Conflict management and feedback help you to avoid conflicts in your professional life too. If you take a clear stance, false expectations don't stand a chance. Instead, your business partners, customers and suppliers can rely on you. If conflicts do arise, it is important to resolve them as quickly as possible - with the help of mediation if necessary.

Conflict prevention through feedback: recognizing and avoiding conflicts

Feedback is an important starting point for avoiding conflict. In order to avoid conflict, you first need to know if something is wrong. This makes feedback an important aspect that will help you in the long term.

Feedback is not just about your needs, but also those of your business partners, customers and suppliers. The aim here is to avoid conflicts and question your processes where necessary.

But what makes feedback so valuable? Basically, the most effective method of avoiding conflict is prevention. For you, this means mastering the situation before it escalates. This is exactly where feedback helps you - without it, you can't recognize grievances early on. Hardly anyone notices conflicts if you defuse them in good time. And yet you contribute to a relaxed atmosphere. For this reason alone, it's worth taking feedback from business partners, customers and suppliers to heart and actively seeking it. Do you want to achieve results quickly? Then this is the right way to go.

Need for harmony and lack of courage

People who attach great importance to harmony find it difficult to formulate clear feedback. They don't want to offend with their expectations and shy away from conflict. However, this doesn't mean that these business partners, customers or suppliers don't have expectations - rather, they try not to show them openly. Always trying to please everyone, being nice and smiling is very exhausting in the long run. They also tend to agree to solutions prematurely, even if they are not convincing.

Recognizing expectations and disappointments

The cause of most conflicts lies in disappointed hopes. This is why efficient expectation management is at the heart of conflict avoidance. Regular feedback helps you to perceive what other people expect and to compare this with the current situation. It is important for you and your company that it is not about fulfilling all expectations of you.

If you intercept unspoken expectations, this has nothing to do with a hypersensitive management style. Rather, it is efficiency that makes such an approach interesting. If you draw the right conclusions from proper feedback, you can catch potential conflicts quickly and effortlessly - in retrospect, it costs a lot of commitment and time. If you express clearly what you stand for and what expectations you fulfill, not everyone involved will like it. Nevertheless, this way you prevent future conflicts and protect your company.

Taking a clear stand

Do you want to curb false expectations? Then it will help if you take a clear stance. Clearly and comprehensibly expressing how you react to feedback from your business partners, customers or suppliers requires the courage to be clear. A quality that many people neglect in favour of diplomatic generalizations. If you shy away from such conflicts, it is possible that the feedback will also be glossed over. After all, your counterparts don't want to disappoint you with their feedback any more than you want to disappoint them.

This diplomacy makes it difficult to express your true views and intentions. You can only initiate a reconciliation of expectations if both parties are open and honest about what they think. In this way, conflicts can be addressed directly instead of simmering subliminally. As Karlheinz Wolfgang, lecturer in individual psychology, put it, expectations are one-sided contracts. When you ask for feedback, you dissolve this one-sided contract and find out what is important to your business partners, customers or suppliers.

Problems with business partners

You and your co-founders have been brought together by the big project "joint company". However, your day-to-day work together turns out to be very different than expected: you prioritize appointments and agreements differently. And the work in general is not done as conscientiously, efficiently and reliably as you had imagined. Such problems and the resulting conflicts are very unpleasant, but they need to be resolved. 

You need to talk to your business partners and discuss how you define your collaboration and what problems exist. In the worst-case scenario, it may turn out that you cannot reconcile your ideas and expectations. However, this realization is also very important: you then know where you stand and have it in your hands in good time to change something or go your separate ways.

Conflicts with customers

Instead of reacting to possible first impulses, such as counter-arguments, getting upset or closing yourself off, the first thing to do is to keep calm and pause for a moment. Don't get angry just because the customer is angry, because it's about your company. Even if the customer is not satisfied with the service - regardless of whether this is justified from your point of view or not - it is helpful to remain calm and objective. 

First of all, it's about the customers and what they have to say. Take them seriously and avoid justifications. This leads to a verbal exchange in which the real issue - the customer's satisfaction and the reputation of your company - takes a back seat. Good customer management also involves admitting mistakes. Under certain circumstances, an apology may be appropriate. Compensation also reduces your customers' frustration.

In general, you should never take a complaint personally, even if it's about your company, your passion project. The focus is on your product or the service you offer, not on you as a person. 

Differences with suppliers

There may well be situations in which you are dissatisfied with your suppliers or service providers. If you expected something different, you should sit down with them and discuss your expectations. 

This way, you can build a reliable relationship together. This includes, for example, training the other party to let you know if deadlines cannot be met. Or if deliveries are incomplete, faulty or damaged. If you are interested in working with a supplier in the long term, you should regulate this cooperation for both parties from the outset. 

The quality assurance agreement (QAA) can be an essential point here. This refers to a contractual agreement between the customer and supplier that describes in detail what the supplier must do to comply with quality assurance and which requirements it must fulfill. The QAA has the task of optimizing the inter-company division of labor, making delivery processes simpler and faster and thus avoiding multiple quality inspections.

The most important basis for such clarifying conversations is preparation. You should be clear beforehand about what is important to you and what your exact goal is. Distinguish between observation and evaluation so that you can distinguish between subjective feelings and facts. It helps to put yourself in the other person's shoes in order to be able to show understanding. Accusations have no place in these conversations in which the parties are striving for a common consensus.  

Conflict management: strategies for dealing with conflicts and solutions

Even in a business context, people always come together, so conflicts with customers are human. No matter how hard you try, sometimes conflicts simply cannot be avoided. If this is the case, it helps to resolve existing problems quickly and efficiently. Feedback and a cooperative team help to minimize the impact. The most important point here is always that you re-establish a functioning human relationship. On such a basis, most conflicts can be resolved quickly and efficiently.

Is there a conflict?

As soon as you recognize tension in your dealings with a person, it is worth investigating whether it is a conflict. You can either start from the feedback or from yourself. Is the tension coming exclusively from you? In this case, it is a problem that is best investigated by yourself. Otherwise, it's about finding out in which areas this conflict is occurring. It always comes from several parties. In very few cases is the cause of the conflict rooted in the issue. If this were the case, a constructive discussion between the parties involved would help.

In a situation like this, targeted conflict management can help you. This is based on Timothy Leary's human model, which was further developed by Robert Anton Wilson. This model states that people resort to certain behaviors in stressful or conflict situations. If you understand the system behind this, you can react to it in a targeted manner. 

Disputes often arise from habits that we use to resolve our conflicts. Basically, you can distinguish between four types:

• People who keep their frustration to themselves and give little or no feedback.
• People who tend to defend their point of view vehemently, even loudly or aggressively if necessary.
• People who take a scientific approach and need tangible evidence - these people primarily argue logically.
• People with high moral and ethical standards who want to convince themselves of the general value.

Agreement? Signal your willingness to find a solution!

Regular communication with feedback helps you to intercept conflicts. Regardless of whether you ask for such feedback or there is an acute problem: Your willingness to find a solution is an important basis for resolving a disagreement. At the same time, it is essential that both parties show an interest in finding a solution. But how can you go about it?

1. Find out whether there is a common conflict situation. Are both parties aware of the conflict? Only if this is the case can you reach an agreement. As long as one side assumes a harmonious coexistence, there is no reason to work towards a solution.
2. Another decisive factor is whether both parties would come to an agreement as soon as all demands or expectations are met. It is important here that you do not make a concrete offer. It is simply a matter of finding out whether the other party would also like to reach an agreement.
3. You can then try to address the problem on a factual level. Ideally, you will come to a joint solution. If this is not possible despite your best efforts, mediation can help in many cases.

Avoid misunderstandings through feedback

Regular feedback helps you to manage conflicts effectively. This is because you can use it to find solution strategies and manage conflicts. However, some tensions are unavoidable. In this case, you cannot counteract them with concrete ideas for solutions or by obtaining feedback.

Even with a high need for harmony, you cannot avoid the occasional argument. Resolving a conflict is always better than suppressing it in the long term. This would lead to latent stress when dealing with business partners, suppliers or customers. At the same time, an unspoken conflict impairs the interpersonal relationship. Conflict management is therefore not a final solution and does not completely avoid tensions. Rather, it helps you to deal skillfully with differing opinions.

Mediation - modern conflict moderation

Mediation is a way of resolving conflicts out of court. However, it is not exclusively suitable for disputes that would otherwise end up in court. You can use it specifically to resolve problems that the feedback points out to you. The aim of the method is for the people involved to find a subjectively balanced solution.

Mediators form the basis of such a procedure. They are neutral and confidential, which enables them to act as outsiders. What does that mean? Mediators stand on the outside and do not evaluate. The fact that they have no decision-making power enables the parties involved to speak openly with each other. For mediation to be successful, it is essential that both parties participate openly and voluntarily.

Before the mediation begins, you define the mandate together. This means that you agree on the objectives of the discussion. How much time can you invest in the mediation? Do you want to play an active role in solving existing problems? At this stage, you provide feedback and analyze everything that will be included in the discussion.

Access

It is important that you create a constructive atmosphere at the start of the mediation. In this protected setting, the participants are given the opportunity to express themselves. What outcome are they hoping for? What fears are they carrying around with them? You can achieve a balanced relationship by involving the participants equally.

Also important: Introduce what the process looks like at the beginning. This way, all participants know what to expect. This helps you to avoid disappointment. It is crucial that it is clear to everyone that no one is judging them. This promotes active and intensive collaboration and increases willingness. Always focus on the goal and avoid time pressure. In this way, you can maintain a positive atmosphere throughout the conversation.

All participants work individually to collect their wishes. The feedback may form the basis for these wishes. The moderator then explains which issues can be resolved in mediation. This raises the question: Why can't all issues be resolved? The answer to this is simple: mediators have no authority to make decisions. The manager takes on this task. For issues that can be resolved, there are usually different approaches. During mediation, the people involved decide together which path they want to take and what feedback they want to give.

Clarification

You then enter the feedback from the first step into the communication square (Friedemann Schulz von Thun). Each person goes through the individual levels:

• What do customers, business partners or suppliers feel when they think about the conflict?
• Which factual topics are particularly important?
• How is the relationship with the other person perceived?
• What does the person want from the others?

Active listening, visualizing content and maintaining the flow are among the main tasks of this moderation step. Disparaging remarks and personal attacks are out of place here. These need to be translated into acceptable language. Once the contentious points have been worked out, only the core points of the conflict remain.