Episode 1098: Conflict and Productivity

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1098 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm

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[00:00:42] Scott Maderer: And it's bad. What I've often seen happen is management and leadership. And even the individuals in the conflict itself say we're not going to deal with it. We'll just avoid it. I just won't talk about it. That'll make it get. We'll just ignore [00:01:00] what's going on and treat it as something that eventually will just spontaneously magically heal itself.

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[00:01:31] Can impact the word

[00:01:32] and today's episode about investing in yourself by stewarding your time. I talk with you about how conflict can affect your productivity. I talk about why this hits on multiple levels. And I also talk about why dealing with it is more important than. As we talk about stewarding your time. Wouldn't it be great.

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[00:02:17] This week, we're diving into talking about conflict and tomorrow I'm going to talk a little bit about what conflict really is, but for right now, it's okay to just have the kind of quote, common understanding of conflict. We all know times that we've had. Work or relational conflicts where either about how something should be done or what should happen with something or personal conflicts with other individuals, whether it's at work or in a family where their stress and their strife and there's disagreement over what exactly it is.

[00:02:53] And I'm not just talking about a small disagreement, I'm talking about something that rises to the level [00:03:00] of really creating a contract. And the truth is when we've got those sorts of conflicts going on in our head and in our heart. And in our mind, they take energy. They take bandwidth from us. Our mind begins to think about those things.

[00:03:17] Have you ever had one of those days where you find yourself dwelling for 30 minutes or an hour or 10 minutes, even about an event that happened or a conflict that came about or a frustrating. That you have, and you're just not sure what's going on, but you end up realizing that you didn't work on the things that you needed to do.

[00:03:40] You didn't get done something that you were planning on doing, because instead you were dwelling on that conflict. I think we all know instinctively that conflict can affect. Our productivity, it can affect our energy. And through that affect our productivity, it can affect our concentration on three [00:04:00] that can affect our product.

[00:04:03] If you look up research on workplace productivity and conflict, because that's usually where it's studied is in the workplace. You find that the way that they study it and they way they correlate it, that if there's conflict going on, individual performance, decrease. Team performance, decreases job satisfaction, decreases organizational commitment, decreases turnover, increases, and overall company performance decreases.

[00:04:36] So all of the stuff that you want to go up goes down and all of the stuff that you want to go down goes up. Turnover and these sorts of things. It's interesting, but it's shown over and over again, that conflict, like this hits at multiple levels. It, because it's affecting performance that then causes management and others to try to figure out what's going on.

[00:04:58] And often they [00:05:00] come in and end up doing things that create even more conflict, not on purpose. But it ends up happening. Plus if your job satisfaction is low, then all of a sudden you start looking for the things that create conflict. Basically you're paying more attention to the negative things than to the positive things.

[00:05:19] And because of that, what ends up happening is you find even conflict to grow. It continues to increase. And maybe if you're not in a job situation, You haven't observed it in those sorts of ways that you'll see in a formal study, but you, again, no instinctively in any organization, conflict creates stress and strain that increases dissatisfaction and lowers performance and productivity across the board.

[00:05:54] This is why. I talked with Jerry food this week, this idea of [00:06:00] identifying conflict and diving in and actually actively dealing with it is so important. Confronting it head on. And this isn't about coming in and saying it's my way or the highway just, you can deal with it. If you're the boss. Yeah, maybe you have the power to do that, but doing that actually creates more conflict, not less instead.

[00:06:25] It's about actually understanding the underlying root causes of the conflict. What is it that's causing this dissatisfaction? What is it that's causing people to no longer communicate and look at things the same way. Is it that they don't actually have the same understanding of the task? Is it a personality, are personal conflict?

[00:06:49] Is it poor leadership or management? Is it maybe one particular employee that is causing an issue or a. Is it lack [00:07:00] of clarity or lack of communication or lack of understanding it. Are there things that you could do to bring the team together? And this isn't about just throwing a party and having some sort of celebration I'm talking about actually deeply understanding what is going on in the hearts and minds of your employees so that you can begin to help them come together instead of tearing each other up.

[00:07:26] And instead, what I've often seen happen is management and leadership. And even the individuals in the conflict itself say we're not going to deal with it. We'll just avoid it. I just won't talk about it. That'll make it get better. We'll just ignore what's going on and treat it as something that eventually will just spontaneously magically heal.

[00:07:51] And that never works in those situations. The conflict always grows over time. It always gets worse until [00:08:00] eventually someone will leave or the company will struggle with work, or the team will implode. And often when they leave, they don't talk about the conflict. They talk about things like poor leadership and poor management, because those things haven't been dealt.

[00:08:20] It's a sample, an example of how you can lead either yourself or others by identifying what is the internal or external conflict, what are the reasons behind it? And then actually dealing with those reasons to get to a better place so that conflict actually goes away and is reduced over time.

[00:08:46] Instead of. Thanks for listening.

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