Ontario Municipal Human Resources Association

Most conflict advice stops where we ‘blow up’. Someone raises their voice in a meeting, two teams stop cc’ing each other, a project stalls because nobody wants to be the one who calls it out. You may have watched plenty of self-help videos on how to de-escalate that moment, but what gets talked about far less is the slowwww, awkward stretch when people seem fine, but continue their work naps with one eye open.

That’s the gap we need leaders to focus on more.

Conflict itself isn’t the problem

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts a number on something some managers have felt for a while: employee engagement has slipped to its lowest point since 2020, and manager engagement has fallen even faster from 31% in 2022 down to 22% in 2025.

We’re running out of the energy to work through conflict.

This tracks. Social posts show seemingly perfect workplaces with teams with zero disagreement. But are they quietly disengaged? What actually predicts whether a team thrives is whether people believe they can raise a disagreement without it costing a piece of their sanity. Conflict handled openly tends to sharpen decisions. Conflict handled badly or avoided slowly eats away at your insides.

Continuing this discomfort, several workforce surveys identify managers who consider themselves highly skilled at resolving conflict at around a quarter to a third. Most aren’t trained for it. Managers are promoted for being good at their previous job, not necessarily for knowing what to do when two direct reports stop speaking to each other.

It’s one thing to resolve conflict. Have you recovered from it?

Wipe your brow and move on. The conflict has been ‘resolved’. Apologies happened, the meeting ended, and everyone shook hands. Resolution and recovery aren’t the same thing. We settled the immediate dispute, but did we initiate rebuilding the working relationship enough that people stop bracing for what could be round two?

This is where the Thomas-Kilmann conflict styles framework can be genuinely useful as a diagnostic. Someone who defaults to “avoiding” during the conflict itself often keeps doing what they excel at – avoiding. It’s natural to steer clear of the person, the topic, the project. Some default to “competing” and may consider the matter closed the moment they’ve ‘won it’, regardless of whether the other person was ‘playing’ or not. Regardless, recovery breaks down when the team assumes one conversation can undo weeks of ‘En garde’.

What tends to rebuild trust is smaller and more repetitive.

Follow-through on the small things. Don’t conduct check-ins as if you’re a litigator. And allow enough time for relationships to reset before throwing them into the wolves’ den. Rushing from one high-pressure collaboration to another right after a conflict is how a disagreement turns into a lasting, teeth-baring rift. We all know this is energy-draining.

What this means practically.

Don’t think a team requires an overhaul. Take notice of a few things in your own team.

• Watch for silence. A quiet team isn’t necessarily a healthy one. We’re organically influenced and can decide that a disagreement isn’t worth the cost or energy.
• Separate ‘it’s resolved’ from ‘we’ve recovered’. Resolved is a status. Recovery takes longer and needs deliberate attention. It saves energy in the long run to check in before just moving on to the next deliverable.
• Big one here. Notice default conflict styles on your team, especially your own. The style that gets you through a disagreement isn’t always the one that helps you recover from it.
• Unless your job is life or death, give repair some runway. Throwing a team back into a high-pressure sprint after conflict prolongs the tension and energy drain.

The data is there and fairly consistent. Managers versed in conflict skills mitigation can see it pay off in retention, engagement, and time saved. Returns don’t come from having one hard conversation well. It comes from what a team does in the ‘few moments later’.

Written by: Shawn Lovegrove, Mohawk College Enterprise