# Conflict Solving Strategies: The Five Approaches and When Each One Fits Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-solving-strategies/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-solving-strategies.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving teamwork at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Conflict solving strategies come down to five approaches: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, collaborating. Learn when each one actually fits. ## Key facts - Title: Conflict Solving Strategies: The Five Approaches and When Each One Fits - Category: Teamwork - Primary skill: Teamwork - Related skills: Communication, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: conflict solving strategies - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-solving-strategies/ ## What this page covers - Conflict solving strategies come down to five approaches: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, collaborating. Learn when each one actually fits. - Practical guidance for conflict solving strategies - How this topic connects to Teamwork ## Detailed explanation There is a particular quiet that settles over a working relationship when something has gone unsaid. You know [the conversation needs to happen](/knowledge/communication/difficult-conversations-at-work/). You have also decided, more than once, that today is not the day. Conflict solving strategies are the five recognized approaches to handling a disagreement — avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, and collaborating. Each balances how hard you push for your own outcome against how far you accommodate the other person's, and using them well means matching the approach to what is genuinely at stake. Which of the five fits comes down to two questions most advice never asks you to separate. ## The two questions behind every conflict solving strategy Nearly every guide on this topic organizes itself around the same five approaches. Harvard Business School Online, Champlain College Online, Park University, and SNHU all publish versions of the identical list, and the consistency is not a coincidence: the five come from the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, developed in the 1970s by consultants Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann, and it is the instrument that business schools and training providers teach from. The vocabulary is settled. What gets lost in the repetition is the structure underneath it. The five are not a ranking that runs from worst to best. They are positions on two axes. The first is assertiveness — how far you push to satisfy your own concern. The second is cooperativeness — how far you go to satisfy the other person's. Collaborating sits high on both. Avoiding sits low on both. Compromising lands mid-range on each. Seen that way, the five names stop being definitions to memorize and start working as a map: here is where I go by habit, and here is where this particular situation needs me to be. So before you reach for an approach, answer two things. How much do you care about the outcome itself? And how much do you care about the working relationship going forward? ## The five conflict solving strategies ### Avoiding Avoiding means sidestepping the disagreement — postponing it, withdrawing from it, or letting the situation play out without stepping in. It is low on both axes: neither person's concern gets addressed. Notably, the sources treat avoiding as a legitimate strategy rather than a failure — not what most people expect to read when they have been putting a conversation off. It fits when the issue is small enough that raising it would cost more than letting it go, or when [emotions are too hot](/knowledge/confidence/stay-calm-under-pressure/) for anything useful to be said yet. What matters is the difference between avoiding as a deliberate choice and avoiding as a default. When both the outcome and the relationship matter to you — which describes most workplace friction — sidestepping does not make the problem go away. It leaves it to compound quietly while you both work around it. ### Accommodating Accommodating means letting the other person's concern be satisfied while setting your own aside. Low assertiveness, high cooperativeness — the mirror image of competing. It has real uses. Sometimes the issue matters far more to them than to you, and spending goodwill would be a bad trade. Sometimes, [having heard them out](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/how-to-be-a-good-listener/), you conclude you were simply wrong, and yielding is the honest response rather than a concession. The risk is repetition: accommodate often enough and your concerns stop entering the conversation at all, which tends to surface later as resentment over something small and apparently unrelated. ### Competing Competing means pursuing your own outcome at the other party's expense, usually backed by formal authority. High assertiveness, low cooperativeness — the only one of the five that knowingly accepts a cost to the relationship in exchange for the result. Sources reserve it for high-stakes or urgent situations where a decision cannot wait. If you are a peer without authority, competing is mostly unavailable to you, and attempting it tends to read as aggression rather than decisiveness. Its practical value for you is usually recognition: knowing what it looks like when someone else is using it, so you can name what is happening rather than absorb it. ### Compromising Compromising means both sides give up part of what they wanted in order to reach a workable middle. Moderate on both axes. Champlain College Online describes it bluntly as a lose-lose approach, since neither party reaches their full goal, and positions it for situations where concern for the outcome and concern for the relationship are both moderate. That framing is a useful corrective, because compromise is widely treated as the grown-up default. If disagreement makes you uncomfortable, compromise is the exit that presents itself fastest: split the difference, end the conversation, restore the peace. It is worth checking whether you are choosing it because it fits or because it ends the discomfort. A quick settlement on something that actually mattered has a way of coming back. ### Collaborating Collaborating means working the problem jointly until the solution meets what both of you actually need. High on both axes, and the only approach that treats the other person's concern as information to work with rather than an obstacle to manage. It is the one most often recommended for ordinary workplace conflicts, because it [builds long-term trust](/knowledge/teamwork/building-trust-in-a-team/) and tends to surface the real issue rather than the presenting complaint. It also costs the most: time, both people being willing to say what they want, and enough trust that neither of you is guarding. That is why it is not the universal answer — on a small issue against a tight deadline, insisting on full collaboration is its own kind of mistake. ## Using a strategy when nobody is going to mediate Look at who the top-ranking articles are written for and a pattern appears. Park University, Champlain, and Syracuse University's iSchool all frame conflict resolution as something leaders master and then apply to other people. The advice is written from the mediator's chair. But most workplace conflict is not mediated — it is two colleagues at the same level, and one of them has to go first. If that is you, a few things translate directly. Address it early: the consistent advice across sources is that raising an issue while it is still small keeps it from escalating into something that damages trust. Pair that with its counterweight, repeated just as often — address it promptly, then do not rush the resolution itself. Those are two different clocks, and the common pattern reverses both: postpone the opening for weeks, then try to settle everything in one tense conversation. Setting is treated as substantive rather than incidental. Harvard's Division of Continuing Education recommends meeting face to face somewhere neutral — the cafeteria, a walk outside — rather than at either person's desk. It is one of the few concrete moves available to someone with no authority, and it removes the quiet signal that one of you is the host and the other is being called in. Once you are talking, the instruction that recurs almost verbatim across independent sources is to focus on the problem rather than the person, and on behaviors rather than personalities, while looking for what you both want before negotiating the differences. Then there is the stage most people skip: following up some weeks later, once things have settled, is what separates a conflict that was resolved from one that was merely paused. Some of this never needed to happen at all. According to BambooHR, a large share of avoidable team conflict traces back to rules nobody wrote down — when norms stay unspoken and never reach onboarding, a new person breaks one without knowing it existed, and colleagues have nothing neutral to point at, so the correction has to be delivered as an observation about that person. That makes a whole category of conflict a documentation problem rather than a personality problem, and it cuts both ways: ask how things are done here rather than inferring the rules by breaking them, and say your own unwritten rule out loud before someone trips over it. None of this is easy to run for the first time in the middle of something. If a disagreement is on your mind right now, it can help to [take stock of your strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) while nothing is on fire, so you know which parts of this you can already lean on. ## The skills that make disagreement easier to handle Read back over the five approaches and something becomes clear: the hard part is almost never identifying which one fits. Most people can tell, in the moment, that a situation calls for collaborating rather than avoiding. The hard part is being able to do it while you are tense, misread, or convinced you are right. That capacity comes from a few underlying, learnable skills. **Teamwork** is where most of this lives. The framework treats managing disagreement constructively as a core part of it — engaging the disagreements that need engaging rather than suppressing them, staying on the topic instead of drifting into the personal, and noticing the moment trust drops so you can reset before the conversation is lost. It also covers what comes after: holding each other accountable, which means naming a broken commitment specifically and without letting it sit. **Communication** turns a chosen approach into words that land. Every one of the five eventually becomes a conversation you have to run — stating your main point first, being clear and direct without being blunt, adapting to how the other person takes things in, and genuinely wanting to understand them rather than to win. Expressing disagreement and handling someone who is angry are specific situations this skill addresses, not general good intentions. **Building Resilience** is the internal half, and usually the reason a conversation got postponed in the first place. It is the practice of catching the chain that runs from event to automatic thought to reaction — the jump from a curt message to "they are doing this deliberately" — and questioning that thought before it sets. It also covers where you put your energy: on your own next move rather than on a colleague's behavior you cannot control. Whichever of those three is weakest for you tends to be the one that decides how a conflict actually goes, which is why it is worth finding out [which one to build](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than guessing. The free Work Skills Test covers these three and the nine alongside them, and because every one of them is learnable, whatever comes back is a starting point rather than a verdict. ## Where this leaves you Some of this may already sound like how you operate — cooling off before replying, or checking what the other person is actually after, without ever calling it a strategy. Where it does not feel natural yet, that is not a fixed limit on you; it is a skill you have not built, and building it does not require becoming a different person at work. This also weighs more heavily over time rather than less: the further into a career you go, the more of your work runs through other people, and a steady hand in disagreement gets noticed precisely because it is uncommon. That you are reading this while not in the middle of a conflict is the part most people skip entirely. ## Find your starting point Which makes the next move a small one. Before the next disagreement lands, it helps to know what you are working with. The **free** Work Skills Test is a 7-minute self-assessment that scores you across all twelve work skills — the ones behind handling conflict and the rest of them — and shows you where a bit of effort would make the most difference. It is the groundwork that makes every approach above easier to run when you actually need it. **[Take the test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free to take, and short — about seven minutes.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Conflict solving strategies come down to five approaches: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, collaborating. Learn when each one actually fits. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Teamwork. It also relates to Communication, Building Resilience. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-solving-strategies/ Preferred summary: "Conflict solving strategies come down to five approaches: avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, collaborating. Learn when each one actually fits." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.