What HR Keeps Missing: High Conflict at Work, Part 2 of 4

So first, Bill, how can an, a company, an HR department tell when it's, when just a personality clash is actually the early stage of a m-much bigger conflict problem? Because we do hear this, that, uh, you know what? There's just two people in this conflict, and it's, it's just two people can't get along, and it's a personality clash, when oftentimes it, or sometimes it can be just one person driving this.

To me, one of the biggest principles with high-conflict situations is there's al-always someone saying that someone else is acting very badly, and you gotta have three theories when you hear that.

First is, it may be true.

The second is, the person saying that may actually be the difficult person, and the third is, it could be both of them.

I believe many companies get this backwards.

They think it's just Joe when it's Joe and Jane, or they think it's just Jane when it's Joe and Jane, and they miss that both are equal and contributing.

Or, and I recently read about a case like this, two guys got fired.

It really was one was the instigator, and human resources and managers had several meetings telling both of them to behave.

And when they looked back and really understood what was going on, it was one person driving this with a lot of high-conflict behavior, and the other person was kind of meekly trying to alert the organization and saying, "Hey, I'm, I'm being bullied.

I'm being picked on here," until that person blew up.

They had a physical fight, and they both got fired.

And that could have easily been prevented if they'd paid more attention to the early concerns about this one person.

So to me, it's not recognizing these three possibilities.

It's one, it's the other, or it's both.

You have to entertain those and look into what's really going on and accept sometimes it really is one person, and sometimes it really is two.

And Michael, what's the cost then of an organization that just thinks, well, two people are involved in the conflict, so it's both of their faults? Is there a fallout? Is there a cost to this when it's only one, perhaps?

Well, I think you can lose good people that, maybe on both sides, mayb-maybe the person who may have some traits is a high performer, is really, contributes to the work well, but it's the way they engage with others or the wake that they leave, perhaps if they're a leader, that does need to be managed and addressed.

Yeah, when we don't see the patterns, I can think of a couple of instances where I know organizations lost some good leaders and thought the leader was the problem, and they didn't see how perhaps the other person who presented, "I'm a victim, I'm being mistreated," either people feel sorry for them, or they bend over backwards to be impartial in their process, but end up, in their impartiality, kind of blaming both or blaming the leader.

And then when the

theOn the other hand, just when they don't deal with things early, see the signs, recognize the patterns, uh, then things can get very big.

I think with hybrid work, it's easier for things to be hidden now, right? It may not come to the forefront as, as quickly.

Some level of dysfunction gets normalized, and then you get these huge, spectacular failures where people would be like, "Well, there's nothing we could have done.

We never could have seen that coming." And then I would suggest, "Yeah, you could, and in fact, maybe within the first three months that you hired that person, the signs were there." All the time I talk with organizations and professionals, and I say...