Years ago, I was asked to work with a group of approximately fifteen receptionists in a hospital office who had reached the point where some of them were barely speaking to one another. The tension had become disruptive enough that I was brought in to help change the dynamic. On the surface, it looked like a fairly straightforward interpersonal conflict: strained relationships, poor communication, resentment, and an obvious need for people to learn how to work together more effectively.
My first task, however, was not to bring everyone into a room and ask them to communicate better. I met individually with each receptionist and listened to her account of what was happening. I wanted to understand how each person experienced the group, where she believed the conflict had begun, what she thought other people were doing, and what the situation had come to mean to her. Those conversations produced fifteen perspectives on a shared workplace, and although there were certainly areas of overlap, there were also substantial differences in how people interpreted the same events and relationships.
Listening Without a Predetermined Outcome
Looking back, those individual conversations illustrate something important about the role of listening in conflict. When we are brought into a difficult situation because something needs to change, it is easy to begin listening with an implicit problem-solving agenda. We want to identify the issue, locate common ground, determine who needs to do what differently, and move people toward resolution. Those may ultimately be necessary goals, but pursuing them too quickly can interfere with the kind of listening required to actually understand what is happening.
That tension sits underneath the idea of Rogerian speech turns. Active listening is often taught as a way of understanding the interests beneath another person’s position so that the parties can eventually move toward a workable outcome. Yet when listening is being used mainly to move someone toward agreement, the other person may experience it as instrumental rather than genuinely receptive. Understanding and influencing can both be legitimate aims; they do not have to occur in the same conversational moment.
Carl Rogers’s person-centered approach offers a useful way to think about the earliest stage of such a conversation. Rogers emphasized accurate empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard: understanding another person’s experience carefully, responding genuinely rather than performing a technique, and receiving what is being said without immediately evaluating or redirecting it.
That was essentially what I was trying to accomplish in the individual interviews. At that stage, I was not asking the receptionists to negotiate with one another or decide what the solution should be. I was trying to understand the ecology of the conflict from fifteen different positions inside it. My responsibility was to hear each person’s experience accurately enough that I could begin to see not only where their accounts differed, but also what patterns might exist beneath those differences.
Only after that listening did we begin facilitated conversations intended to improve communication among the group. We worked on helping people hear one another more directly, surface concerns that had become difficult to discuss, and begin interacting in ways that were less defensive and more constructive. Those conversations mattered. They created opportunities for people who had stopped communicating to speak to one another again, and they helped reveal how much misunderstanding and accumulated frustration had developed within the group.
The Problem Was Larger Than the Conversation
But something else became clear as the work continued. The problem was not simply that fifteen receptionists had failed to communicate effectively.
The office itself was organized around an intensely competitive dynamic among the physicians they supported. Competition between the doctors was being transmitted into the work of the receptionists. Loyalties, priorities, information, and even ordinary work processes could become associated with one physician or another. The receptionists were being asked to collaborate while operating in a system that repeatedly rewarded or reproduced competition.
That realization changed the nature of the intervention. Better communication was still important, but communication skills alone could not solve a problem that the structure of the workplace was continually recreating. Ultimately, our recommendation was not merely that the receptionists learn to get along better. We needed to change aspects of how the work was organized so that collaboration and teamwork could actually occur.
The experience taught me an important distinction between understanding a conflict and solving it. Had I entered the situation focused primarily on achieving a quick interpersonal resolution, I might have concluded that the receptionists needed clearer communication expectations, conflict-management skills, or greater personal accountability. None of those conclusions would have been entirely wrong. They simply would have been incomplete. The early listening changed what became visible.
Sequencing Matters
This is why the sequencing suggested by Rogerian speech turns is valuable. A conversation does not have to pursue the same objective from beginning to end. Early turns can be genuinely oriented toward understanding, while later turns can shift toward shared and competing interests, possible options, appropriate criteria, and eventual agreement. Making that shift transparently can help prevent active listening from becoming simply another technique for moving people toward a predetermined destination.
In the hospital example, the individual interviews created an early stage in which understanding was allowed to be the primary purpose. The facilitated conversations represented a later stage in which people could begin considering what different interactions might look like. Yet the process also demonstrated something that I think is especially important in organizational conflict: careful listening sometimes changes the problem we believe we are trying to solve.
What first appeared to be a relationship problem among receptionists was also a structural problem. The behavior occurring between individuals was connected to a larger environment that made competition easier than collaboration. Once we could see that, the possible outcomes changed. The question was no longer only, How can these people communicate better? It became, What would need to change in this environment for collaborative behavior to become more possible?
That experience has influenced how I approach difficult conversations ever since. When people are in conflict, I still care about what happens next. I care about repairing relationships, changing behavior, and finding workable outcomes. But I have become more cautious about deciding too early what the problem is or what resolution should look like. The first responsibility may simply be to understand the experience well enough to see the system more accurately. Listening, then, is not merely the first technique in a problem-solving process. Sometimes it is the process through which we discover what problem actually needs to be solved.