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I'm a manager whose definition of conflict mostly matches yours, so here's how I handle it (as an interviewee) and how to translate the "default behavioral interview question" to something you can answer: - the scope of the question is usually "how do you reconcile your worldview, desires, and best interest with someone else's". When answering, I tend to first clarify to the interview that "conflict" is a word that has intense connotations for me, and then ask "Are you asking about a time I had to negotiate with a person that was coming from a different point of view or background, or about how I handled an emotionally charged situation?" (As a manager, it is more common that I do get asked about emotionally charged situations, which also take skills to defuse, just different ones.) - At least for me, I often think of non-emotionally-charged disagreements as negotiations; there are absolutely negotiation skills to be used to resolve disagreements efficiently and effectively, and if you can't think of any, it may be something for you to practice. Do you often get what you want? When you do, is it mutually beneficial? How does that course of action happen? - Sometimes you can sidestep the question and showcase better conflict resolution skills by thinking of a time you arbitraged a conflict between two other parties. Describe how you dealt with each party. Did you feel you were unbiased? If you were initially more on the side of one party, how did you set that aside to listen to the other person? - Don't mention abuses of power (by you or the other party) in a conflict resolution question. Also don't mention conflicts that are primarily personal - the origin of the disagreement should be about work, not tone, physical threats, intimate history, etc. - If you do have a story about building a working relationship with a known problematic person, so that your work with that person yielded good results and you didn't fall into the trap of a bad personal relationship with them, you can mention what you did to get there. E.g. "X was widely known for his temper and would often yell during code reviews. Although this caused problems with all his teams, and he doesn't work there anymore today, I always got civil, useful code reviews from X by sending him my points in writing in advance, and expressing that I valued his feedback which was why I wanted a trace of it." |