Are you leading your team the way they need?
- Shiv Martin
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Ideas for Managing Conflict as a Team Leader
My people come first.
I have heard a lot of leaders say it over the years. Sometimes in interviews, sometimes in strategy sessions, sometimes in the middle of a leadership workshop when we are talking about culture, engagement and trust. And to be fair, I think most of them mean it.
Years ago, I was not so charitable. When I heard a leader describe themselves as a "people person" and then watched their team tiptoe around them, I assumed it was simply hypocrisy. They had learned the language of leadership without changing the way they led. It felt performative.
The more time I have spent mediating workplace conflict, coaching leaders and facilitating difficult conversations, the more I have come to see something more interesting about leadership and conflict. The problem is rarely that leaders do not care.
It is that they care through the lens of their own experience. And that quiet habit shapes how they end up managing conflict within their teams.
Why do good leaders still create conflict?
One of the most common patterns I see is a leader assuming they already know what their team needs. Not because they are arrogant or controlling, but because they are human. We all interpret the world through our own experience.
Here are some examples of how good leadership intentions can lead to adverse team impacts:
Without noticing, I begin leading people the way I would want to be led. It sounds reasonable, until you remember that your team is not made up of people exactly like you.
This is where a lot of workplace conflict quietly begins. Not with a dramatic event, but with a gap between what a leader intends and what a team member experiences.
Can good intentions still cause workplace conflict?
Yes, and often. I have worked with leaders who believed they were empowering their staff while their teams felt abandoned.
I have worked with managers convinced they were supporting people while those people experienced constant micromanagement. I have seen leaders who thought they were being fair by treating everyone exactly the same, without recognising that fairness and sameness are rarely the same thing.
None of these leaders set out to create those outcomes. They genuinely believed they were putting their people first. Their intentions were not the problem. Their assumptions were.
This is a useful distinction to hold onto when you are managing conflict. Intention is what you meant. Impact is what the other person experienced. A great deal of conflict lives in the space between the two.
Why self-awareness matters more than conflict management techniques when leading your team
I spend a lot of time talking about self-awareness before I talk about communication techniques, conflict management frameworks or emotional intelligence. That order is deliberate.
Every conversation you have is filtered through your own values. How you define trust, respect, professionalism, integrity, hard work and support. Even something as ordinary as what it means to be "responsive" at work. Most of us do not realise we have written our own private definitions of these words until someone experiences them completely differently.
That is often where conflict starts. Not because one person is right and the other is wrong, but because they are working from different maps of the same situation. No amount of technique will resolve that if the underlying assumptions stay invisible.
Managing conflict means looking at the system, not just the person
It would be easy to read all of this as a personality issue, something to fix in the individual leader. It is worth widening the frame. Assumptions do not only live in people. They live in systems too. In how roles are defined, how expectations are set, how feedback is given, how workload is shared, and how decisions get made. A leader who leads only from their own preferences will, over time, shape a team and a set of processes that suit some people and quietly disadvantage others.
When conflict surfaces, it is worth looking at both. What is happening between these particular people, and what is happening in the structure around them. Role clarity, competing priorities, unclear standards and unspoken expectations do as much to create tension as any personality ever could.
Good leaders learn to ask both questions: What might I be assuming about this person, and what might our system be assuming on my behalf.
Why curiosity is a leadership skill in conflict
The leaders I admire most are not the ones who announce that they are people-focused. They are the ones who stay curious.They ask questions instead of making assumptions. They notice that the graduate joining the workforce may need something different from the experienced manager. That the parent returning from leave may value different things from the ambitious executive. That one team member reads frequent check-ins as support while another reads them as a lack of trust.
Rather than assuming they already have the answer, they stay open. That curiosity builds trust, and trust makes the difficult conversations easier long before they become conflict.
A leadership question worth sitting with
If you lead people, here is a question worth returning to.
Am I leading my team the way they need to be led, or simply the way I would want to be led?
There is no perfect answer, and it is not a question you answer once. People change. Teams change. You change. The best leaders I have worked with are not trying to become perfect leaders. They are becoming better students of the people they lead.
Perhaps that is what being a people person really means. Not believing you already understand people, but being curious enough to keep learning.
Common questions about leadership and managing conflict
Isn't treating everyone the same the fairest approach?
Consistency matters, but sameness and fairness are not identical. Fair treatment usually means applying the same principles, such as respect, transparency and clear standards, while recognising that people need different things to do their best work. Treating a returning parent and a new graduate identically can feel fair on paper and land quite differently in practice.
How do I know whether my good intentions are landing well?
Ask, and then listen without defending. Simple questions help. What is working for you in how we work together, and what would you change if you could. The gap between what you intend and what people experience only becomes visible when you invite it into the open.
What are the most useful conflict management skills for leaders?
Most leaders expect the answer to be a technique. In practice, the skills that matter most are self-awareness, genuine curiosity, the ability to separate intention from impact, and the judgement to choose the right process for the issue in front of you. Techniques help once those foundations are in place.
What if the conflict has already taken hold?
Then one conversation rarely cuts it. Entrenched conflict usually has history, assumptions and a fair bit of avoidance layered into it. It tends to need clearer structure, sometimes an independent process, and more than a single well-meaning chat. That is not a failure of leadership. It is a sign the situation needs the right process rather than more goodwill.
A closing thought - Leading through Conflict
The hardest part of leadership is rarely knowing what to do. It is noticing when the way you have always done it might not be what your people need right now.
That noticing is a practice, not a one-off insight, which is part of why I created Leading Through Conflict.
Leadership does not happen inside a workshop. It happens on a Tuesday morning when a team member pushes back, during a difficult performance conversation, or in the middle of organisational change when you are leading real people through real problems.
Leading Through Conflict is a twelve-month program built around that reality. Download the flyer to find out exactly what's included.
It brings together one-on-one coaching, practical reflection and a community of senior leaders working through the situations in front of them, with support that keeps relationships, legal and procedural fairness, and organisational outcomes in view at the same time.
If that sounds useful, you are welcome to get in touch by filling in our EOI form or booking a confidential conversation to find out whether it is the right fit for you or your team.
Shiv Martin Consulting – Supporting you to support others
Hi, I'm Shiv Martin. I'm a nationally accredited mediator, lawyer, conciliator, and conflict management specialist with over a decade of experience working across government, business, and community settings. I support teams to navigate complex and emotionally charged situations through mediation and conciliation, conflict skills training, facilitation, and practical advice on policies and processes. My approach is grounded in law, psychology, and real-world dispute resolution, with a strong focus on clarity, fairness, and workable outcomes.
If you'd like to talk about how I can help you or your organisation, you can get in touch here: 👉 Contact us
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