A recent survey conducted by Robert Half International’s Accountemps unit revealed that top execs at the nation’s largest companies were spending nearly 20 percent of their time resolving staff personality conflicts, about twice as much time as they spent in the 1980s. The results come as no surprise to the cadre of human resources and management consultants who work in the Valley and elsewhere and, almost without exception, say their business is booming as a result. But what they may not realize is that the conflicts have been there all along for the most part, it is management’s attention to them that has changed. The switch from a manufacturing-based to a knowledge-based economy, a heightened regulatory environment that has increased employers’ vulnerability to employee lawsuits, the arrival into the workforce of the millennial generation with a different set of expectations and even heightened productivity expectations are all playing a part in putting these issues front and center on the plates of managers. “Maybe management should have been dealing with it all along, and they just ignored it for so many years,” said Robert Sniderman, president of HRFOCUS USA Inc., a human resource and organizational development consulting firm in Studio City. “Now that people are going after employers for being treated unfairly, now that people are unwilling to put up with poor treatment and they are taking action, it’s forcing management to attend to interpersonal conflict.” Personality conflicts in the workplace can stem from a variety of reasons everything from differences in style to the pressures of the workday. Indeed, about the only thing that doesn’t seem to promote conflict is diversity in the workplace. “Having diversity is better than not having diversity,” said Eric Nielsen, a spokesman for The Gallup Organization referring to the results of a Gallup study on diversity. “The more diverse the workplace, the more engaged it is and the more productive it is.” Differences in style, on the other hand, proved so troublesome for one local company that officials completely revamped their hiring practices in hopes of screening out those who would not fit in. “What we are doing is spending more time profiling applicants, not just to qualify them, but to determine who will work well with the team I have in place that’s working well,” said Richard M. Burke Jr., president and CEO of the Calabasas-based makers of nutritional supplements Performance Labs Inc. Burke likens the workplace to a ball team it needs more than star players; it requires players that can work together to win. Performance Labs wasn’t so much dealing with interpersonal conflicts as it was dealing with groups that could not perform successfully together, Burke said. But differences in style do often lead to personality clashes, with an equally devastating effect on productivity. “Primarily it is people that come across as abrasive, as condescending, as defensive or intimidating, what I tend to call over-caffeinated,” said Joe Jotkowitz, managing partner of The Executive Advisory LLC, an Encino-based communications consulting firm. “The idea is they’re doing a lot of the right stuff, but they’re either doing too much of it or they’re doing it at the wrong time. I have continued to get more and more work out of that.” Jotkowitz thinks at least part of the problem is generational. Twenty or 30 years ago, there were clearer lines of authority and more rules about interpersonal behavior in the workplace. Today, what he finds is younger executives behaving in ways that tick off supervisors and co-workers with little awareness of the impact their behavior is having. Take the case of the co-worker who would sit at staff meetings with his hands on his head staring at the ceiling. His fellow workers regarded him as condescending and aloof, but it turned out the position was this manager’s way of concentrating on what was being said. “There is a certain amount of what I like to call professional radar that you have to develop in the workplace,” Jotkowitz said. Then too, some believe conflicts arise because of the way different people approach their jobs. “The personality conflicts are not between supervisor and employee as in the past,” said Ken Keller, who runs Renaissance Executive Forums, a discussion and training group for small business owners in North L.A. County that has taken up the topic a lot more recently. “What is happening now is that those that are hard working, industrious and dedicated to the company are getting very frustrated with those that are not working hard, complaining about the company and being negative.” When Gallup conducted extensive research with millions of workers, it concluded that only 26 percent of employees are engaged; in other words, hard working, loyal and productive. Another 55 percent are disengaged clockwatchers who do only the minimum required, and another 19 percent are actively disengaged, meaning they not only put little effort into their own work, they also disrupt the larger workplace. “I think by definition, you’re going to find a certain amount of greater acrimony in the groups that are disengaged,” said Rodd Wagner, a Gallup principal and co-author with Jim Harder, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management, of “12: The Elements of Great Managing,” a primer based on interviews with 10 million employees and managers. “If you feel like one or more members of your team is not pulling his or her weight, that’s going to cause some tension.” Wagner and Harder place the blame squarely on management. They note that about half of workers surveyed say they don’t know what’s expected of them and few managers offer praise for a job well done. “One of the reasons there isn’t more engagement is that managers for the most part have ignored some of the fundamentals of people management,” Harder said. At the same time, Harder and Wagner say, what workers need from management has not changed literally since commerce began. What has changed is the group environment, from family and tribe constellations to artificially manufactured teams in corporate environments. “If you’re talking about a small, mom-and-pop operation in a small town, you’re more likely to be hiring people who know each other, who went to the same school,” Harder and Wagner said. “When people are forced together by decisions made by a larger corporation, the more these kinds of issues will come up and the more important it is for a manager who is highly adept at making a tribe out of a group of people who are thrown together by circumstances.” To make matters worse, a whole new form of communication has entered the workplace, mucking up communication between workers of all levels, some say. “It’s gotten worse since e-mail,” said Anita Gorino, whose Thousand Oaks consultancy, Creative Resources, specializes in HR issues. “People don’t take the time to re-read before they hit send. They just do a dump. The reader is looking at a two-page dissertation and doesn’t have time to read it the way it’s meant, so they put their own twist on it.” Add to all that the increased demands for productivity companies are placing on employees at all levels and, Gorino said, communication goes by the wayside. “Management is being asked to do more with less, and everybody’s busy and nobody wants to stop and take the time to talk it out,” Gorino said. For most of the modern age, managers were not forced to address these issues. In a manufacturing society of assembly line workers, each was interchangeable, and if problems arose, there was little hesitation in switching out a worker. But as the economy shifted from manufacturing-based to knowledge-based it became harder to replace workers, many of whom possessed an institutional memory critical to getting the job done. Just as the problems festered, the consequences too have mounted. In today’s workplace, with the threat of employment lawsuits looming, employers are paying far more attention to interpersonal issues. “Everybody is so frustrated,” said Sue M. Bendavid-Arbiv, a labor law attorney with Lewitt, Hackman, Shapiro, Marshall & Harlan, an Encino firm. “And it gets down to petty things that grownups should be able to resolve on their own: this person is not inviting me to lunch; I’m excluded from a birthday lunch. I have a case now where people are speaking their own language and the other employees in the vicinity assume they’re speaking about them even if they’re not.” Bendavid-Arbiv said she is being called to consult far more frequently on these issues because her clients are worried that these interpersonal conflicts could escalate into costly lawsuits, “I think it’s always been there,” she said of the typical workplace problems. “I think people are just highly sensitive to employee claims because they’re in the news and the numbers are high. It’s a growing field for me because employers are paying more attention to it.” Even without the threat of a lawsuit, though, employers are increasingly realizing that the cost of these conflicts in productivity is mounting, and managers are feeling more pressure to resolve workplace issues as a result. “When it affects business, it becomes an issue, and it always affects business,” Gorino said. “Unhappy employees can create all kinds of damage to the bottom line, and unhappy bosses can take it out on employees, and that’s human nature.”
