Conflict Resolution Strategies: 5 Approaches, One Process

A disagreement with a coworker has a way of lingering. You replay it afterward, wonder whether you handled it well, and quietly dread the next one. Conflict resolution strategies are the deliberate approaches you use to settle a disagreement — most famously the five in the Thomas-Kilmann model: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, and collaborating. Used well, they let you resolve the issue while protecting the relationship, by matching the right approach to the situation and working through it in order. The strategies are only half of it, though — the other half is the process that turns them into an actual resolution.

Conflict resolution strategies: a step-by-step approach

There is no single best way to handle every disagreement. The five conflict resolution strategies each suit different circumstances, and the real skill is knowing which one to reach for and how to carry it out. Most of the guides that top the search results, from Harvard Business School Online to Indeed, organize their advice around these five approaches; what they cover less often is the sequence that puts them to work. One point nearly all of them agree on: address conflict early. Raising an issue while it is still small keeps it from escalating into something that damages trust. The steps below move from managing your own reaction to closing the loop afterward.

1. Cool down before you engage

The instinct in a heated moment is to fire back, but a conversation started while you are still angry rarely ends well. Give yourself enough time for the initial surge to settle — a few minutes, sometimes a day — without letting the issue drift so long that resentment hardens. This is the balance behind the “address early” advice: early enough to stop the escalation, calm enough to think clearly. The composure you gather here is what makes every step that follows possible.

2. Pin down the real issue and what you want

Before you talk to anyone, get clear on what the conflict is actually about. The surface complaint — a missed deadline, a curt email — often sits on top of an unmet need, such as feeling overlooked or overloaded. Name that underlying need, then decide two things: the outcome you actually want, and how much the ongoing relationship matters to you. Those two dimensions, your goal and the relationship, are exactly what determine which strategy fits next.

3. Choose your conflict resolution strategy

The Thomas-Kilmann model, developed by Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann in 1974, maps five strategies along two dimensions: how strongly you assert your own goal, and how much you cooperate with the other person’s. Which one fits depends on the goal-versus-relationship judgment you just made.

• Collaborating (high assertiveness, high cooperation) looks for a solution that fully meets both sides’ needs. Harvard Business School Online calls it the ideal for most workplace conflicts, because at work you usually care about both the outcome and the relationship — but it costs the most time and trust to reach.
• Compromising splits the difference: each side gives up something of lesser value to settle quickly. It is the right call when a workable answer now beats a perfect answer later.
• Accommodating means yielding to the other person. It fits when the issue matters far more to them than to you, and preserving goodwill is worth more than winning the point.
• Competing means pushing for your own outcome. It is rarely suited to everyday workplace friction, but it earns its place in a genuine emergency or when an unpopular decision has to stand.
• Avoiding means sidestepping the conflict altogether. It works only when both the issue and the relationship are trivial; in most workplace disputes, where both matter, avoiding lets the problem fester and is usually the most damaging default.

Most of us lean on the same one or two of these by habit — often avoiding — whether or not it suits the situation. Recognizing your own default is the first move toward choosing deliberately, and a free snapshot of your work skills can help you see which patterns you tend to bring to conflict before you are in the middle of one.

4. Open the conversation and listen first

With your approach chosen, start the conversation — privately, and in person where you can. Lead with listening rather than your case. Let the other person share their view fully before you respond, paraphrase what you heard to confirm you understood, and ask questions to close the gaps. When it is your turn, frame your side with “I” statements — “I felt sidelined when the decision was made without me,” rather than “you went behind my back.” Stating your own experience instead of leveling an accusation keeps the other person listening instead of defending, which is the single most repeated in-conversation tip across the guides.

5. Name the root problem together

Once both of you have been heard, the real issue is usually easier to see. Name it together, out loud, as a shared problem rather than one person’s fault: not “you keep missing handoffs” but “our handoffs aren’t landing, and here’s what each of us needs from them.” Digging past the initial complaint to the unmet needs underneath is what lets the next step solve the actual conflict instead of its symptoms.

6. Build a solution you both agree to

With the root problem in the open, turn toward solutions together. Invite the other person to put options on the table alongside yours, and look for one that meets both sets of needs — this is collaborating and compromising put into practice. Then make the agreement concrete: who will do what, and by when. A vague “let’s communicate better” fades by next week; a specific action plan gives you both something to actually follow, and something to check against later.

7. Follow up — and know when to bring in help

The step most people skip is the one that makes resolutions stick: follow up. After some time has passed, check in on how the agreement is holding — not to catch anyone failing, but to confirm the fix actually solved the problem and to head off a repeat. And if the two of you genuinely cannot get there, that is not a failure; it is the signal to involve a neutral third party. A mediator, often a trained colleague or an external professional, can help you find options you could not reach on your own.

The skills that make conflict easier to handle

Read back over those steps and a pattern shows through: the hard part is rarely knowing that you should listen or collaborate — it is being able to do it when you are tense, misread, or convinced you are right. That capacity comes down to a few underlying skills.

Teamwork is where most workplace conflict lives, and where it gets resolved. The framework treats managing disagreement constructively as a core part of it: engaging the friction that needs engaging, keeping it about the problem rather than the person, and rebuilding trust when a hard conversation knocks it loose. It is also the skill behind committing to a solution you argued against — voicing your objection, then genuinely getting behind the agreed plan.

Communication turns a chosen strategy into words that actually land. Handling someone who is upset, expressing disagreement without it becoming an attack, listening well enough that the other person feels heard — these are the mechanics underneath every step above. The “I” statement is not a trick; it is this skill in miniature, framing your experience so the message gets through instead of triggering a defense.

Building Resilience is what keeps you steady enough to use either of the others. Conflict pulls up quick, automatic reactions — the jump to “they are doing this on purpose” — and this skill is the practice of catching that thought, questioning it, and not taking every friction personally. It is the difference between reacting from the surge and responding once you have cooled down, which is exactly where step one began.

These three sit inside a broader set of twelve work skills that recur across almost any role, and conflict is a useful place to watch them interact, since it draws on several at once. The free Work Skills Test measures all twelve, so you can see which ones to strengthen — teamwork, communication, resilience, or others — and because each one is learnable, whatever you find is a starting point rather than a verdict.

What this means for you

You might notice you already do some of this — the colleague who cools down before replying, or who reframes a complaint as a shared problem, is often just running these steps without naming them. If parts of it feel less natural, that is simply something you have not built yet, not a fixed limit; the whole premise here is that these are skills, and you can grow them while still handling conflict in a way that feels like you. What is worth knowing is that this counts for more as you go: the further into a career you get, the more your work runs through other people, and the steadier your hand in disagreement, the more quietly it sets you apart. The fact that you have read this far — thinking about how you handle conflict before you are in the thick of one — is already the part most people skip. Which makes the next move a small one.

See where your skills stand

So the last step is an easy one. Before your next disagreement, it helps to know where you are starting from — which of these skills are already strong, and which are worth a little work. The free Work Skills Test is a 7-minute self-assessment that scores you across all twelve work skills, the conflict-related ones and the rest, and points you to where a little effort would go furthest. Think of it as the groundwork that makes every strategy above easier to run.

Take the test

Free, and quick — about seven minutes from start to your results.