Leadership

How to Resolve a Conflict Where Both Sides Are Right

A powerful approach to nonviolent communication at your company

Dave Bailey
Published in
7 min readApr 1, 2020

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If you’re trying to innovate, taking a critical business decision, or just figuring out the truth, conflict isn’t just expected — it’s essential. If everyone has the same idea, chances are it’s obvious and not very insightful.

But conflict is hard. Especially in a startup, where you’re sandwiched between huge opportunity and certain death.

There are lots of different reasons for conflict at work. It can result from differing points of view; for example, engineering and sales might see a problem in different contexts. In other cases, it might result from personality clashes.

Conflicts sometimes resolve themselves peacefully, but I’m going to offer some advice for teams that want to better manage conflict and use it to drive more robust solutions and decisions. These are particularly useful for those times when conflicts are persistent, unproductive, or have reached a stalemate.

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When I wrote about the nonviolent communication framework last year, I never imagined it would resonate with so many people. NVC is a versatile…

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