5. Conflict

anger

What?

The IT Crowd

The IT Crowd: Have you tried turning it off and on again?
The IT Crowd was a hilarious British sitcom (2006-2013) about the fictional Reynholm Industries in London, resolving around the three staff members of its IT department: technical genius Maurice; work-shy Roy; and Jen, the department head/relationship manager who knows nothing about IT.
As a comedy show, it paints a very stereotypical picture: Roy and Moss are socially inept geeks and despite the company's dependence on them, they are generally ignored and considered losers by the rest of the staff. Roy's support techniques include ignoring the phone, hoping it will stop ringing, and while Maurice is a brilliant technician, he is hopelessly clumsy and impossibly shy. It's up to Jen, the newest member, to bridge the gap between the technicians and the company's other employees, but this generally has the opposite effect, landing her and her teammates in ludicrous situations.

Fight or flight

As said, the IT Crowd offers a clichéd image of IT workers: while people in IT might be known for their lack of people skills, I would venture that many people struggle with interpersonal relationships at work. After all, we now know that we all suffer from fear of abandonement and fear of failure, and this causes one of two typical social responses. Either we avoid conflict as much as possible, or we get self-defensive quickly. It is either fight or flight — sound familiar?

Colleagues

I'm the boss
If you don't recognize yourself in the above, let's look at it from another perspective. When you ask people about their work experience, they will often say that the work itself is great, but there is this one colleague or team leader who makes life hard. Either because they are regularly getting into arguments with this co-worker, or — more often with introverted people — because there is a lingering conflict between them but they avoid dealing with it at all cost.
I'm sure many IT people will identify more as conflict avoiders, as described above, than the self-defensive type. Still, I would invite you to take a hard look in the mirror and also explore the latter side of your character. Sure many people in IT are introverted and soft-spoken, but in a way (either subtle or not so), they can also, and I'm happy to include myself in this, be quite stubborn and argumentative. Just look at tech Twitter/X!

Meetings

A final example is meetings. Almost all developers I know will confess that they hate meetings. But let's look at what is really happening there. Some hate meetings because they fail to stand up for their ideas. Others because they are afraid to call bullshit on others' ideas. Still others because they don't feel the meeting is necessary, but still go to avoid making a fuss about it. All of these are strategies to avoid conflict...

Why?

Career

It goes without saying that failing to deal adequately with conflict, will cause stress and unhappiness on the work floor. What many people don't realize, though, is how determintal the inability to deal with conflict is to their career. In fact, in my opinion it is the main reason why people are stuck in their careers. Either they are too shy or too afraid to stand up to differing opinions and thus unable to showcase their true qualities and potential. Or, they are argumentative and contrary, so they are considered "not a team player" and thus miss out on opportunities to collaborate and grow.
Mastering conflict is therefore an essential part of any career, and not only for those who are looking to climb up the ladder. Sure, being able to deal with conflict is an essential part of leadership skills, but is also indispensable in a more subordinate role. Maintaining a healthy relationship with your boss is as much about conflict skills, as leading a team.

Work-life balance

Improving the way you handle conflict will also have a beneficial effect on your work-life balance. This involves an important insight which we like to call the conditional vs unconditional world.
You see, at first glance, the work environment is part of the conditional world: after all, work essentially a situation where you perform actions because of a financial compensation. And your friend and family are part of the unconditional world, where relationships are not defined by certain conditions being met or not (so-called unconditional love).
However, with many people who are unhappy at their jobs you see a complete reversal of both worlds. They work really hard, often going above and beyond expectations, and are absolutely loyal to the team. But when their "unconditional" attitude is not met by their co-workers (who do not work as hard as they do) or a team leader (who criticizes part of their work), they feel betrayed and disrespected. Vice versa, when they come home, they are exhausted from work and sometimes fall to conditional reasoning in the household: "Why am I always the one to load the dishwasher?" and so on...
Being able to deal with conflict at the work place involves getting a better perspective on the conditional and unconditional world. In my view: work is always conditional. Please, do the best job you can, but never forget that work is "just" work. No one is irreplaceable. Friend and family are always unconditional; and if they are not, perhaps it's time to questions some of those relations...

How?

Clichés

When it comes to conflict skills, there are a lot of clichés going around. A nice example of this is the response you get when asking LLMs about this, like Bing Chat. When asked about strategies for dealing with conflict, it suggested things like
  • open dialogue about personality and communication styles
  • communication skills (e.g. active listening)
  • conflict resolution strategies (e.g. compromise)
  • emotional intelligence
All of these suggestions, however, have little merit in themselves. The real question is how do you apply them?

Emotional intelligence

At least Bing got one thing right and that's pointing out the importance of emotional intelligence, which it defines as "the ability to recognize and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others". But again, what does that mean?
Let's look at conflict from the now familiar perspective of our emotional systems. Avoiding conflict is a manifestation of fear of abandonment above all. We fear our colleagues' rejection or anger, so we choose to please them instead of confronting them. It is important to realise that the opposite reaction, seeking out conflict, also stems from the same fear of abandonment. It just uses a control mechanism ("I'll be the bully instead of being bullied") instead of an avoidance mechanisme. Recognizing this dual response (control/avoidance) to a negative emotion is a very common theme in emotional therapy.

Phone anxiety

Let's look at two concrete examples of this. One is so-called phone anxiety, an increasingly common fear where people avoid conversations over the phone or (less often) are afraid to answer the phone. Many Gen-Z people prefer texting over talking on the phone, and the reason is clear. It is much "safer" to navigate a potential conflict (e.g. asking a question and getting a no) in text than in a real-life conversation. This is classic fear of abandonment.

Public speaking

I'm talking, aren't I?
A very similar case is public speaking, which includes work presentations and more informal speaking occasions, like stand-up meetings, which are popular in Scrum environments. Being reluctant to talk in standup meetings or even just finding it hard to articulate your views and react to those of others, is again textbook fear of abandonment.

Anger

By now, it's pretty obvious that learning to deal with conflict, means facing your fear of abandonment, as it will help you stop avoiding conflict. However, it's also important to acknowledge the role of anger, which accounts for stubborness and argumentative behaviour. Failing to neutralize our anger also blocks our ability to acknowledge our mistakes (in a subordinate role) or to refrain from punishing others' mistakes (in a leadership role). Letting go of anger is therefore an important step towards ownership, maturity and accountability — all of which are excellent levers to master conflict.

Identify triggers

In your journey towards eliminating fear and anger from your life, it will also serve you well to identify things, people, situations that are triggers for those emotional responses. Specifically for conflict, it's good to think about how your family handled conflict when you were growing up and how that has shaped your own conflict behaviour. Did your mom and dad avoid or seek out conflict? And in what domains or situations?
What Do Mirror Neurons Really Do?

When it comes to fear and anger and the way they impact our behaviour, it is important to realise the role of so-called mirror neurons in these emotional responses. A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an organism acts and when the organism observes the same action performed by another. This is an important mechanism of associative learning in mammals, which means that as children we "learn" fear and anger responses from our parents, siblings and peers. Couple that with our capacity for fear memory (amygdala) and you realise it takes only a few iterations to deeply engrain fear in us. A large aspect of emotional work therefore entails identifying our negative emotional "heritage" and reprogramming our emotional systems to a more positive disposition.

Change the world, start with yourself

We've already discussed the importance of others when it comes to conflict. I often see people getting very frustrated at the fact that they have to deal with impossible colleagues or management, both in a professional and personal context. And while they are right that the person in question is posing outrageous behaviour, they forget that you cannot change other people.
This is a really tough nut to crack, because secretely we all very much like trying to change other people. Not because it is a fruitful endeavour, but because the alternative is a far harder pill to swallow. The alternative is radical self-ownership: letting go of any resentment and stubborness, and fully focussing on the one person we can change in this world: ourself.
This is why whenever I hear people say "That's just who I am", my skin starts to crawl. But I'll freely admit: change is hard. We feel threatened by it ("Is this really for the better?"), we feel self-pity ("Why do I have to change and not the other?") — which are all last-minute attempts by our fear and anger centers to avoid facing them head on...

Challenge your beliefs

Every value I've ever held is being questioned; and I love it.
One final piece of advice concerning conflict handling, is to be open towards challenging your so-called limiting beliefs. Every time you say "I do/don't", "I can't", "I am (not)", "Others will", and so on, you are expressing a belief which constrains you in some way. It prevents us from doing something or believing something else, and this inhibits us. This is a control mechanism, and by now, we know that control mechanisms are rooted in fear.

Make love, not war

In conclusion, we now see clearly that this chapter on conflict is just a concrete manifestation of the fear and anger we have already discussed in earlier chapters. To put it in Panksepp's terms: the fear and anger associated with poor conflict handling at work, puts our emotional experience in a state of war. It's high time to turn that around and strive towards a state of play and care instead. Both leadership and teamwork can be excellent expressions of this: leading a team with respect or working with others in the ful flow of creativity can lead to true happiness and fulfilment on the work floor.
Are you ready to choose this above fear and anger?

Exercise

This week's exercise is simple, but not easy: write your own funeral eulogy. This exercise has a double purpose: first of all, it will make you think about yourself from an outside perspective. What kind of a person would people say you are/were? What would they say were your biggest strengths and successes, and perhaps, your biggest failings and mistakes? What kind of emotions does this stir up with you? Do you find yourself caring about what other people will think of you when you die? Or does all this talk about you dying make you feel uneasy? Good. This is true emotional work.
The second aspect of this exercise is that it will make you reflect on your core values, and what they ultimately to you. How important are they to you and what joy have they brought to you in life? Do you still stand by them? Of now that you know of your untimely demise would you change them in any way?

Inspiration

Andrew Huberman —
How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset

Andrew Huberman —
Dr. Maya Shankar: How to Shape Your Identity & Goals