How to work with a colleague you don't like

In a recent episode of the INTHEBLACK podcast, leadership and workplace consultant Tammy Tansley and director at the Centre for Work, Organisation and Wellbeing at Griffith University, Paula Brough, sat down to discuss healthy and unhealthy workplace conflict.

Is tension at work healthy?

Both tension and conflict can be very healthy, Tansley says.

“You think about what difference can create in terms of difference of opinion, diversity of thought, different ways of doing things or different ways of approaching a project.

“It is where it spills into something that is less about the issue and less about the system that it gets into the kind of personal behaviours that can become tricky.”

When tension becomes personal

Healthy tension becomes problematic when it starts affecting a professional’s wellbeing and sense of psychological safety, Tansley says.

“When people start to feel that knot in their stomach when you do not want to go to work or see the person you are in conflict with... At that point, it is not a structural systemic issue anymore, but it is actually something personal and it is potentially becoming unhealthy.”

Brough agrees. “If [the conflict] is too serious, it is going on too long or it is making the employee feel more uncomfortable than they need to, then that is where it should be attended to.”

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