What’s the Problem and How to Solve It: How Leaders Can Support Peer-to-Peer Conflict Resolution

4/3/2025

What’s the Problem and How to Solve It: How Leaders Can Support Peer-to-Peer Conflict Resolution

Turn conflict into clarity with a simple, effective peer-to-peer resolution approach.

DR. ROBERTA LENGER KANG
Executive Director

Within any organization, but especially in complex organizations, peer-to-peer conflicts come with the job. When everyone is moving at lightning speed, roles and responsibilities are ambiguous, or the pace of the work is simply impossible to keep — as human beings, we’re likely to let someone down at least once.

In the best working and learning environments, we can raise our hand and say, “I made a mistake, I’m so sorry,” and everyone can move on. But some mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed expectations aren’t as easy to resolve. Many leaders don’t want to get involved in the tiny squabbles of their teams — and rightly so!

But teams who are constantly embroiled in conflict aren’t productive, don’t meet goals, and don’t grow professionally or personally. So even if you aren’t a touchy-feely leader, ensuring that your team is well equipped with the personal and professional skills to identify, mediate, and move on from internal, peer-to-peer conflicts is essential to cultivating a healthy organization that reaches its goals.

Problems vs. conflicts

Problems are challenging or complex barriers to a goal that require a solution. Problems come up in everyone’s job and they usually aren’t emotionally disruptive. They may be stressful, for sure, but they don’t usually create reactive or negative feelings toward a colleague, team member or supervisor.

Problems need to be solved. Conflicts, on the other hand, need to be resolved.

Conflicts occur when problems become personal and involve hurt feelings, which can tap into an individual’s values around trust, transparency, and fairness. When a problem escalates to a conflict, the team has to address the barrier, as well as the interpersonal conflicts that have emerged.

Peer-to-peer clearing conversation

In healthy organizations, peers can identify when a problem has evolved into a conflict, engage in personal reflection to identify the root issues, and engage in seeking solutions. These processes bring people closer together, increase trust, and improve morale.

Most adults don’t have formal education in conflict resolution so it’s valuable to spend some time with your team talking through the importance of personal reflection, expectations setting, and ways of communicating to increase connection and reduce conflicts. Consider practicing these types of conversations with low-stakes issues and ensuring that everyone feels comfortable with the reflective activity as a routine in your professional learning and team building time.

After establishing some of the basic principles of expectations setting, the Peer-to-Peer Clearing Protocol is a set of steps that two people can follow in order to “clear the air” after a pain point or conflict.

The chart below outlines the steps someone might take when they realize they’re experiencing a conflict with a colleague that just isn’t going away on its own.

Mediating a clearing conversation

Sometimes conflicts between peers or between leaders and those they supervise become too intense for them to process independently. Having a third party mediate the discussion can create the important space that each person needs to hear alternate perspectives and move into healthy and productive agreements moving forward.

Pre-conversation

You’ve been made aware of the conflict, either by one of the people involved or by a third party. Once you’ve decided this situation merits an intervention, reach out individually to anyone who’s personally involved in the conflict.

In this outreach you want to accomplish four things:

Communicate that you’re aware that there’s a conflict (ex: I’m checking on you because I’m aware that there might be a problem as a result of xyz. Can we talk?)
Understand the nature of the problem from their perspective (ex: Help me understand what happened from your perspective … is there more?) Asking “is there more” is a critical question. When invited to share, many people open up about other issues that are pain points and potentially reveal a deeper root or core issue that’s contributing to the conflict.
Determine if their desired outcome is to have a peer-to-peer clearing conversation or a mediated conversation (ex: As we move forward, do you want to address these concerns with the person directly, or would you like me to mediate?) As often as possible, it’s important for our teams to develop peer-to-peer conflict resolution skills. Some conflicts will require a third party, but jumping to the third party prevents individuals from practicing these skills on their own. In either situation (peer-to-peer or mediated), ask each person involved in the conflict to complete a clarifying expectations protocol where they can process for themselves what happened, the missed expectation, and what they would want to see as a solution.
Articulate your next moves (ex: Here’s what I’m going to do next…) Articulating your next moves is an important moment for trust building. If you promise to keep a secret, and then realize you can’t, it erodes trust if the person later feels betrayed. It’s better to be up front and honest about what you will disclose, and what you won’t, even if it feels painful in the moment.

If moving to a peer-to-peer clearing conversation, make a plan to follow up with each person after the conversation is over to support any agreements that are made. If moving to a mediated conversation — continue reading!

Initiating the conversation

Invite each person to the conversation in a shared message where everyone can see who’s being invited and what is being said. While confidentiality is important when mediating conflicts between team members, trust and transparency are often at the forefront of fostering an environment where team members can trust the process and the person helping them through it.

In the invitation, identify a time and place for the meeting, ideally within one week of the conflict being identified. If the mediation is too soon, folks may not have an opportunity to really process what happened. If too much time passes, it can be easy to minimize the conflict as something too long ago to matter.
Ask each person to complete the Clarifying Expectations Protocol and to bring their notes to the meeting. I always consider these to be private reflections and don’t typically ask to read them or for them to be shared. Asking participants to bring them to the meeting increases the likelihood that they actually go through the reflection process, and some people prefer to read aloud their writing, especially if they get flustered or nervous in conflict situations.
Confirm the date, time, and location and request a confirmation from each person attending. This is helpful because some folks who may be conflict avoidant may “never get the email” or “not realize it was for them.” Avoid having to chase people down later by being very direct about the expectation that they participate.
Provide a brief agenda for the meeting. Very few people actually enjoy these kinds of conversations. Many have negative experiences working through conflicts, so the anticipation can create even more anxiety. One way to support everyone is to be clear and direct about what will be discussed.
Using what you know about the team members, consider any norms that you may want to set in advance. For example: Our meeting norms will be...every person will have an opportunity to share their perspective, we seek to understand different viewpoints, we’ll use "I" statements and ask for clarification.

The goal is to create clear and concrete expectations so that everyone feels emotionally safe to participate. This isn’t about being touchy-feely; when people don’t feel emotionally safe to resolve conflicts, they are more defensive, protective, and less likely to be honest or respectful. These responses create more conflicts, which results in less productivity for the whole team overall.

The conversation

Open the conversation with an appreciation for everyone who’s joined the meeting and an acknowledgement that by showing up, each person is demonstrating care and positive intent to overcome the current challenge.

Before digging into the actual incident, I often begin a mediation by asking each person to share their role and responsibilities on the project or in the situation, and ask them if their understanding of this changed at any point. The reason I begin here is because this is typically a very safe question that gets folks warmed up, but in the process it often opens up areas where there are misunderstandings about who does what, which are often a contributing factor to the current conflict. If everyone agrees about the roles and responsibilities, then we have begun the conversation starting on common ground. If folks have different perspectives, it can be a powerful a-ha moment, or an issue that needs clarification from the mediator.

Initiating the Clearing Conversation steps:

What happened: Viewpoint 1; viewpoint 2 restates in their own words. Viewpoint 2 adds additional information.
What was the missed expectation and the impact: Viewpoint 1; Viewpoint 2 restates in their own words. Viewpoint 2 shares, Viewpoint 1 restates in their own words.
Agreement request & discussion: What does a good solution look like for each party in the future?
Agreement and appreciation

While mediating, the goal is to let those in the conflict do most of the speaking, but with your prior knowledge of where the pain points are, it can be helpful to ask probing or clarifying questions so that others gain important insights. Additionally, it’s up to the mediator to hold space for following the norms, asking someone to hold their thought until the other person finishes speaking, or to ask them to reframe accusatory comments into the first person language.

Avoid speaking for anyone else. In this role, at this time, we don’t want to disclose something we might know in confidence if the person isn’t able to share in the moment. As the meeting comes to an end, ask each person to share any final thoughts or a-ha moments from the discussion.

Post-conversation

After the conversation, send a follow up message to reinforce the importance of resolving these normal challenges and restate what agreements were made. It may be valuable to describe the change we think these agreements will make and identify any specific or immediate next steps the team has.

A note on workplace harassment and improper conduct

Most conflicts between team members are caused by gaps in communication, missed expectations, personality differences, or working styles. Sometimes, an issue stems from an incident of workplace harassment or improper conduct. In these situations, always follow your organization's policies for reporting to your Title IX office, Human Resource representative, or mandated reporting policies.

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