Conflict Resolution

All jobs require you to interact with coworkers, and there are bound to be conflicts. Your effectiveness in handling the conflicts has a significant impact on the outcome of your work.

Thus, the interviewers spend a considerable amount of time to figure out your attitude towards conflicts and your ability to resolve them. The interviewers are often looking for your ability to

  • Spend time to understand other people’s point of view,
  • Negotiate to resolve the conflict in an amicable way and
  • Looking for conflict resolution strategies such as Accommodating, Avoiding, Collaborating, Compromising, Competing

Conflict Resolution with a Colleague

What is the interviewer looking for: The interviewer is looking for the conflict resolution skills and your resilience. The following are a few areas that the interviewer is going to assess you.

  • Did you listen well?
  • Did you try to fully understand the other party’s story?
  • Did you work with other parties to come up with a creative solution to resolve the conflict, etc?
  • Did you try to resolve the conflict before escalation?

Best practice to answer: Use the STAR framework. Describe the situation and the task. The actions you took to resolve the situation and the result. Ideally, showcase some good moves that you undertook to resolve the conflict. Some sample moves are:

  • Proactively reach out to the other party to fully understand their perspective.
  • Assume good intent. Do not be judgmental about the other party’s move. Most conflicts in a workplace is caused by misinterpreting the other party’s intent.
  • Steer both parties to find solutions that are optimized for the company and the combined team.
  • If needed, escalate to the right authorities in a timely manner.
  • After the conflict was resolved, reach out to further strengthen the relationship with the other party.

Common pitfalls:

  • A story wherein the conflict was resolved by a third party and your actions were not responsible for resolving it.
  • Showing aggression or restlessness.
  • Rise of a new conflict.

Question variations:

  • How did you resolve conflicts in your team?
  • Tell me about a time when you had an issue with a coworker
  • How do you handle disagreement with your teammates?
  • Tell me about a situation when you had to work in a group that wasn’t functioning well. What happened?

Disagree with Leadership

What is the interviewer looking for: The interviewer is looking for your involvement in the decision-making and post-decision process. In particular, how well did you function as a leader to make your voice heard before the decision? And how well did you demonstrate followership to support a decision that you disagree?

Best practice to answer: It is a good practice to share your philosophy about decisions. A good practice is to be actively involved in the decision discussion so that your voice is heard and assist the decision maker to make the right decision with all the relevant data and different perspectives available before the decision making. Once a decision is made, follow and support the decision even if you do not agree. To illustrate active participation during decision process, you should share your perspective and why you prefer this route, how does it compare with the ultimate decision. You should also share how the final decision played out. If it played out well, please share what you have learned from this. If it did not work out, did the team come back to retry with your approach? If it did, what could you have done differently to better influence the team before the decision was made?

Common pitfalls:

  • Vague answer with very little focus on how you stood up the ground to make sure your point of view is well heard.
  • Do not support the decision, still feel bitter about it.
  • Belittling a coworker or your team.

Question variations:

  • What do you do if you disagree with your manager?
  • Share one experience that you argued forcefully but turned out you were wrong.

Experience of Compromising

What is the interviewer looking for: We have all experienced situations where people share different opinions and are stuck in stalemate since nobody can convince anyone. In such situations, it is often the case that proceeding with any option is better than being stuck. Strong leaders seek to make compromises in such cases so that the team can proceed. It is a critical skill to make the right compromises in any type of organizations. When asking this question, the interviewers are trying to assess your flexibility and your creativity to make the right compromises to resolve conflicts.

Best practice to answer: Without saying, you need to use the STAR method to describe the situation, what you did and the result. Simply making a compromise is never a strong leadership. You need to showcase why making a compromise was the right thing to do in this circumstance, what you did to break the stalemate and how you subsequently resolved the conflict. Make sure you lay the foundation, why different people have different views and how everyone believes theirs is correct. Explain what you did to make sure everyone understood the situation, the compromises that the team had to make and articulate the actions that made a difference.

Common pitfalls:

  • You did not go through a thorough analysis or compromised and ended up in a situation that is not necessarily right for the organization.
  • You made compromises because you had to, such as pressure from your manager. This is the chance to show your action has made a difference and was not to please someone.

Question variations:

  • Share one experience where you stepped back and found a better solution.
  • Share an experience that solved a problem by collaborating with others.