A Guide to Managing Conflict and Creating Resolutions

Leadership Capability: Conflict Management

This blog is part of a 16-part series focused on what capabilities make a strong leader. Sounding Board has identified 16 leadership capabilities that the strongest leaders possess. These were developed from research-backed leadership theories, leadership competencies used for evaluation from top business schools, and 25+ years of practical coaching application. 

When you lead different kinds of projects, people, and personalities, you are bound to come across instances where your team looks to you for guidance in moments of uncertainty or conflict. Workplace conflict is a natural and unavoidable facet of people leadership. 

But conflict doesn’t have to be scary or tumultuous. With effective leadership skills, you can not only manage your people and their conflicts, you can arrive at resolutions that make all parties feel heard and valued.

Conflict management and resolution-making skills are core leadership capabilities for people leaders. What follows is a guide to manage workplace conflicts, and we will explore some key skills that drive impact and successful resolutions. 

Why is conflict management a leadership imperative?

It’s important to understand the relationship between your role as a leader and conflict management. Essentially, why should you prioritize developing this leadership capability? Managing conflict while remaining solutions-driven is a key skill that speaks to a leader’s ability to consistently maintain high productivity and morale in the workplace. 

There are two common types of conflict that often arise at work:

  1. Conflict between individual members of the team; or
  2. Conflicts regarding your team’s established goals.

As a leader, your people look to you for clarity around roles and responsibilities, as well as understanding. So, when things are unclear and conflict bubbles up, it’s imperative that leaders are there to set the tone and provide clarity again — whether that means redistributing tasks, listening to and addressing interpersonal issues, or anything in between. 


The ability to recognize conflicts on your team and resolve them quickly is essential, not only for continued productivity and success, but also for its psychosocial impact on your people. It’s no secret that happier workers produce greater results. So, while conflict can’t be avoided completely and you can’t make everyone happy, as a leader you can take steps to turn these moments into productive opportunities for learning and growth.

A guide to managing conflict

Mastering conflict resolution skills can take time and a significant amount of energy. But with enough practice and by keeping a few simple guidelines in mind, effective conflict management can transform the way you build and lead great teams. Here are a few foundational steps to start with:

  1. Listen: Your first role as a leader is to actively listen to your people with an open mind. Get all sides of the story, and diagnose the conflict. Is it between people and personalities, or does it have something to do with systems or project management? Fully assess the situation before you decide how to intervene.

  2. Identify patterns or triggers: As you lead, over time you may notice patterns or particular triggers for conflicts among your team members. A good leader has insight into these forces and not only addresses the conflict at hand, but takes steps to treat the root cause as well. For example, if there is a team process that repeatedly causes problems, reexamine it to see if things can be done differently so that a similar conflict doesn’t arise again.

  3. Set boundaries: In the process of managing conflict, you might notice unproductive behaviors come up. For instance, maybe some team members are engaging disrespectfully with one another. As a leader, it’s vital that you establish and hold yourself and your people to healthy boundaries so that minor conflicts don’t get out of hand and cause lasting wounds. Defining acceptable behaviors and holding everyone accountable to those standards is one way to ensure that.

  4. Talk it out: Once you’ve assessed the situation and established healthy boundaries, it’s time to talk things out. This is the time to put your communication and facilitation skills to good use. Popular American author, speaker, and researcher Brene Brown calls this step the rumble: “a discussion, conversation, or meeting defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving.”

  5. Establish goals moving forward: Now that you’ve successfully addressed the conflict at hand, it’s important to take some prescriptive or corrective action before the next conflict occurs. A good resolution outlines new boundaries and expectations from which to move forward. This should be a collaborative effort that includes your team members’ voices, and subsequently calls for their accountability as they move onward.

Essential skills that drive impact and resolution

There are a few essential leadership capabilities that come in handy even as you follow the aforementioned steps. They entail many of the intangible, more elusive but no less critical competencies that can make or break leaders as they ascend the career ladder. These competencies are almost always present in the world’s top leaders. 

When it comes to successfully managing conflict and resolutions, these competencies include: 

  • Effective communication: Provide your people with clarity and honesty.
  • Active listening: Actively engage with your team members; ensure they feel heard.
  • Practicing empathy: Put yourself in others’ shoes for a moment; make an effort to understand your people.
  • Establishing neutrality: Every conflict has multiple perspectives. Listen to all without favoring any.
  • Being level-headed: Don’t let emotions get the better of you or your team members.

Keeping these things in mind can have a significant impact on the way you lead your team through rocky moments and prevent future conflicts from arising. Undoubtedly, your team will be better for it.

Putting it all together

At Sounding Board, our expert, certified coaches know that conflict is an inevitable part of the work world. No matter how great the leader, conflict can impact even the most talented peace-maker. But it doesn’t have to leave a lingering sense of negativity in its wake.

We offer high quality leadership coaching services designed to equip you with the tools needed to navigate tumultuous moments, and carry your people forward with confidence. Effective leadership coaching can help you learn how to consistently adopt a solution-driven approach to creating resolutions. To learn more about our leadership coaching services and our award-winning Leader Development Platform, request a demo today.

Subscribe to Our
Newsletter

Stay up to date with new releases, features, how-tos, leadership tips, and more. (Don’t worry, we won’t flood your inbox or share your address.)
Subscribe
Related Articles
REQUEST A DEMO

We Develop The World's Most Impactful Leaders

Sounding Board offers virtual and scalable enterprise learning solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing work environments. Powered by behavioral science and core leadership capabilities, our proven coaching methodology drives measurable business impact.

Niall MacGearailt

SVP of Finance
Niall MacGearailt leads Sounding Board’s finance division as the SVP of Finance and Operations. Niall earned a solid track record of improving P&L and operational expense management for leading companies such as Whirlpool, Logitech, Avaya and most recently Soraa, where he prepared the business for acquisition by leading hi-tech lighting company, Ecosense. In his role, he is responsible for building and leading the finance & relevant operations functions for the company.

Ron Buell

VP of Engineering
Ron Buell is the VP of Engineering at Sounding Board and an accomplished software professional with extensive experience in leadership, software engineering, project management, and product management. Ron has led the development of highly scalable systems and applications across a variety of technologies for companies including OpenFeint (acquired by GREE), Rdio (acquired by Pandora), Lyris Technologies, and Lotus/IBM Software Group. In his role at Sounding Board, Buell is responsible for all engineering efforts in developing, deploying, and maintaining the enterprise software platform and team for the company.

Tommy Perkins

SVP OF SALES, PARTNERSHIP & CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Tommy is at his best helping clients think through complex challenges in order to create a positive impact on their organizations. He thrives when interacting with others whether helping his team succeed or working with clients to build long-term partnerships. He has extensive experience consulting with organizations on driving their employee experience, guiding organizations through change, and working to ensure organizations are moving the needle when it comes to their results.

Most recently, Tommy was a Client Services Leader overseeing some of GP’s most prized accounts on a global level. His responsibilities included overall client growth strategy, retention, and satisfaction. He represented all of GP Strategies’ major business lines including leadership, coaching, and engagement, digital transformation, outsourced services, and technology implementation solutions.

Before GP Strategies, Tommy spent several years with TTEC Digital (formerly rogenSI) where he led the sales team,  eventually becoming the regional Learning & Performance practice leader for North America. While managing the P&L and sales team he also led the largest global relationship for the firm (Deloitte Globally). During his time at TTEC, he focused on delivering blended learning solutions that incorporate technology and hands-on training. Before TTEC Digital, he spent several years dedicated to strength-based leadership disrupting the business landscape regarding performance management and employee engagement with thought leader Marcus Buckingham at The Marcus Buckingham Company / TMBC (now ADP).

Tommy has had the privilege of working with some of the most well-known global brands in professional services, retail, technology, and healthcare including Deloitte, Facebook, Microsoft, Bank of America, Novartis, Gap Inc., lululemon, and Intel. Several projects he led for Deloitte were Global GNPS, New Partner Pivot, NextGen Partner Program Deloitte China, Present to Win, the RPM project on performance management, and Unconscious Bias.

Tommy holds a BS in Health Sciences from Texas A&M University, and an MBA from Universidad del CEMA.

Drive hiring, retention, engagement, and DEI initiatives with Sounding Board’s leadership coaching solution

Sounding Board is the first leadership development platform that combines technology to scale with world-class coaches – empowering companies to solve urgent people-problems and gain a long-term talent advantage.

Join our coaching team

Our expert coaches combine top notch coaching, business acumen and organizational savvy to truly become your leadership “Sounding Board”. Sounding Board coaches are all industry certified and strongly vetted going through a 3 step qualification process and receiving ongoing supervision and development.

Lori Mazan

Co-Founder & CCO Sounding Board, Inc.
Lori Mazan is the Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer of Sounding Board, the preeminent global leadership development enterprise platform changing the face of leadership development through innovative technology for leaders at all levels of an organization. Lori is a seasoned executive coach who has guided hundreds of corporate executives through 1:1 coaching focused on business outcomes and developing critical leadership skills. Client companies advanced by Lori’s expertise include Fortune titans such as Chevron and Sprint as well as high growth and public companies like Intellikine, and Tapjoy, plus 10XGenomics, which became a public company in 2019 while top executives worked with Lori and the Sounding Board team.
Lori has spent the last 25 years coaching C-Suite executives to leadership excellence. Many of those public and private company CEO’s expressed that they would have liked this caliber of coaching earlier in their careers. Inspired by these experiences, Lori joined with Christine to launch Sounding Board as a feedback-driven, cloud-based leadership coaching platform that could maintain best-in-class leadership coaching while lowering costs to make it affordable and scalable for leaders at every level of their careers.
Before founding Sounding Board, Lori received her Masters’ in Adult Educational Psychology/Counseling from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelors’ in Psychology from the University of Virginia. Lori is an educator and has spent over 10 years as a professor of social psychology and group dynamics while acting as the interim Dean of Students at Holy Names University, She is certified by the industry’s gold standard, the Coaches Training Institute, and is a founding member of the Genentech Preferred Network of Coaches. Sounding Board is one of <3% of sole female founded startups receiving venture funding. In 2019 Sounding Board was selected as 1 of 7 startups (out of 100+ applicants) as part of SAP’s HR tech cohort, a group that represents the rising stars of the next-gen HR ecosystem.

Christine Tao

Co-Founder & CEO Sounding Board, Inc.
Christine Tao is the co-founder & CEO at Sounding Board, a Silicon Valley startup redefining how organizations are developing their leaders. Her extraordinarily rapid career growth to executive management in the media, mobile and tech sectors of Silicon Valley became her inspiration for founding Sounding Board. As she began to manage larger teams and be responsible for growing revenues, it became clear that she needed a “sounding board” to coach her on the development of her leadership skills. That’s where her Sounding Board co-founder, Lori Mazan came on the scene. A seasoned executive coach focused on leadership development, Lori coached Christine on real-world leadership skills that had a direct impact on business outcomes. Based on her positive and impactful experience with leadership development, Christine was driven to make leadership development coaching accessible to people at all levels of the organization.
Christine advises several startups, is a budding angel investor and is also a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow, a foundation dedicated to investing in the success and sustainability of women entrepreneurs.
Prior to co-founding Sounding Board, Christine was a Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a venture-backed, leading mobile advertising & publishing network. She led the growth of Tapjoy’s publisher advertising business from 0 to over $100 million in revenues in less than 3 years. Prior to that she led e-commerce partnerships and strategy at YouTube. Christine holds an MBA in Marketing & Operations from Wharton and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.