Conflict Is Rarely the Problem

One of the questions I find myself asking more and more, when I’m called into a workplace conflict, is whether the conflict itself is actually the problem.

Most people find that question surprising. Conflict is usually the reason I’ve been called in. Two colleagues are no longer speaking. A manager and an employee have reached an impasse. A leadership team has split into camps. Everyone is focused on the visible tension, and understandably so: conflict is uncomfortable, disruptive, and expensive.

When organisations describe a conflict, they almost always describe it in terms of people. Someone is difficult. Someone is resistant. Someone is undermining a colleague. Someone has a personality disorder (”they’re a NARCISSIST”). The conversation becomes focused on personalities, behaviours, motives, blame. Occasionally that is what’s going on. There are individuals whose behaviour genuinely drives workplace dysfunction. But more often, I find myself wondering why intelligent, capable, well-intentioned people have become trapped in a pattern that none of them seems able to escape on their own.

A useful test

Imagine both individuals left the organisation tomorrow.

Would the problem disappear with them?

In my experience, the answer is frequently no. The names change. The faces change. But within a year or two, a remarkably similar conflict re-emerges, involving different people. That possibility should give leaders pause, because it points to something the org chart isn’t showing them.

Over the years I’ve refined my approach around this. There is the painful interpersonal conflict in front of me, which needs to be eased. And there are the conditions that gave rise to it, which, if left unexamined, stay exactly as they were and quietly fuel the next conflict, and the one after that. So I work at both levels: the human and interactive, and the organisational and structural.

When the structure sets people against each other

My next question is usually: what larger organisational goal were both of these individuals expected to contribute to?

Organisations frequently set objectives for departments, teams, and individuals without offering the line-of-sight clarity on how those objectives connect to the organisation’s overall purpose and direction. Instead of complementing one another’s efforts, people end up working at cross-purposes, sometimes appropriating resources the other side needs more.

I recently worked with two senior leaders whose relationship had deteriorated to the point where productive conversation was nearly impossible. Each had a detailed account of why the other was the problem. As we explored further, it became clear the organisation had placed them in fundamentally different, competing roles, and never reconciled the two.

I saw a sharper version of this years ago, doing team development for a mining company in South Africa. Different crews, working different shifts underground, were developing and securing new tunnels. One team was in trouble with management for working too slowly, delaying extraction. The other was on schedule and doing fine. It turned out both teams drew the struts required to stabilise the underground tunnels from the same supply pile. Team A’s shortages were caused by Team B quietly taking more struts than they needed each shift and hiding the surplus in a secret place, so they’d have a private stockpile if supply ever ran short.

I took the two teams through a board game I’d developed for a beer company I’d work for previously. It was called kuburesha utendaji kazia (improve how we work, in Swahili). Prticipants mapped out their work processes and their place in the value chain, from raw materials through to the corporate stakeholders and what they actually required from the company. At the centre of the exercise was a conversation about shared resources and discovering a common purpose, and that undermining another team ultimately undermines the purpose everyone is meant to be serving, and everybody loses something as a result. The session ended with both teams discovering their inter-dependence and how that stabilizes the organisation as a whole. The shorthand we landed on: my success depends on your success.

The dimension people overlook

There’s a further layer that’s easy to miss. We tend to assume that if someone has the skills for a role and understands its objectives, alignment follows naturally. My experience says otherwise. People bring more than skills and experience to work. They bring values, interests, motivations, and a sense of personal purpose, and when that’s missing, alignment doesn’t hold no matter how clear the job description is.

At that same beer company, I once met a driver whose job was collecting visitors from the airport. He told me about training I’d run for staff some months earlier, and described, in his own words, how he saw his work of collecting visitors from the airport connecting to the company’s success: these were important people, flying in overnight from London, tired, needing to be alert for a meeting that would shape decisions about the company’s future, including his own. If his car was clean, if he drove well, if he was courteous, the visitor would arrive relaxed and in a good frame of mind. That would feed into the visitor’s confidence in the company’s leadership and direction. Good decisions in that meeting would shape the company’s profitability, which meant his own job security, his ability to house and educate his children. He understood exactly how his work connected to something larger than the task itself. That conversation has stayed with me for more than forty years.

I learned the same lesson from the other direction, through my own experience. I loved two successive roles I held at that beer company: the first that I was recruited for involved building relationships between management and trade unions in the years before South Africa’s transition to democracy, through working on solutions in housing, adult basic education, and healthcare; the second, some years later, in implementing the performance management system that had trained that driver to see his place in the value chain.

Both felt meaningful because I could see how they connected to my own values.

There was an irony in that second role. The system I was helping implement was, at bottom, designed to improve profitability. A better aligned organisation is generally a more profitable one. But what engaged me wasn’t the profitability.

It was the possibility that people might experience their work differently once they understood why it mattered.

Many years later the company invited me back, for a role in the marketing department, to help competing brand teams market beer effectively without undermining one another. I considered it, then declined, for reasons that had nothing to do with the job itself. The man I’d married decades earlier had struggled with alcoholism. It had caused enormous pain and eventually ended our marriage; he later got sober, and we rebuilt our friendship. When the company first offered me that first relationshipbuilding-through-social-reconstruction job, I called him, wrestling with the ethics of working for the company that had made the product he’d become addicted to. “Describe the job,” he said. When I did, he told me, “You’re not helping them sell more beer. You’re spending their money on things that improve people’s lives. Take the job.” So I did, that first time.

The marketing role was different. For the first time, I could draw a direct line between doing my job well and the profitability of a company whose product had caused real harm in my own life. That disconnect was too direct to work around, so I declined.

What this means for conflict

That experience taught me something about goals and motivation that I still rely on: skills matter, experience matters, performance measures matter, but they are not the whole story. When an employee genuinely cannot see themselves in the job, and the disconnect causes real disengagement in someone otherwise competent and diligent, the organisation has a responsibility to look for a better-fitting role. If none exists, the most constructive and respectful outcome may simply be an agreed parting, not a dismissal, just a shared acknowledgment that it’s time to look elsewhere.

This is the thread that ties the structural and the personal back to conflict.

When people lose sight of purpose, whether it’s the organisation’s purpose or their own sense of it, they tend to become territorial, defensive, disengaged, or resistant. Those behaviours look like personality problems, and sometimes they’re treated that way, with coaching plans and HR interventions aimed at the individual. But often they’re signals that the connection between the person, the role, and the larger purpose has come loose somewhere upstream. Fix the personalities in that situation and you’ll have addressed the symptom. The structure that produced it will still be standing, waiting for the next two people to walk into it.