Causes of conflict!

Causes of conflict - 115/365: Anger Management Style #1 (Photo credit: by Janine)

What are the causes of conflict? It is too late to think of the cause if you are already in a conflict. The best time to think of the causes of conflict is during peacetime so to speak. 

How many times have you made the same mistake repeatedly and triggered the causes of conflict? 

Given below are the common causes of conflict:

• Mind reading – you assume negative things the other person is thinking about you and feel angry.
• You are so self-centered that you fail to consider other person’s needs.
• You are carrying a heavy baggage of hurts, insults, and suspicions.
• Your Leadership and management styles are authoritarian.
• Your Leadership and management styles do not leave any room for listening.
• You are taking relationships for granted.
• You are under tremendous stress, or you are unable to spot the stress in others.
• You have a suboptimal Leadership and management styles.
• You have poor conflict resolution skills.
• Your empathy is so low that you are unable to put yourself in other’s shoes.
• You have differences in values with others, and you are not even aware of it.
• Your goals are misaligned with others, and you are pulling in different directions.
• You have an inbuilt prejudice that you are not even aware of, and it is affecting your relationship with certain kinds of people repeatedly. 
• You have very poor listening skills and most of the time you are not registering in what others say.
• You are very selfish, and you are concerned only of your needs and wants.

These are some of the main causes of conflict. A lot of it has to do with your personality and some of it has to do with your Leadership and management styles.

The bad news is that you will find it difficult to change as these are hardened habits of behavior. However, the good news is that you can change if you are determined and work hard.

The first step you can take is to increase your awareness of these causes of conflict and resolve to remove the causes one by one. 

It will also be a good idea to go for some excellent training programs where they teach you leadership management styles that are based on sound leadership and management values.

Related articles

• Managing Conflict: Power through Influence (ramikan.wordpress.com)
• A Meta-Analysis of the Cultural Propositions about Conflict Management Styles in Face-Negotiation Theory (tc.eserver.org)
• FIVE LEADERSHIP MISTAKES of the Galactic Empire. "Even beyond this one mistake, by adopting a manag... (pjmedia.com)
• 4 leadership styles to master (empwaynek.wordpress.com)

Leadership must be earned

In every team you will find people who want to be leaders. However, very few people realize that leadership should be earned.

Few months back, I assigned few mini projects across my team members. Each mini project had a leader and a few team members, who will help the leader to complete the mini project. There were few projects, where the leader of one project was also a team member of another.

The results were very interesting:

There were few leaders who did a great job, while there were others who miserably failed. There was this one leader, who wanted to relinquish his leadership, as very few team members cooperated with him. He just couldn't move forward.

The lesson learnt out of this exercise were the following:

1. Leaders who failed, were invariably, poor team members, who did not cooperate in other leader's projects.
2. Leaders who failed were found to have a common trait-arrogance.
3. Leaders who did not make it, were the ones who had relationship issues and were not liked by many of the team members.

Learnings:

Leadership must be earned. Even if you are the appointed leader, you need to build trust for you amongst the team members. You may have all the authority in the world and fail to be a leader, while someone else may have no authority at all but may be the the unspoken, unnamed, and undisputed leader.