How good are you at managing your emotions? Do you spot when the frustration or upset is coming and take steps to reduce it, or do you let it build until it’s far too late? For many people, spotting what’s coming feels impossible. The emotion arrives like an impulsive wave, crashes down and then ebbs away. The problem is, when that happens at work, it can cause untold damage to team communication.
Conflict coaching helps you learn how to better manage your emotional response so you can strengthen your relationships by choosing more constructive communication methods. It can also help you spot when others are about to have an issue.
This blog explores the benefits of applying emotional management and offers you tips about how greater self-awareness can reduce conflict. You’ll find details on:
- Natural emotional reactions and their tendency to escalate conflict
- Conflict profiles: what they are and how they can help
- Ways to prevent emotions from controlling your behaviours, reactions and responses
- How to recognise your emotional triggers quickly
How emotions contribute to conflict
When there’s conflict at work, emotions tend to be the first thing to get affected. You might find yourself contending with disagreements, personality clashes or perhaps there’s a changethat you’re struggling with. It’s natural you’d have an emotional reaction to all that.
Quite often, you’ll see it come out in some form of stress. You might experience frustration, appear difficult, start being short with people, or even go incredibly quiet (which may also lead to internalising feelings of over thinking or resentment). All of these are responses to stress, driven by your emotions.
The difficulty is, emotional reactions result in instinctive behaviour and rarely help calm the situation. When you suddenly find yourself clamming up, crying, or shouting and storming out, it can feel very hard to take a step back to do something different. The result is then damage to relationships as you and others become unable to communicate effectively.
Becoming aware of your emotions, however, and what might trigger them, is the first step to addressing conflict in the workplace. It helps you shift from reactions, (which are likely to make things worse), towards responses, where, albeit briefly, you’ve considered your next step and chosen behaviours more likely to help things improve.
Your conflict profile and how it helps you
There are some simple ways to understand your natural tendency when it comes to conflictsituations. Using a conflict profile, you can spot when you’re likely to feel triggered intodisplaying destructive behaviours. You can also develop strategies to help you adjust your responses and consciously choose constructive behaviours instead.
Knowing your conflict profile helps you understand elements, such as:
- How well you take on someone else’s perspective
- How well you communicate how you’re feeling
- How comfortable you are creating possible solutions to address the issue
- How likely you are to press pause or reflect
- How easy you find it to adapt
When you bring all these elements together, it helps you see which situations are easier or harder for you to manage. It also gives you insight into how you can develop different strategies to manage your own responses. That way, you can help recognise and support other people’s reactions too.
Moving from reaction to response during workplace conflict
Improving your self-awareness is a great first step to managing conflict. Although you may not be able to stop yourself initially, just recognising how you’re feeling gives you a way to analyse what happened later.
You can reflect on what caused your reaction and create strategies to do things differently next time. You can also:
- Take a moment to reflect: It sounds simple. Just stop before you say anything. If you can learn to do that, it can make a big difference in how you manage conflict situations.
- Seek clarification and feedback: Do your best to avoid jumping to conclusions. If someone’s been critical of you, ask questions. What’s their concern? You may find it’s a minor misunderstanding which is quickly resolved.
- Take responsibility for your emotions: Just sharing how you feel can make a real difference in your communication. Let the other person know how what they’ve said has impacted you and why this triggered a reaction in you. Importantly, give yourself time to offer a more considered response.
- Take responsibility for your behaviours: Recognise that your own reactions and responses are likely, and often inadvertently, going to trigger other people. Taking time to understand why that might be provides huge insight into how others may perceive you.
While it’s unlikely you’ll be able to put these strategies in place overnight, regular practice and reflection will help you improve your responses over time.
Can you ever avoid conflict?
The short answer is no. Sometimes you’ll end up in a conflict situation, no matter how well you have trained yourself to respond. Why? Because you can only control your own behaviour. You can’t stop someone else from reacting.
Conflict, no matter how minor or major the issue, is inevitable. It is behaviour that determines how we subsequently feel about it.
Learning how to manage your own responses and recognising your conflict profile can make it easier to understand and support the other person. You might become more skilled at considering their perspective, for example, or better able to propose creative options for next steps. The more times you practice reviewing and reflecting, the more likely you are to take a different approach next time.
If you’d like to explore proactive conflict coaching for yourself or others get in touch today. We can help with many different conflict resolution approaches, so call the HR Detective Hotline on 01278 802329 or email debbie@thehrdetective.co.uk to get the advice and guidance you need.
