Stop Treating Symptoms: The Real Cause of Workplace Conflict

If you're a leader dealing with a rise in interpersonal conflict and pervasive burnout, your first instinct might be to look at personnel, team dynamics, or culture.

Stop. These are likely symptoms, not the disease.

These are lagging indicators of a deeper pathology: a fractured or poorly articulated strategic purpose.

Interpersonal friction is often the end result of systemic ambiguity. When an organization's "why" is diffuse, its "how" and "what" become battlegrounds.

Before you invest in another team-building workshop, conduct a simple qualitative audit. Your goal is to map the coherence of your own strategic intent across the organization.

The Audit: Ask These Questions. Just Listen.

Go ask your people these questions. Ask them individually, and simply listen.

• What is the specific, collective function of this group?

• What shared goals or aims unify us?

• Tell me about a critical, collective goal from the past. How did we know we'd won?

• What is the single most important objective for this group to accomplish this year

For any specific team, drill down even further: Why does this group meet? What is the purpose of these meetings?

The variance in these answers may tell you everything you need to know.

When you ask these questions, don't be surprised by the pained, quizzical faces. That hesitation is not a sign of a disengaged employee; it's a data point.

An earnest – and astonishingly common – answer like "There really isn't anything we do collectively" is evidence of siloing.

Frankly, it means you haven't given them a "collectively" to latch onto.

The Cost of Strategic Ambiguity

When your strategic intent is nebulous, individual and team efforts become divergent vectors. This diffusion creates immense organizational drag; significant effort is expended without much collective forward motion. People are spinning their wheels. And they know it.

We see two frequent outcomes of this wheel-spinning:

• Burnout is a frequent consequence of working hard but seeing no clear, collective progress.

• Conflict is the inevitable outcome when good people are forced to battle for resources and priority in a vacuum.

Looking at this aggregated qualitative data offers you a diagnostic mirror. It moves the conversation away from managing downstream symptoms ("Why is Lucas fighting with Finance again?") and forces a necessary, and likely uncomfortable, confrontation with the upstream cause: strategic ambiguity.

Often, this audit will expose the fissures within the leadership team itself.

And that, of course, is where the real work begins.