# Resolving Conflict at Work: The Seven Steps, in Order Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/resolving-conflict/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/resolving-conflict.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 The conversation you keep putting off, broken into seven steps: how to prepare, open it, listen well, agree on a fix, and when to bring in your manager. ## Key facts - Title: Resolving Conflict at Work: The Seven Steps, in Order - Category: Teamwork - Primary skill: Teamwork - Related skills: Communication, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: resolving conflict - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork/resolving-conflict/ ## What this page covers - The conversation you keep putting off, broken into seven steps: how to prepare, open it, listen well, agree on a fix, and when to bring in your manager. - Practical guidance for resolving conflict - How this topic connects to Teamwork ## Detailed explanation There is usually one specific conversation behind a search like this — the one you keep deciding to have, and then not having. Resolving conflict works best as a sequence: steady yourself first, ask for a private conversation, describe the behavior and its effect rather than the person, listen until you understand what the other side actually needs, agree on one concrete change, then check back a few days later. The sequence is not the hard part. What stops most people is everything that happens before step one. ## Why resolving conflict stalls before it starts None of the steps hold if you skip the state you are in when you start them. HelpGuide is blunt about this: if you cannot [manage your own emotions under stress](/knowledge/confidence/stay-calm-under-pressure/), no technique survives contact, because the moment the conversation gets uncomfortable you will either escalate or go quiet. There is also a decision hiding underneath, and most people make it without noticing they made it. The Thomas-Kilmann model, the framework that recurs most often across guidance on this topic, describes [five modes of handling conflict](/knowledge/teamwork/conflict-management-styles/) — avoiding, accommodating, competing, compromising, and collaborating. Its genuinely useful point is not that collaborating is always correct. It is that avoiding is a real mode with real costs. The silence you have kept so far was a choice, not the absence of one. One more thing is worth settling before you start. UC Berkeley's People & Culture guidance puts the goal plainly: conflict resolution is not about establishing who is right, but about reaching a solution everyone involved can live with — and looking for needs before solutions is what generates options in the first place. Most people walk in wanting a verdict. That is usually why the conversation they finally have goes badly. If you notice you reach for the same mode every time — always smoothing it over, or always pushing back — that pattern is worth knowing about before the next difficult conversation rather than after it, and there is a free self-assessment that will [show you your own defaults](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in a few minutes. ## The seven steps to resolving conflict at work ### 1. Decide whether this actually needs raising Start by separating a passing irritation from a pattern. A one-off annoyance that will not repeat can be left alone; recurring friction, anything that is slowing the work down, and resentment that is quietly accumulating all need addressing. The practical test is whether you can state the problem as one specific behavior and its concrete effect — not "they are impossible to work with," but "the review comments arrive after the deadline, so I rebuild my part twice." If you cannot get it into that shape yet, you are not ready for the conversation; you are still holding a feeling about a person rather than a problem you can solve with them. ### 2. Get your own reaction under control first The Center for Creative Leadership compresses the whole process into three moves — Pause, Engage, Address — and the ordering is not decorative. Every multi-step guide on this topic puts self-regulation before contact, and none put it after. Pausing here means something specific: work out what is actually triggering the reaction, then examine [the story you are telling yourself](/knowledge/resilience/automatic-thoughts/) about their intent. "They are doing this deliberately" is a conclusion, not an observation, and it is usually the thing that makes you sharp in the room. Look for a second explanation that fits the same facts — overload, a competing priority, a briefing they never got. You do not have to believe the kinder version. You only have to stop treating the harsh one as established. ### 3. Prepare, then ask for the conversation This is the step most guidance skips straight past, and it is where an avoided conflict actually becomes a resolvable one. Indeed's guidance on coworker conflict is the most operational material here: list what is genuinely bothering you, work out honestly whether your own behavior contributed, note the two or three points you want to make, and rehearse with someone if you doubt you will stay calm. It is also the first move that does not require the other person, which is what makes it a usable starting point when you have been putting the whole thing off. Then ask, rather than ambush. Setting is a design decision, not a detail: HR Acuity and others specify a quiet neutral room in person, or a private one-to-one call if you work remotely — explicitly not a group channel, not an open-plan desk, and not the tail end of a team meeting. The reason is mechanical. An audience pushes both of you into defending a position instead of solving a problem. ### 4. Open on the behavior, not the person The first two minutes decide whether this is a problem-solving conversation or a defense. State the specific behavior, state its effect on the work, and then stop talking. Stay on the present situation: pulling in a grievance from three months ago is the single fastest way to lose the thread, because it invites the other person to start defending their whole record rather than one fixable thing. This is also the moment to name your own share of it. Guidance from SHRM and Indeed both treat admitting your contribution and asking what you can do about it as a resolution accelerant, and the two habits are connected — people reach for counter-evidence and old history when they feel entirely blamed. Owning a piece early is what keeps the conversation inside one solvable issue. ### 5. Listen for what they actually need Now find out what you are really dealing with. Ask clarifying questions and [paraphrase their position back](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/active-listening/) until they agree you have it right — not as a technique, but because you are frequently wrong about what the friction is about, and the version in your head has been unchallenged for weeks. Hold off on proposing anything until this is done. Arriving with a fixed remedy turns the conversation into a negotiation over your one proposal; surfacing what each of you actually needs usually reveals that more than one outcome would work. This is also where you will find the part of the problem you own, which is much easier to see once you have heard how it looked from the other side. ### 6. Agree on one concrete change — and write it down Settle on a specific change in behavior each of you will make. Aim for workable rather than fair; a solution both of you can live with beats a solution that correctly apportions blame, and the second one rarely exists anyway. Then record what you agreed, even informally — a short message afterward confirming your understanding is enough. Vague agreements feel good in the room and quietly fail a week later, because neither of you can point to what was actually decided. ### 7. Follow up, and know when to escalate The follow-up appears in nearly every guide on resolving conflict and gets skipped in nearly every real case. HR Acuity and SNHU both recommend checking back within days: is the agreement holding, has the working communication improved, has anything new surfaced? The mechanism is accountability. An agreement nobody revisits is a conversation, not a resolution. If it has not shifted, escalate. Sources are unanimous that bringing in your manager, HR, or a neutral third party is a legitimate move once direct negotiation stalls, and that leaving a conflict unresolved is worse than escalating it — but almost none of them define the threshold, which is exactly what you need. A workable one: two direct attempts, spaced far enough apart that the change had a real chance to happen, with no observable difference in the behavior. Anything involving harassment, discrimination, or safety skips the sequence entirely and goes straight to escalation. And frame it accurately when you get there — "here is what I have already tried, and we are still stuck" is a problem being handed over, not a complaint about a colleague. ## What the seven steps are really asking of you Look back over the sequence and notice how little of the difficulty sits in the sequence itself. Nobody gets stuck because they cannot remember to follow up. They get stuck holding their nerve at step four, or hearing something they disagree with at step five without arguing over it. Underneath the process sit a few habits that decide whether you can actually run it. **Teamwork** — the whole point of resolving conflict is disagreeing with someone you still have to work alongside on Monday. That is the substance of teamwork: engaging the disagreements that genuinely need to happen, keeping them on the topic rather than letting them turn personal, addressing a broken commitment specifically instead of letting it slide, and noticing when trust has taken a knock so you can deliberately reset it. It treats friction as an ordinary part of working with other people, not evidence that something has gone wrong. **Communication** — steps four through six are entirely a conversation, and they succeed or fail on how it is conducted. Choosing to talk rather than write when the subject is sensitive, listening with a real intent to understand instead of waiting to respond, being direct instead of hinting and hoping they infer it, apologizing cleanly for your share: these are the specific verbal moves that turn "I do not know how to say this" into something you can actually say. **Building Resilience** — step two is a skill in its own right, and it is the one people most often assume they simply lack. It works by a recognizable mechanism: an event triggers an automatic thought, the thought drives the reaction. Catching the thought — the mind reading, the all-or-nothing verdict, the jump to conclusions — is what gives you a choice about the reaction. So is spending your energy on your own conduct rather than on theirs, which is the only part of this you control anyway. Working on all three at once is possible but inefficient, because you would be guessing at which one is actually costing you the conversation. That is what the free Work Skills Test is for — it will tell you [which one to work on](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) out of the twelve work skills it covers, these three among them. None of them is a trait you either have or do not; a weak one is simply a skill nobody taught you yet. You may already recognize parts of this in how you handle things — perhaps you are someone who cools off before replying, or who instinctively asks how the other person saw it before making your own case. Those instincts are worth trusting. The parts that do not come naturally yet are just that: not yet, and learnable without becoming a more combative version of yourself. This tends to matter more rather than less as you take on more — more people to coordinate with, higher stakes on getting it wrong, and conversations that get harder rather than easier. Working out how you want to handle this before you are standing in the middle of it is the part most people skip entirely, and you have just done it. ## See where you actually stand The only thing left is to find out which of these skills is your weak link, before the conversation rather than after it. The **free** Work Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your own work skills: it shows where you stand across all twelve, including the three underneath resolving conflict, and points to the ones that would make the biggest difference to you right now. You get a clear read on what is already solid and what is worth building — so the conversation you have been putting off starts from knowing rather than hoping. ## 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? The conversation you keep putting off, broken into seven steps: how to prepare, open it, listen well, agree on a fix, and when to bring in your manager. ### 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/resolving-conflict/ Preferred summary: "The conversation you keep putting off, broken into seven steps: how to prepare, open it, listen well, agree on a fix, and when to bring in your manager." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.