Here’s a simple but important conflict resolution tip: when you’re having a conflict conversation, keep having it until it is finished.

It sounds self-evident, but you’d be surprised how many people stop the conversation before it is over. In general, that will make the conflict worse over time. But I see how it happens.

You start in a conflict situation by yourself. You’re unhappy with what’s going on (what the other person did, what the policy says, what the customer just did, etc.). Something’s wrong. Your very first assessment of the situation is purely inside your head. That’s fine, of course. But frequently we let it sit there, inside our head, for quite a long time before we bring it up to anyone. In doing so, we can often let the conflict get much bigger than it actually is. You get very little new information while you’re having a conversation with yourself, it turns out, so it’s easy to fill in gaps with assumptions.

And when we DO finally let it out of our head to talk to someone, it is frequently NOT the person with whom we have the conflict in the first place. We talk to a friend or colleague about it. At one level, this is okay. It’s okay to vent a little to someone if it can help you clear your head. But typically we go beyond venting. We find someone who can further inflate the sense of outrage or unhappiness we have. We vent to people who will be on our side and reinforce our feelings.

So eventually, when we raise the issue with the other person, we’ve got a fairly complete story in our heads about how wrong the other person is and how great our own proposed solution is. The hard part is, the other party frequently has their own story, which is quite different from yours obviously, but equally well defended in the head of the other party. So a lot of that conflict conversation ends up with me making my case, and you making your case. We struggle to make are arguments more clearly, but you and I never really come to any agreements about what’s going to happen next.

That’s what finishing the conversation is: figuring out what’s going to happen next. The shared understanding of the situation is definitely the first step, but that shared understanding doesn’t help if it doesn’t translate into “so what are going to do next about all this.”

But we don’t get there because it takes so long to even come close to the shared understanding part. So we end up having the conversations up to the point where we get to really make our point to the other party. This isn’t good enough. Once you’ve made your point, start to ask the other person about what needs to be done next. Throw out some ideas, but ask them what they think should be done. Even ask them what they think YOU should do. You may not get the perfect answer right away, but don’t leave the conversation until you have something you both can try. It will make the next conversation MUCH easier, and that’s the goal here: making conflict conversations easier so they happen more frequently.