One of the toughest things to handle in the workplace is interpersonal conflict. It’s no surprise that a recent study showed 70% of respondents were avoiding difficult conversations in their workplace. This is for many and often personal reasons, but one of the commonly reported factors is that it’s the emotional intensity that is difficult to deal with.
Interpersonal conflict can bring up a whole host of challenging emotions like fear or anger. While there’s nothing wrong with emotions, in fact, they provide important information for us and are a fundamental part of our human experience, they can get in the way of how we work. When we ignore them or try to pretend they don’t exist, they can become especially problematic.
In the workplace, there’s one key ingredient in your organization that can help when working with conflict and emotions that come up. And that’s TRUST.
At an organizational level, if you build a foundation of trust, you can get out in front of what can make conflict destructive and potential emotional reactions. This comes from Charles Feltman’s work and his book called the Thin Book of Trust – his definition of trust is profound and used by people like Brene Brown.
He defines trust as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to the actions of someone else”.
Feltman talks about trust in the workplace where his research and experience has shown time and time again, when there is interpersonal conflict, politics, the inability to get things done or they’re staying the same, people not caring or having negative attitudes, they are almost always traced back to a breakdown in trust and typically accompanied by challenging emotions. On the other hand, successful organizations where people are innovative, have constructive conflict or debates about ideas and how to solve problems, and have fun working together, he usually finds strong trusting relationships. It’s also a part of having psychological safety in the workplace or not.
This kind of trust exists on a continuum and is contextual – it may be different across people or situations and may change over time depending on the circumstances. On the other side of this continuum is distrust and the definition is essentially the opposite of trust – it is a choice not to make yourself vulnerable to another person’s actions.
It is a general assessment that what is important to me is not safe with this person in this (or any other) situation. When we make this assessment, consciously or unconsciously, we tend to want to protect ourselves, and if we start “protecting” ourselves, the strategies we’re likely to use are not necessarily constructive. These might be what are considered destructive behaviours in conflict – avoiding, attacks, withholding, demeaning – behaviours that are likely to reduce the other person’s trust in us.
Now people typically rate their own trustworthiness higher than others – so keep in mind, people may be thinking this about you as well. Others are acting on their assessments of how trustworthy you are, not how trustworthy you believe yourself to me. These misconceptions may create actual perceptions.
Feltman includes four components of trust and what people base their assessments on – sincerity, reliability, competence, and care.
- Sincerity – “I mean what I say, say what I mean, and act accordingly”. This is an assessment of our honesty, that our actions line up with our words, and this helps set up future expectations from those we work with.
- Reliability- “you can count on me to deliver what I promised”, meaning we follow through with the commitments we’ve made.
- Competence – “I know I can do this, and I need to learn how to do that”. This also includes doing the work of thinking through something or getting evidence, we’ve demonstrated our capabilities, or that we’re delegating to the right people and showing that we put our trust in the right place.
- Care – “we’re in this together”. This is the assessment that we’ve got the other person’s interest in mind as well as our own when we make decisions and take actions. This is the one that is arguably the most important for building lasting trust.
The four criteria are all behaviour-based criteria – it’s not just a sense of the person, but it’s “what are they doing” that the assessment is based on. You might notice there’s a recurring theme in these of openness and clarity which is also very important to building safety through trust.
A note on clarity – people may define these things differently in the same way that they define trust or safety differently – so I will encourage you to reflect on the following:
What indicates to you that there is trust in a relationship? (For our purposes we’re talking about a workplace relationship but you can ask this for any relationship.)
How would you respond if someone you work with told you they didn’t trust you? What could you ask them to in order to understand their specific concerns?
What behaviours or actions have led to your assessment of distrust of another person? *This can be helpful if you want them to rebuild trust with you, or it may give you a sense of what else you needed in that situation.
When you’re in a conflict and it’s bringing up some challenging emotions, ask yourself – “what do I not trust here?”
When thinking about how you’d like to deal with the situation – “what would I need to trust to use a more constructive strategy in conflict” like expressing emotions or reaching out.
Now I’m in no way saying that this is all the responsibility of an employee to take on entirely – building trust is also about following through on policies and holding people accountable when necessary. One of the reasons people avoid conflict is because they don’t think anything will change in the organization.
So as a manager, what can you do to encourage trust between employees, management, and with the organization? Where has trust been breached in the past that you may need to address?
When there’s been a breach of trust, it’s important to rebuild it and that’s not a quick process – it involves consistency and repetition of the components above, and ongoing conversations about the experiences of those involved.
Trust is fundamental to our sense of safety, autonomy and dignity as human beings. It is a critical part of every relationship we have, and that includes ones in our workplace. When we trust someone we feel more safe with them. And that is where if an emotional reaction comes up, we can handle it in a constructive way and have some of the more challenging conversations we need to. So when we’re having or seeing an emotional reaction in a dispute, consider the possibility that there’s been a breakdown of trust and how you might handle it with that approach.
For more tips on how to handle conflict in your workplace, download our free guide here.
Sarah Albo is an HR Consultant and Psychological Health and Safety Advisor who helps employees and organizations manage conflict. She founded Novel HR to bring a consulting focus on the link between interpersonal conflict and mental health in the workplace. Her role is to help organizations assess and implement PH&S principles to support the mental health of their employees and comply with relevant legislation. She also provides coaching or mediation for workplace disputes that arise from interpersonal conflict or mental health issues.
