Conflict and Disrespect
When faced with conflict or disagreement, how do you respond?
• Do you immediately go to anger and blame? Is it always someone else’s fault?
• Do you absorb the blame yourself, apologise without really understanding?
• Or do you withdraw, then find yourself unable to let go of the confusion?
These reactions have their place and for a fleeting instance of disrespect (being cut off in
traffic, bad customer service), the interaction and response doesn’t need to impact our lives.
But what happens when these interactions happen at work?
Most of us will spend one third of our lives at work and instances of disrespect from the
people we need to spend most of our week with do not feel fleeting, and often do leave an impact. Many of us are pretty bad at confronting disrespect and repairing relationships, we tend to just absorb the pain or feel sad or angry about it in private. Others try to find a
‘debrief’ ally and find themselves re-visiting the issue in a never-ending negative spiral that feeds on itself.
It’s easy to lose sight of how we know we should behave. My strategy for dealing with
instances of disrespect (personal or workplace) follows 4 steps:
1. Assess the situation – for me this is ‘checking my side of the street’. This requires
some self-reflection and vulnerability to determine if I am actually feeding or
contributing to the situation/conflict. It’s worth remembering that an unpleasant
relationship with a co-worker is not happening TO us, it is a dynamic that we are
most likely participating in.
2. Trust myself – if something doesn’t feel ok then I trust myself to identify it fairly (after
step 1)
3. Depersonalise the issue/problem – I think about the behaviour I am not ok with rather
than making it about the person
4. Speak up – this is where I ask for the behaviour to stop.
Step 4 comes with it’s own set of rules, I want to set a conversation up to succeed, so I will
do my best to be calm, honest, polite, clear and non-confrontational. I will have done some preparation and will know what I want to say and why I want to say it, and most importantly I will listen and do my best to really hear what the other person is saying. I will also consider how I am communicating, no matter how careful our words are during conflict, they won’t help if our tone still reflects blame.
My strategy isn’t always easy and sometimes requires re-visiting some of/all of steps 1-3
before I move to step 4. Sometimes step 4 also requires a reframe and repeat, sometimes
step 4 leads into a frustrating step 5 (take it higher). But without the strategy I can get lost in negative emotions and then no-one wins.
We don’t have to like each other or even agree to get along, we only have to respect each
other’s perspectives enough to find the way forward without resorting to blame or
aggression.
