Today we’re going to tackle a problem that was likely not on many managerial radars until fairly recently: how to handle political disputes among employees.

It’s pretty clear that simply banning political discussions in the office isn’t the answer. For example, at Basecamp last year, one-third of employees opted to resign instead of accepting a ban on talking politics at work.

The Basecamp example is cited in a new article by professors Nour Kteily and Eli Finkel in Harvard Business Review that looks at the challenges leaders face in today’s politically charged world..

“Not long ago such questions lay at the periphery of corporate life. But today they’re central,” they write. “Potentially explosive new forms of leadership crisis are emerging as a result of this surge.”

The professors lay out a strategy for avoiding—or at least minimizing the fallout from—these new leadership crises. We’ll take a look at some of their advice today.

How to Manage Political Conflict on Your Teams

To start with, it’s important to understand that all of us are impacted by our worldview when we assess a situation. Kteily, who like Finkel is a professor of management and organizations, published research last year that demonstrates this phenomenon.

He and coauthors found that people who hold less socially egalitarian views are less aware of signs of inequality. Social egalitarians, by comparison, are much more alert to inequality—but only when it affects marginalized groups. (Insight covered this research, which you can read more about here.)

For example, in one study the researchers recruited nearly 1,500 participants who watched a short video of a panel discussion. Half saw a video in which the men on the panel spoke more than the women; the other half saw the reverse. Social egalitarians were much more likely to notice the imbalance than their less-egalitarian counterparts when it was the women who spoke less. But when men spoke less, there was no difference in who was likely to notice.

This is an example of “motivated reasoning” and is one reason why political disputes can get so heated. In their HBR piece, Kteily and Finkel offer managers dealing with these sorts of disputes a two-part strategy, breaking it down into how to avoid the conflict in the first place and how to address conflict if avoiding it is impossible. The article is chock-full of good advice. I’ll touch on just a few pieces of it here:

Start the process early: During onboarding, explain that your organization encourages and celebrates differences of opinion but that acts like hate speech or discrimination are unacceptable.

When conflict arises, have those involved share their views: If two employees have clashed, a manager should facilitate a discussion where they each get to share their views without interruption. The manager needs to ensure that neither person critiques or argues with the other.

Don’t ignore your own thinking: Managers aren’t simply responsible for helping their teams. They also need to focus on themselves. “To facilitate an evenhanded and clear-eyed approach to dealing with politically charged conflict in the workplace, they should be humble and apply the same strategies to themselves that they encourage their employees to use,” the professors write.

For more tips, you can read the full HBR article here.

How Companies Should Engage with Activists

Kteily and Finkel focus on conflict within your organization. But what if the discontent is coming from outside the company? Don’t ignore it, explains Professor Brayden King, who has studied the impact that activists have on the corporations they target. That’s because collective action against corporations often works, King explained in a The Insightful Leader Live webinar.

He and coauthors conducted research that found that if a boycott received national media attention, activists got some sort of concession from the targeted company 25 percent of the time. In another study, he and coauthors looked at the impact of protests on a company’s stock price. They found, on average, a 1 percent drop in stock price within 26 days of a protest targeting that company.

King recommends targeted companies engage with activists in a genuine way so they can help improve the organization and, in the process, reduce the risks associated with drawing activists’ ire. He’s seen this happen more and more over the past decade or so as companies have been beefing up their corporate-social-responsibility work—and employees engaged in that work have become allies with activists.

“I think that activists increasingly do have a place at the table,” he says. “We see them as voices that matter, and companies and governments throughout the world are increasingly willing to let them in and have them help set better practices.”

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP QUOTE

“In my experience it is very unusual and almost bizarre for someone who has not purchased the company to speak to current employees of the company he is looking to purchase.”

—Clinical professor Harry Kraemer in the AP on Elon Musk’s decision to speak directly to Twitter employees before he has finished a deal to buy the company.