Navigating Conflict in Meetings
How teams can thrive in conflict and turn controversy into creativity
You’re sitting in a meeting, and yet again, your contribution is interrupted with criticism. Why even share an idea if someone always knocks it down? Before you know it, the heat rises in you, and you push back. It doesn’t matter how you said it or how the rest of your team reacts. All that matters is making sure they see things your way.
What is conflict? Or perhaps the better question is—what makes us feel conflict?
Topics have “heat” when they tug at our needs and values. Your reaction usually isn’t about a team member. Rather, the way they framed the idea, or even the idea itself, conflicts with something that you see as being important, creating tension.
When it comes to meetings, the problem isn’t conflict. It’s how we navigate it—both internally and within teams. When we focus on the people involved instead of the issue itself, the likelihood of a productive conversation is slim.
What if we could do conflict better? What makes it so difficult in the first place?
In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker notes that historically in the United States, the Freemasons’ Constitution promoted harmony in their gatherings—at all costs, harmony should never be broken. Old-school etiquette tells us that it’s impolite to discuss race, religion, and politics in polite company. Conflict avoidance is rooted in our organizational DNA, and we’ve never really outgrown this.
If you and your team want to do conflict better, it starts with navigating it differently:
Start with self. Manage your reaction to what you perceive as conflict.
Establish agreements with your team to follow when conflict arises. This also helps build trust, and trust is a key ingredient for constructive conflict.
Use visuals in meetings. Visualizing the conversation helps groups focus on the problem, rather than the person. Depersonalizing the conflict makes it easier to navigate.
Find alignment. Being the only one “on your side” can feel isolating. We can try to reduce this by finding areas of agreement where possible.
When all else fails, take a L.A.P. Listen, advance, and provide a process to move forward. When others feel heard, they are more likely to hear you.
Productive conflict doesn’t happen out of nowhere. You have to create the right conditions.
Manage Your Reactions
When you perceive conflict, what happens? Maybe a certain feeling arises, like anger or anxiety, and you start to feel a physical sensation, such as tense shoulders or a tight chest. Becoming aware of how your body reacts to conflict can help you create new patterns of behavior.
When you feel the tension rise, take a few deep breaths. It sounds cliché, but slowing our breath and becoming aware of our breathing activates our parasympathetic nervous system—the part of ourselves responsible for rest and recovery—via the vagus nerve.
We need to become masters of our own reactions to conflict before we can change our behavior. Figure out what is at the root of the conflict by doing an internal interview:
What am I feeling?
What is the reason I feel that?
What else might be going on?
What is the most important thing to me right now?
This is the type of work that we often do with a therapist, but you can do it on your own if you allow yourself to be open to new perspectives.
Speaking of perspectives, that’s the key to understanding conflict at its core. Conflict is just two or more perspectives coming into contact with each other. Meeting facilitators have another term for this—brainstorming. How’s that for a mental reframe? Conflict is often just brainstorming but with a little more heat. There’s no real danger in most work conflicts, so if we can manage our reaction to a “threat,” we can pivot more easily into constructive conflict.
Kilmann’s Five Conflict Styles
From the visual summary of This Meeting Sucks Season 3 Episode 2 How People Work—download it for free.
Once you begin to see conflict as valuable, you can begin to understand your relationship to it. That starts with awareness of your conflict preferences. The stronger your understanding of your own preferences, the easier it is to adapt your conflict style to be most appropriate for a given situation.
The Kilmann Model for Conflict Style features two axes. The horizontal axis considers the importance of the relationship, while the vertical axis considers how important it is to express your needs. From this, the Model identifies five unique styles of conflict.
No one of these conflict styles is better than the other, and we all have our preferences. Each style of conflict has a value and a scenario in which it is most appropriate. Practicing the ability to make choices and “flex” between different styles will make you more effective at different types of conflict.
Avoidance
When there is both a low need for cooperation with others and a low need to be assertive of your own needs. Avoidance is most beneficial when the issue does not merit an urgent response or when you don’t have strong feelings about the topic.
Accomodation
When there is a high need for cooperation with others and a low need to be assertive of your own needs. Also known as harmonizing. Harmonizing is most beneficial when it is more important for the group to have harmony over the individual. This may be meeting a customer or client need.
Competition
When there is a low need for cooperation with others and a high need to be assertive of your own needs. Also known as directing. Directing is most beneficial when it is there is an emergency and immediate action is needed.
Collaboration
When there is both a high need for cooperation with others and a high need to be assertive of your own needs. This is the win-win scenario, with a solution that is acceptable to all parties. Collaborating is most beneficial when you have the time needed to achieve the ideal outcome. This style may require a third-party mediator or facilitator.
Compromise
When some but not all needs are met on all sides. This is the lose-lose scenario, with a minimally acceptable solution for all parties. Compromising is most beneficial when a quick decision needs to be made, and everyone can accept the results.
Consider which conflict style is your default and which one is harder for you. We need access to all conflict styles so that we can choose which one is best for each situation.
Want help making decisions about which conflict style you should choose? Grab our conflict styles decision tree.
Build Trust through Meeting Agreements
Have you ever been to a team-building workshop? One that left you feeling super positive about the people you work with? How about a work happy hour where you learned something about Sarah that makes you feel completely differently towards her the next time she butts into your idea (again).
Taking time out of the day-to-day grind to interact with your team on a personal level builds trust. Trust has a big role when it comes to achieving team goals and team development. Lencioni’s model shows us that when trust is present, conflict is constructive and can lead to commitment, accountability and, ultimately, high performance.
Trust serves as the foundation or the most important element of a team. Only when we have trust can we engage in constructive conflict.
Mastering constructive conflict enables team commitment to be established.
When team commitment is established, members of the team can begin to hold each other accountable.
A strong sense of shared accountability, or holding each other responsible for tasks, paves the way for high-quality performance.
While we would all love to start as a high-performance team, it’s only possible when all four foundations are mastered.
Designing meeting agreements with your team is one way to build trust and create an environment for constructive conflict. Simply talking about what the team agrees on is a new way of interacting with and getting to know each other. So don’t just design meeting agreements for the sake of the meeting; design them to build a high-performing team that navigates conflict like waves in the ocean on a windy day.
The other benefit of meeting agreements is to head off conflict before it even starts. Teams that have worked together have a good sense of where meetings tend to go off the rails, and designing meeting agreements to prevent that is an effective pre-conflict management strategy.
Check out our blog for example meeting agreements that address common situations that tend to create or worsen conflict.
Reframe Conflict into Complexity Through Visuals
Visuals don’t just make meetings more engaging; they fundamentally shift how we navigate conflict.
They focus on the problem, not the person. Placing ideas on the wall directs the energy toward the visual instead of toward individuals, diffusing tension and shifting the conversation from “you vs. me” to “us vs. the challenge.”
They reduce the need to repeat. When people see their ideas reflected in the discussion, they feel heard and validated—eliminating the cycle of re-explaining and re-arguing. Meetings go faster and flow better.
They reveal connections and alignment faster. Visually mapping thoughts makes it easier to spot patterns, identify shared goals, and build solutions. That moment of clarity—“Wow! We all want the same thing!”—becomes more likely.
How can you integrate visuals into your team’s meetings?
For in-person meetings, use a whiteboard or flipchart as your canvas. Use sticky notes to place ideas on your canvas and move them around to cluster ideas and create connections. In online meetings, you can use an online whiteboard or shared document and leverage polling tools to generate and prioritize ideas.
The more we visualize our thinking, the better we navigate complexity—and the more we turn conflict into constructive collaboration.
Discover Areas of Alignment
Conflict has a way of draining energy and making it feel like no one agrees on anything. The reality? We often spend 80% of our time debating the 20% of things we don’t agree on while missing the bigger picture of what we do align on.
Focusing solely on disagreements keeps teams stuck. Identifying common ground accelerates problem-solving and moves discussions forward.
So, in your organization, ask: What is the thing we all care about?
The end user—the people we ultimately serve
Outcomes—the positive outcomes we’re striving toward
By centering conversations around these shared priorities, teams can create alignment and generate solutions more effectively.
The End User
When we shift our perspective to include the people impacted by our decisions, alignment becomes easier.
What might our audience think about this?
Could we test this idea with a few customers?
What reactions might we receive?
If we did this, what impact would it have on our customers?
Try this: Invite your team to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. Ask them to consider how they might react to an idea or change and if it’s possible to test it with real users. You can even assign team members to role-play, with one person acting as the customer and another as a team member.
For deeper empathy-building, try using:
Persona Canvas to create a detailed picture of your end user
Journey Map to visualize their experience over time
Outcomes
Sometimes, alignment isn’t about the who but the where—where we’re trying to go. Help your team zoom out and connect to long-term goals.
Thinking about our goal to [X], how does this align?
What are we trying to achieve with this result?
Try this: Ask your team to imagine what it would be like if the team met its goals. Brainstorm structures, policies and relationships that would make this possible in the present tense and consider the most crucial steps needed to get there. As the team members share ideas, write short statements for everything the team agrees on. If the group cannot agree on something, move it to a “not agreed items” list.
Conflict thrives in uncertainty, but alignment creates momentum. By focusing on shared goals—the people we serve and the future we’re building—teams can move from debate to action.
When All Else Fails… Take a L.A.P.
Even with the best meeting agreements, clear visuals, and a focus on alignment, some conflicts just won’t budge. That’s when it’s time to take a L.A.P.—a simple but powerful framework to keep conversations moving productively.
L.A.P. = Listen, Advance, Process
Listen
When you feel or observe conflict arising, take a step back, default to listening and let the conversation play out. Give others the space to unpack their thoughts fully before jumping in so you can better understand where everyone is coming from.
Advance
Help the conversation move forward by paraphrasing what’s been said and use clarifying questions to make sure everyone is on the same page. Work to identify connections and use “Yes, and” language to keep momentum and build generative solutions rather than shutting down ideas.
If the conversation is stuck in the weeds, zoom out and remind your team of the larger context of the conversation.
Process for Moving Forward
When the conversation feels stuck, it’s time to get strategic about the next steps.
I see a couple of ways forward—what do you think? Do you see another way?
What do we need to do in order to move forward?
Do we have the right people for this conversation? If not, should we table it for now?
Depending on the importance and timeliness of the conversation, you may suggest moving it to a “parking lot” or action list and scheduling time to come back to it another day. If it’s something you need to focus on addressing, decide what needs to be set aside to make time and determine agreements to make the discussion productive (ex. no interrupting, use a timekeeper, keep comments to under a minute).
And when in doubt, take a break. Sometimes, the best way to get unstuck is to step away, reset, and return with fresh energy.
Navigating conflict in meetings doesn’t have to be draining—when approached with the right tools, it can be an opportunity for alignment, innovation and progress.
MeetingMakers Academy covers navigating conflict at a basic and advanced level. Join us this summer on Fridays, May 30 to July 11, from 11:00 AM to 1:30 PM ET to transform the way you participate in and lead meetings. With three levels to choose from, you can find the right training for your goals, schedule and budget. Learn more.
