imapMyTeam Blog

Winning a ‘No-Win’ Scenario

Claiming to have ‘won’ a conflict at work is like claiming a peaceful conquest – it’s an oxymoron.

When you’re having conflict at work, resolving it is a much better outcome than winning. Disagreement happens; even on the most cohesive teams. While healthy disagreement often helps a team move forward, failure to effectively address and resolve disagreement is a real threat to the ability of the team to be successful.

What makes workplace conflict so challenging is that we all have very different reactions to conflict and disagreements. Here is a very common scenario:

When under pressure Person A loses their sense of long term implications of their actions and ‘winning’ a conflict with a colleague, or being “right”, becomes their short term goal.  Person A becomes more verbally assertive and dominates their interaction. Person B, on the other side of the disagreement, has opposite expectations. Person B wants collegiality and views fighting openly about things to be counterproductive and difficult to do. Person B ‘gives in’ to Person A because he or she is uncomfortable with the open clash. Person B did have important points to make but couldn’t do it with the open conflict so that key information failed to surface.

Who won? No one of course; and certainly nothing happened that is good for the team because when the underlying issues that created the disagreement in the first place have not been solved, they will simply reappear later. Also if you damage the relationship in the process your colleague might find it very hard to forgive you for what you have done.

imapMyTeam® helps you understand why working through disagreement can be so difficult and provides some helpful suggestions through the Resolving Disagreements report.

You will find the Resolving Disagreements report in the center pane, under reports about you section.

When you find yourself in a disagreement – large or small and don’t know what to next - this report is a valuable resource to help you consider what you can do differently to manage the tension of conflict before it becomes counter-productive to winning as a team.