Er ... could you remind me how we got here ...?

Making better decisions in workplace conflicts

Er ... could you remind me how we got here, or is it a little late for that?

“What were we thinking? How on earth did we get here?” are questions often asked when it’s too late to turn back in a conflict. In this article, I’ll look at how we can avoid getting “here” in the first place.

For those who like an executive summary at the start, the key lessons that I suggest we should draw are:

• Be prepared to deal honestly with uncomfortable realities (such as dysfunctional teams) before they become festering wounds.

• Encourage people to have moral courage and to speak up if they believe something is going wrong.

• When they do speak up, listen carefully to them. Beware of Groupthink.

• Be prepared to take a step back and conduct a review before any key decision in a conflict.

• Involve a genuinely neutral person at the core of your review.

• Be aware that there are always alternative routes to deal with any conflict situation: the most obvious or direct way may not be the best – it may be disastrous.

• Even if you are "in the right" it may still be in your best interests to settle at an early stage.

• Early settlements are almost always better for all sides than later ones.

To illustrate this, I've taken a recent employment tribunal case as an example. Like many employment tribunal cases (admittedly viewed with hindsight), this is a sorry tale of misjudgements and missed opportunities. In essence, the facts found by the Tribunal were as follows:

• C was employed as a childcare practitioner.

• She was particularly involved in providing support to a child (“Z”) who had severe autism.

• She was temporarily assigned to a pre-school nursery to support Z’s integration into the school.

• Staff at the nursery were considered (at least by one external NHS professional) to be “quite difficult” and by their line manager as inclined towards “complaints and bitching”.

• C raised a number of concerns, including that Z’s care plan was not being followed by nursery staff, causing risks to his health and safety.

• She reported those concerns to the appropriate people, including her employer and the line manager of the nursery staff.

• As far as she was aware, her concerns were ignored.

• C raised further concerns at a meeting with external professionals and the line manager.

• The line manager responded with criticisms of C that she had heard from nursery staff.

• Although some attempts were made to address the concerns, they were not effective. It transpired that the relevant nursery staff member had not even seen Z’s care plan.

• C raised her concerns with the Local Authority, who raised them with the school.

• The school’s response was to instigate a misconduct investigation into C, mainly on the basis of reports from nursery staff about her interactions with children.

• C was ultimately dismissed by her employer and was reported to the General Teaching Council. Her mental health suffered severely as a result.

• C’s whistleblowing claims against her employers succeeded and the report to the GTC was found by the employment tribunal to have been malicious.

• The employment tribunal proceedings took over 3 years to complete (assuming there are no appeals) and at that stage the GTC’s proceedings had still not been concluded. C was awarded compensation for loss of earnings, injury to feelings and psychiatric injury.

• The legal costs on all sides are not recorded, but they must have been very substantial. C failed in an attempt to claim her legal costs in relation to the GTC proceedings from her employer.

We do not know whether anyone involved in the case ever asked themselves the question “How on earth did we get here?”. But it would be surprising and alarming if they had not.

So how did they get there? The managers involved neglected multiple opportunities to recognise and deal with the uncomfortable realities of the situation. They accepted one side of the story while apparently ignoring the inconveniently cogent evidence pointing in the other direction. They compounded this by misguidedly trying to protect their organisations from criticism – by attacking and ousting someone who was justifiably pointing out failings to support and protect vulnerable children.

The (to my mind, disastrous) decisions to discipline and ultimately dismiss C (and to "maliciously" report her to the GTC) might have been avoided if one person with some level of authority had summoned up the moral courage to say, “Hold on! Something’s not right here - can we step back see if there is another way to deal with it?”

Stepping back could have included involving a genuinely neutral person to help everyone work through the issues. Even if relations had by that time soured to the extent that the nursery team and C could no longer work together, the process would have enabled a greater understanding of the concerns on all sides, including the comments about C’s conduct. There was other work that C could have done for the employers, outside that particular nursery.

More importantly, such a process would have allowed the support and protection given to vulnerable children to be improved, without causing damage to the organisations and individuals concerned.

No doubt there were also missed opportunities on the part of C and/or her advisers. They are more difficult to see from the Tribunal's judgment, which is overwhelmingly in her favour. However, although she was "in the right" and won the case, after taking into account legal costs and damage to health and career, she probably came off worst in reality. We do not know from the judgment whether there were any attempts to settle at any stage, but with hindsight almost any early settlement would have been preferable to this victory.

In conclusion, the key lessons that I suggest we should draw from this case (and other all too common cases like it) are (as set out at the start):

• Be prepared to deal honestly with uncomfortable realities (such as dysfunctional teams) before they become festering wounds.

• Encourage people to have moral courage and to speak up if they believe something is going wrong.

• When they do speak up, listen carefully to them. Beware of Groupthink.

• Be prepared to take a step back and conduct a review before any key decision in a conflict.

• Involve a genuinely neutral person at the core of your review.

• Be aware that there are always alternative routes to deal with any conflict situation: the most obvious or direct way may not be the best – it may be disastrous.

• Even if you are "in the right" it may still be in your best interests to settle at an early stage.

• Early settlements are almost always better for all sides than later ones.

Image: James Grant (book author), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons