and to your psyche.

When you surrender yourself in a conflict to the—sometimes arbitrary—wishes of others, even though you know that you have been harmed, it causes us all to diminish internally and makes us angry with ourselves for not having taken a stronger stand and not having stated our position more forcefully. So, in the end such docile actions in a conflict cause us harm in two ways: our immediate acceptance—even surrender—in a situation, where we were not able to make our case or to prevail; and the long-term deleterious effects on our own psyche of how we let others railroad us in a situation, where we were unwittingly or even deliberately harmed. When we experience this we even martyr ourselves to become an embodiment of an esprit de l’escalier, long after we have lost the opportunity to remedy the situation.

Most of such knee-jerk reaction to a conflict, especially at work, results from our inability to manage our emotions when dealing with matters that affect us. So, if we are able to look at our situation that is resulting in a conflict and deal with it after removing our emotional response to it, it becomes much easier to deal with it in a rational way. If you let your emotions overrun you in dealing with a conflict, you are often likely to end up with a short straw. So, the first rule of engagement in a conflict is to step back and to deal with the situation in an emotionally devoid manner.

Here are some others:

1. When you are blindsided at work by anyone, including your boss, do not go into an emotional overdrive. Calm down and assess what the best response is. If you are overwrought by emotions by the unexpected and outrageous behavior of someone, including your boss or a superior, calm down and see if you can buy some time and come back to deal with it later. Once your emotional outburst is in full display you have lost the opportunity to remedy the situation and you end up harming yourself even more, even though you have been harmed in the first place.

2. In an emotionally charged situation, where you are not able to provide a cogent response, quietly retreat and look at the facts in an objective way. Give the other party the benefit of the doubt and use the facts to build your case for argument.

3. Look at each situation of conflict as a career or brand-building opportunity. How you deal with the conflict that confronts you can set the stage for your future treatment not just where you work, but where you go. Once you are armed with the confidence of dealing with a conflict and leveraging it to your advantage, you have learned a life skill that will go wherever you go. So, do not avoid an opportunity to learn when you get in a conflict. People are often defined by how they come out of such situations; they can make or break you. This is the risk worth taking to grow and to learn from the available opportunity.

4. Once you have mastered the process of dealing with conflict on your terms, “losing” in negotiating through the conflict takes a secondary position to learning how to marshal your arguments for future benefit. In the case of one client she was promoted to a manager role after being a star performer as an individual contributor. She continued to do her best during the first year as a manager with absolutely no guidance or feedback from her boss. At the review time, he told her that he was demoting her back to her previous role, as she had failed as a manager. I coached her to confront her manager and to tell him that he had failed her as her boss, since he refused to coach or mentor her during her first year in her new role. When he realized the logic of the argument, he decided to give her another chance for her to succeed. This time around they both were engaged in constant feedback on her performance as a manager. My client learned a valuable lesson in the process. From then on her boss had a different respect for her and what she did.

5. When you realize that the party doing the harm is doing it merely because they are in a position to do so, acknowledge that during your discussion with them by saying something like, I realize that you really do not have a cogent argument to defend your position, but are merely doing this because you can. I am OK with it if that is how you see it. After saying this walk away and decide how you want to deal with the fallout. You always have an option to resign and leave. But, if you do, do so only after stating your case!

Most people shy away from a conflict and decide to live with its outcome. If, instead, you look at such situations to build your brand and stand up for yourself, you’ll walk away enriched by a rewarding experience in self-defense and self-respect!

Good luck!