Is there a conversation on your calendar this week you’re not looking forward to? Maybe you need to address someone’s behavior, explain an unpopular decision, or sit down with two employees who have apparently decided that making each other miserable is now part of their job description.
You’ve probably already rehearsed what you’ll say. You may have rehearsed their response, too, along with your very compelling explanation of why they’re wrong. Unfortunately, the version of the conversation happening in your head rarely includes anyone changing their mind.
De-Escalating Conflict At Work
On my Culture Forward Show last week, I talked with Daniel Orth, Associate Director of the Training Institute at the National Conflict Resolution Center (NCRC). Daniel has spent more than 20 years helping organizations in the U.S. and abroad work through conflict.
Daniel shared NCRC’s ART method: Active Awareness, Respond Respectfully, and Troubleshoot Together. It’s a practical approach to de-escalating tense conversations, especially when your first instinct is to defend yourself, correct the other person, or suddenly remember another meeting you absolutely must attend.
Watch the full conversation here. Also, sidenote: Do you have a perspective that deserves a spot on the Culture Forward Show? We’re always interested in guests who bring practical insights, fresh thinking, and something more useful than “communication is key” to our audience of HR professionals and leaders. Fill out this quick form, and we’ll share more about guest opportunities.
Here’s what the ART method looks like.
Step 1: Active Awareness
Before you prepare your opening statement, take a look at the story you’re telling yourself about the other person. Have you already decided they’re difficult? Oversensitive? Trying to make your life harder? If so, there’s a good chance that judgment will show up in your tone long before you say anything overtly disrespectful.
Active Awareness means checking your biases, recognizing your communication habits, and knowing what tends to set you off. Perhaps you become defensive when someone questions your judgment. Maybe interruptions make you raise your voice, or you get so focused on explaining your intentions that you stop listening to the impact. Knowing those patterns gives you a chance to manage them.
If you skip the preparation, you’ll spend more time “cleaning up the mess on the back end.” Most leaders already have enough on their calendars without adding damage control for a conversation they made worse.
Start by separating what happened from what you assume it meant. “They questioned the deadline during the team meeting” describes something you observed. “They wanted to undermine my authority” is your interpretation. You may feel very confident about that interpretation, but confidence doesn’t turn it into a fact.
Then get clear about the outcome you need. If the goal is to agree on a realistic timeline, make that the focus. You might say, “We had different views about what the team could deliver by Friday. I’d like to understand your concerns and work through the plan.”
That opening gives you somewhere useful to go. It also leaves room for the possibility that the other person knows something you don’t, which remains possible even when you’re the boss.
Step 2: Respond Respectfully
When someone is upset with you, listening can feel like waiting for an opening to explain why they shouldn’t be. You hear the first sentence, identify the part you disagree with, and start building your response while they’re still talking. Meanwhile, they can usually tell you’ve stopped listening, so they repeat themselves with more emphasis. Now everyone is louder, and nobody is further along.
Responding respectfully means giving the other person enough attention to understand the concern, then paraphrasing what you heard. For example, if an employee says, “You keep changing priorities and then blaming us when we miss deadlines,” resist the urge to launch into everything they don’t understand about your job.
Instead, try: “You’re frustrated because the priorities have changed, but the deadlines haven’t. You feel like the team is being held responsible for something it can’t reasonably deliver. Am I understanding you?”
You’re checking whether you understand the problem before trying to solve it. The employee may confirm your understanding, correct it, or explain something you hadn’t considered. Each response gives you more to work with than an argument about whether they’re being fair to you.
However, this only works if you’re interested in the answer. “I hear you” loses its charm when it serves as the introduction to a five-minute rebuttal. Follow your paraphrase with a real question, such as, “Which priorities are competing for the same time?” Then allow the answer to influence the discussion.
Feeling heard can help reduce the pressure to keep arguing a point, although it won’t make every person calm down on command. And if you discover you contributed to the problem, own your part clearly. “I changed the priorities without discussing what needed to move” gives you something to fix. “I’m sorry you feel that way” gives the employee a reason to regret bringing it up.
Step 3: Troubleshoot Together
Once you understand the concern, you can share your perspective and work toward a solution. This is also where leaders sometimes get stuck, because they worry that acknowledging someone’s frustration means conceding the argument.
Acknowledgment does not mean agreement. You can understand why someone felt excluded from a decision and still stand by the decision. You can recognize that an employee is frustrated and still address the way they spoke to a colleague. Listening doesn’t require you to surrender your judgment or your expectations.
For example, you might say, “I understand why the change was frustrating, especially without an explanation. The Friday deadline still stands because another team depends on this work. Let’s look at what we can postpone or reassign to make it achievable.”
Now you have a concrete problem to work through together. Ask what information is missing, where the workload needs to change, or what support would help. At the same time, be honest about what’s open for discussion. Asking for someone’s input when you’ve already made every decision tends to create another tense conversation.
Before you finish, agree on specifics. Who will communicate priority changes? Who decides what gets delayed? When will you check whether the adjustment worked? “We’ll communicate better” is a lovely sentiment, but it has probably appeared at the end of thousands of meetings that changed absolutely nothing.
What If the Other Person Stays Defensive?
Sometimes you prepare, listen, and respond thoughtfully, and the other person stays defensive. That’s frustrating, particularly when you feel you’re doing all the work to keep the conversation productive.
Daniel’s advice was to stay focused on what you came to accomplish. Telling someone exactly how ridiculous you think they’re being might feel satisfying. It’s less likely to help you influence a decision, resolve the disagreement, or leave with an agreement anyone intends to honor.
You can redirect without pretending you see everything the same way: “We still disagree about how this happened. What I’d like us to work through is how we prevent it from happening again.”
You can also set boundaries. If the conversation becomes insulting or too heated to be useful, pause it and establish when you’ll return: “I want to work through this, and we need to do that without personal remarks. Let’s take a break and come back at 2 p.m.”
Then actually come back. A pause can help people regroup; an indefinitely postponed conversation simply gives the problem more time to grow.
Address the Conditions That Keep Creating Conflict
Daniel’s final advice was to avoid being afraid of conflict. Handled well, a difficult conversation can help people understand each other and strengthen their working relationship. Getting there takes a willingness to hear something uncomfortable and follow through, especially when changing your own behavior is part of the solution.
If the same tensions keep resurfacing, though, your organization may need more than a better conversation. Unclear expectations, damaged trust, and a history of avoiding accountability won’t disappear because everyone attended a meeting and agreed to “communicate better.”
At Civility Partners, we provide expert workplace conflict resolution consulting to help organizations address those underlying issues. Whether you want to prevent friction through proactive culture strategies or resolve tensions already disrupting your team, our assessment, coaching, and facilitation services help you rebuild trust and establish clear expectations. We work with you to turn communication breakdowns into collaborative, accountable working relationships that move your business forward.
Ready to stop having the same conflict on repeat? Book a complimentary consultation with Civility Partners.
