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Workplace Conflict Doesn't Start With People. It Starts With Assumptions.

  • Writer: stepBYstef
    stepBYstef
  • 4d
  • 7 min read

85% of employees experience workplace conflict at some point. That's not a crisis statistic — that's just the human condition at work. Put people together under pressure, with competing priorities and imperfect information, and friction is inevitable.

What's less inevitable is how badly most of it is handled.

Not because people are bad at conflict. Because they're looking at the wrong thing. They see the argument, the tension, the person who won't cooperate — and they address that. What they don't see, almost ever, is what created it.

Almost always, it started earlier. Quieter. With something nobody thought to question.


The Real Origin Story of Most Workplace Conflicts


Workplace conflict rarely announces itself. It doesn't begin with a fight or a confrontation. It begins with a moment someone interpreted something — a tone, a silence, a decision, an absence — and reached a conclusion.

That conclusion is the conflict. Everything that follows is just its consequences.

The interpretation is almost always about intention. Why did they do that? What are they actually after? And here the human brain, reliable in so many ways, becomes unreliable in one specific and well-documented way.

Psychologists call it the Fundamental Attribution Error. When we observe someone else's behaviour, we systematically overestimate internal causes — their character, their intentions, their attitude — and underestimate external ones — their circumstances, their workload, their information, their constraints. We explain what other people do by who they are. We explain what we do by what happened to us.

The result, in practice, is that people at work are constantly misreading each other. Not because they're careless. Because the default reading is almost always wrong in the same direction.


Two stags locking antlers — representing the workplace conflict that arises when two perspectives collide without either side seeing the other's reality.

What People Actually Assume


Across two decades of managing teams drawn from more than sixty nationalities, I sat in the middle of more conflicts than I can count. And the explanations people brought me for what was happening clustered, with remarkable consistency, around three things.

Bad intentions. The belief that the other person was acting deliberately — to undermine, to obstruct, to make life difficult. This was by far the most common. And in the vast majority of cases I was actually able to get to the bottom of, it was wrong. Not partially wrong. The other person wasn't plotting. They were managing something the first person simply couldn't see from where they were standing.

Laziness. The automatic explanation for underperformance. The first place most managers go when someone isn't delivering. Rarely the accurate one. Behind most underperformance I encountered: missing clarity, missing training, missing information, missing conditions. Not missing effort. But laziness is a satisfying explanation — it puts the problem squarely on the other person and removes any uncomfortable questions about what wasn't provided.

Stupidity. That's the word people actually used with me. Not incompetence. Not skill gap. Stupidity. Frustration talking — but also a verdict. And verdicts stop curiosity. Once you've decided someone is stupid, you stop asking what they might actually need to succeed.

None of these assumptions are made maliciously. They're made quickly, automatically, by busy people with incomplete information doing what human cognition does: closing the loop as efficiently as possible. The problem isn't the assumption. It's what happens next — which is usually nothing. Nobody checks it. It just sits there and compounds.


When Good People Build a False Picture Together


Here's the dynamic that caused the most damage in the environments I worked in — and it's the one least likely to be visible from inside it.

Close-knit teams communicate well. They trust each other. They share impressions and observations naturally. And in doing so, they can collectively construct a picture of someone that is entirely wrong — and feels entirely solid.

One person notices something and mentions it to a colleague. The colleague has noticed something similar. A third person confirms it. The picture builds. Each account seems independent. The consistency feels like evidence.

It isn't independent. The first impression seeded the second. The second confirmed the third. Nobody is fabricating. Nobody is lying. But the shared picture has become self-reinforcing — and it feels more true with every person who validates it. What organisational psychologists call social proof bias in judgment.

I've seen this process quietly ruin someone's reputation in a team over a matter of weeks. By the time it reached me, the united front felt unassailable. Multiple good people, all pointing in the same direction, all certain.

What nobody had done was check the basics. Had this person been properly trained? Had the expectations been made explicit? Did they actually have what they needed?

In one particular case — a dealer surrounded by supervisors who'd converged on the view that he was difficult and uncooperative — the answer to all three questions was no. Nobody had verified the foundations. Each had assumed someone else had handled it.

And while the supervisors were building their picture of him, he was building his own picture of them. He could feel the dissatisfaction but not its source. So he found an explanation: someone had something against him. Then he saw the united front, and the assumption grew. They all have something against me. This is personal.

So he started behaving accordingly — guarded, withdrawn, less cooperative. Not resistance. Self-protection. Which confirmed, of course, exactly what the supervisors had been seeing.

Two loops, running in parallel, feeding each other. Neither checked. Both escalating. This is not a story about bad people. It's a story about how assumptions, left unexamined, write their own ending.


The Leader Is Not Neutral in Any of This


Before we get to resolution, something worth naming directly.

The leader sets the conditions in which conflict either grows or doesn't. And not always in the ways leadership training suggests.

The leaders whose teams had the most persistent conflict — in my observation — shared one quality. They saw themselves as the most important thing. Decisions filtered through how they reflected on the leader. Consistency disappeared because the operating principle was self-protection, not fairness. Information became selective. Dark corners multiplied. And in dark corners, assumptions breed.

The leaders whose teams had the least — or resolved it quickly without escalation — were consistent. Same standards, same behaviour, same fairness regardless of who was in the room. Information was transparent and unified. When someone raised something, they felt heard — even when nothing immediately changed. That acknowledgement kept things from going underground.

There's also the dysfunctional version of team cohesion worth naming: a team that unites around a bad manager. The internal friction disappears temporarily because everyone is pointing outward. That's not resolution. That's survival with a different target. It has its own costs.

The leader's culture is not a backdrop to conflict. It's the soil it grows in.



The Move That Actually Works In Workplace Conflicts


After hundreds of informal team mediations, one approach worked more reliably than anything else I tried.

Before any joint meeting, I met with each person separately. Not to take sides — to understand what each had concluded, underneath everything, about the other person's intentions. What they believed was driving the behaviour. Not the behaviour itself. The assumed motive behind it.

And then — carefully, without putting anyone on trial — I checked those assumptions with the other party.

This is not as simple as it sounds. People arrive at these conversations armoured. They've been wronged, or they believe they have, and they're holding that belief tightly. Challenge the assumption directly and they defend it. Expose it as false and they feel foolish. Neither helps.

The approach matters as much as the move. It has to be disarming before it can be clarifying. Curiosity before conclusion. Factual before personal. Not why didn't you tell them — but let's find out together what actually happened. Not accusation — shared investigation.

When I brought the dealer's perspective back to the supervisors — not as a verdict, just as a set of questions — the exchange of looks in the room said what words didn't need to. Nobody could confirm the basics had been done. Each had assumed someone else had handled it.

The conflict deflated in that room. Not because everyone liked each other. Because the assumption — this person refuses to perform — had been replaced by a fact: this person didn't have what they needed. Facts are workable. Assumptions, left unchecked, aren't.

It didn't always go that cleanly. Some conflicts had more layers than I'd found in the preparation. Some people hadn't told me everything in the one-on-one, and I walked into the joint meeting with an incomplete picture. On average — and it's an average built across a lot of rooms — checking the assumption at the source was the move that worked most often.


Before You Act on What You Think You Know


Most workplace conflict doesn't need a mediator. It needs one question, asked before the conclusion hardens into a decision.

Have I checked this directly with the person it concerns?

Not through a third party. Not through accumulated impressions. Directly. With genuine curiosity about whether your current explanation is the right one.

The answer won't always change the situation. Some conflict is real and requires real management. But it will almost always change how clearly you see it. And in conflict, seeing clearly is where the rest becomes possible.





Stefania Codarcea is a leadership coach for managers and leaders navigating the moments their experience hasn't fully prepared them for. She spent two decades leading teams across 60+ nationalities in 24/7 live international operations — including hundreds of mediations that taught her more about human assumptions than any framework ever could.





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