The Reason Your Dispute Management Training Continues to Disappointing: A Brutal Reality Check
With fifteen years of consulting in conflict resolution, I’m fed up of seeing organizations throw away enormous amounts on superficial training that appears enlightened but produces absolutely no measurable results.
Here’s the harsh truth: most conflict resolution training is based on wishful thinking about how individuals genuinely behave when they’re angry.
Standard mediation training assumes that humans in disagreements are basically rational and just need improved conversation skills. Such thinking is absolute rubbish.
We consulted with a major manufacturing corporation in Melbourne where employee conflicts were losing them enormous amounts in reduced productivity, absences, and worker departures.
Executives had invested heavily in extensive mediation training for supervisors. The training included all the typical approaches: empathetic listening, “personal” messages, discovering mutual interests, and cooperative issue resolution.
Appears reasonable, correct?
The consequence: disagreements kept happening exactly as they had been, but now they consumed much longer to resolve because supervisors were trying to use useless processes that didn’t handle the actual problems.
Here’s what actually occurs in actual disputes: people don’t become angry because of dialogue issues. They’re upset because of real, specific issues like biased handling, resource distribution, workload distribution, or inadequate leadership.
Organizations cannot “talk” your way out of structural problems. Every the careful listening in the world cannot address a problem where a single employee is really being overloaded with work while their colleague is coasting.
At that Brisbane manufacturing company, we eliminated 90% of their existing conflict resolution training and substituted it with what I call “Practical Dispute Management.”
Rather than training supervisors to facilitate lengthy conversation meetings, we showed them to:
Quickly recognize whether a dispute was personal or organizational
For systemic problems, focus on changing the underlying structures rather than attempting to talk employees to accept unfair circumstances
With genuine interpersonal issues, create specific standards and results rather than expecting that talking would magically fix personality clashes
The outcomes were rapid and significant. Staff conflicts decreased by over 60% within a quarter, and resolution times for persistent disputes got faster by nearly 70%.
However this is one more major flaw with conventional dispute management training: it presupposes that all conflicts are worth resolving.
That is wrong.
After extensive time in this field, I can tell you that roughly 20% of employee conflicts involve people who are essentially difficult, toxic, or refusing to improve their behavior regardless of what approaches are implemented.
Trying to “resolve” disputes with those employees is beyond being useless – it’s significantly damaging to company culture and wrong to other staff who are attempting to do their work professionally.
The team consulted with a medical organization where certain team was getting completely disrupted by a senior staff member who wouldn’t to adhere to new procedures, constantly fought with team members, and created every department meeting into a battleground.
Supervision had attempted multiple mediation meetings, brought in outside facilitators, and actually offered personal support for this employee.
None of it was effective. The person persisted in their toxic conduct, and good team members started leaving because they were unable to endure the constant conflict.
We convinced leadership to stop working to “fix” this situation and rather work on protecting the remainder of the team.
They created clear behavioral standards with prompt consequences for breaches. When the toxic individual maintained their actions, they were terminated.
This improvement was immediate. Department happiness increased dramatically, productivity improved substantially, and they ceased experiencing good workers.
This point: occasionally the right “conflict resolution” is getting rid of the source of the problem.
Now, let’s talk about a different critical problem in standard conflict resolution methods: the fixation with “win-win” outcomes.
This sounds pleasant in principle, but in reality, many business conflicts concern legitimate competing interests where someone needs to prevail and others needs to compromise.
When you have restricted budget, competing priorities, or core disagreements about strategy, pretending that every person can get all they desire is dishonest and squanders significant quantities of time and energy.
We consulted with a IT business where the sales and technical groups were in ongoing conflict about product development focus.
Marketing wanted capabilities that would assist them secure sales with large clients. Technical teams wanted working on infrastructure improvements and software stability.
Each teams had reasonable points. Each priorities were crucial for the company’s success.
Management had worked through numerous “cooperative” solution-finding workshops working to find “mutually beneficial” solutions.
Their consequence: months of meetings, zero clear decisions, and increasing tension from all teams.
I assisted them create what I call “Strategic Priority Setting.” Instead of trying to assume that every goal could be concurrently critical, management set definite regular focuses with obvious trade-offs.
For Q1, sales priorities would receive precedence. During quarter two, development priorities would be the concentration.
Both groups understood clearly what the focus were, during which periods their requirements would be prioritized, and what compromises were being chosen.
Tension among the departments virtually disappeared. Efficiency increased significantly because staff could concentrate on specific goals rather than constantly fighting about focus.
This is what I’ve concluded after years in this industry: good dispute management doesn’t come from about ensuring everyone happy. Good management is about creating obvious structures, equitable procedures, and consistent enforcement of rules.
Most organizational conflicts stem from vague requirements, inconsistent handling, inadequate information about changes, and poor structures for handling reasonable complaints.
Fix those fundamental problems, and the majority of disputes will end themselves.
Continue working to “resolve” your way out of systemic failures, and you’ll use years dealing with the recurring disputes again and repeatedly.
This option is in your hands.
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