Diversity Conflicts

Managing a diverse workgroup will inevitably also mean dealing with the conflict associated with diversity. It is essential that every manager equips him-/herself with the necessary skills to address the conflict.

The first important skill is that you as manager need to distinguish between less serious and more serious diversity conflict:

• Day-to-day personality/work routine conflicts can often be addressed with relative ease – if it is handled skilfully and immediately. Managers should realise that if such conflict is ignored, it will result in bigger problems that might be very difficult to solve later.
• Direct discrimination, such as racism, sexual harassment, insulting behaviour, or physical conflict, is very serious. Your company should have policies to deal with these types of discrimination. Your policy will probably deal with these behaviours via your disciplinary- and grievance procedures. Direct discrimination is often dismissible offences.

Every manager needs to be alerted to conflict situations. By not being aware of what is happening in his/her department, conflicts might be left unresolved and this might end up in a ‘boiling pot’ of unresolved conflicts, which might make a department very difficult to manage.

Teach your team conflict resolution skills. We will explore ways of enabling the individual members of your team to deal with smaller conflicts themselves. This way, conflict will be resolved at the very beginning, avoiding the ‘boiling pot’ situation. Only when they have gone through the process of resolving conflict themselves, should a third party (like yourself) be involved.