**Why This Matters**

Many leaders default to being "nice" rather than effective. This well-intentioned approach carries significant costs.

A client expressed that her team was falling apart because two of her best people couldn't be in the same room together, and it was adversely affecting the rest of the team.

Here's what she discovered through our coaching conversation: The problem wasn't the conflict. The problem was and is how we've been taught to handle it.

What I'm Seeing in Leadership Coaching

In 20 years of coaching leaders, I've never seen workplace conflict quite like this. The data backs up what I'm witnessing: DDI's 2024 analysis of over 70,000 manager candidates found that 49% fail to demonstrate effective conflict management skills, while the Workplace Peace Institute's 2024 survey revealed that 32% of workplace conflict occurs between management levels.

But here's the twist that catches most leaders off-guard: the highest-performing teams I work with don't avoid conflict. They've learned to use it as fuel for innovation and stronger relationships. Research from the CPP Global Human Capital Report confirms this: 76% of workplace conflicts result in positive outcomes when managed effectively.

Think about it. When was the last time your team had a really good "argument" about the best way forward? Not personal attacks or power plays, but genuine debate about ideas, priorities, or approaches? If you can't remember, that might be your first red flag.

The "Nice Leader" Trap

I see this pattern routinely in my coaching practice. Smart, well-intentioned leaders who think their job is to keep everyone happy. They avoid tough conversations, smooth over disagreements, and wonder why their teams seem disengaged or why the same problems keep surfacing.

When you prioritize being liked over being effective, you're not actually being kind. You're creating an environment where the loudest voices win, diverse perspectives get silenced, and real problems go underground until they explode.

One of my clients had this epiphany: "I realized I wasn't protecting my team from conflict. I was protecting myself from discomfort."

The Four Faces of Workplace Conflict

Not all conflicts are created equal, and understanding what you're dealing with makes all the difference in how you respond. In my coaching work, four distinct types are usually prevalent:

Task conflicts happen when people disagree about goals or priorities. Your marketing director wants to focus on brand awareness while your sales leader is pushing for lead generation. Both are right from their perspective.
Process conflicts emerge around how work gets done. Think remote versus in-office debates, or different approaches to project management. These often mask deeper questions about trust and autonomy.
Status conflicts revolve around authority and recognition. Who gets to lead the new initiative? Whose expertise takes precedence? These hit our ego and identity hard.
Relationship conflicts feel personal because someone feels disrespected or undervalued. But here's what I've learned: most relationship conflicts started as one of the other three types and weren't addressed early enough.

Most workplace conflicts involve multiple types simultaneously. That's why simple solutions rarely stick.

A Four-Step Framework for Leaders

When conflict shows up in your team (notice I said when, not if), here's a suggested approach:

Get Curious Before You Get Certain: Your first instinct will be to judge the situation and pick sides. Resist it. Instead, ask yourself: "What might be driving each person's behavior?" The most generous interpretation is usually closer to the truth than your initial frustration.
Diagnose the Real Issue: Peel back the surface drama to understand what's actually happening. Are they disagreeing about the goal, the method, who's in charge, or feeling respected? Often what looks like a personality clash is really about unclear expectations or competing priorities.
Get Clear on Your Primary Goal: This is where most leaders get stuck. They want everything: project success, team harmony, individual growth, and organizational alignment. Where possible, pick your top priority. It will guide every decision that follows.
Choose Your Response Strategically: Sometimes, the right answer is to let it go. Sometimes you need to facilitate a conversation. Sometimes you need outside help. But make it a choice, not a default reaction.

The Psychological Safety Balance

As I've written in other LinkedIn articles and posts, here's where modern leadership gets nuanced. You want people to feel safe speaking up, challenging ideas, and taking risks. The sweet spot leaders need to explore in the realm of psychological safety is this: people should feel completely safe to raise important concerns, question decisions that affect their work, and admit mistakes. AND they should also know there are consequences for poor performance and there is accountability for results. These are not mutually exclusive. Research shows that teams with high psychological safety and high accountability report higher performance and lower interpersonal conflict.

One client described it perfectly: "My team knows they can disagree with me about anything work-related, but they also know I expect excellence in execution."

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me give you a real example from my coaching work (details changed for confidentiality). A tech team was constantly missing deadlines, and finger-pointing was destroying morale. The team lead kept trying to smooth things over with team-building activities and motivational talks.

When we dug deeper, the client discovered the conflict wasn't about personalities. It was about fundamentally different approaches to quality versus speed, plus unclear decision-making authority when trade-offs were needed.

Instead of a solution around "team building" (which, in most instances, is NOT worth the investment in time and other resources), the client surfaced a solution focused on priorities, establishing clear decision rights, and creating a process for handling future trade-off discussions. The "personality conflicts" began to resolve within several weeks.

Your Action Plan for This Week

If any of this resonates, here's what I'd recommend for you in the near term:

Identify one simmering conflict in your team that you've been avoiding or hoping will resolve itself.
Ask yourself: What type of conflict is this really? What's my primary goal in addressing it? What's one conversation I could have this week to better understand the different perspectives?
Start small: You don't need to solve everything at once. One honest conversation about what's really happening can shift the entire dynamic.
Get support if you need it: Some conflicts require an outside perspective or mediation. That's not a failure; it's smart leadership.

The leaders I work with who excel at conflict resolution share one trait: they've stopped seeing conflict as a problem to be eliminated and started viewing it as information to be processed. They know that healthy teams disagree, debate, and sometimes get frustrated with each other. The difference is they do it in service of shared goals rather than individual egos.

And, by the way, your team is watching how you handle conflict. They're learning from your example whether it's safe to bring up problems, whether different viewpoints are valued, and whether this is the kind of place where they can do their best work.

References

DDI. (2024, September 24). New DDI data shows 49% of emerging leaders struggle with managing conflict in the workplace [Press release]. DDI Global Leadership Company.

Workplace Peace Institute. (2024, April). State of workplace conflict in 2024: Insights and solutions. Workplace Peace Institute.

CPP Global. (2008). Workplace conflict and how businesses can harness it to thrive: CPP Global Human Capital Report. CPP, Inc.

Workplace Peace Institute. (2024, April). State of workplace conflict in 2024: Insights and solutions. Workplace Peace Institute.

Cappelli, P., Eldor, L., & Hodor, M. (2023). The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance. Knowledge at Wharton.

Center for Creative Leadership. (2024, May 8). How leaders can build psychological safety at work. Center for Creative Leadership.

The Conflict Conversations Every Leader Needs to Have, But Many Avoid