The Four Things People Actually Need in a Conflict

Most leaders are trying to solve the wrong problem.

When conflict surfaces in a school district -- between a board member and the superintendent, between two staff members, between a principal and a parent -- the instinct is to get to resolution as fast as possible. Define the issue. Identify a solution. Move on.

That instinct is understandable. Leaders are trained to fix things. But speed without understanding is one of the most reliable ways to make a conflict worse, or to settle it on paper while it continues to burn underneath.

After 28 years in educational leadership and formal civil mediation training, I have come to believe that most conflicts are not actually about what they appear to be about. And the reason resolution so often fails -- or holds for only a few weeks before the tension resurfaces -- is that nobody stopped long enough to ask what the people involved actually needed.

Not what they said they wanted. What they needed.

Those are different things.

What People Ask For vs. What They Need

In mediation, we talk about the difference between positions and interests. A position is what someone says they want. An interest is the underlying need driving that want.

A board member says she wants the superintendent to present budget updates differently. That is a position. What she actually needs may be to feel informed before decisions are made, not blindsided in public. Those are not the same problem, and they do not have the same solution.

When leaders try to resolve conflict at the position level -- negotiating over the stated demand -- they often reach an agreement that satisfies nobody and changes nothing. The real need went unaddressed. The conflict did not end. It just went quiet.

So what do people actually need when they are in conflict? In my experience, there are four things that show up again and again, regardless of the setting or the specific dispute.

1. To Be Heard -- Really Heard

This is not the same as being listened to while someone waits for their turn to respond. People in conflict need to feel that their experience has been received and understood by another person. Not validated necessarily, not agreed with -- just genuinely heard.

When someone does not feel heard, they escalate. They repeat themselves. They get louder, or they withdraw entirely. The conflict grows not because the issue grew, but because the unmet need for understanding is driving the behavior.

In my work, I have seen disputes that looked impossibly complicated begin to shift the moment one party felt that someone in the room actually understood what this had been like for them. That moment of being heard does not resolve the conflict. But it creates the conditions in which resolution becomes possible.

The first step in any effective conflict process -- what I think of as Pause -- is creating space for exactly this. Not jumping to solutions. Not assigning fault. Just stopping long enough to let the conflict be named and heard before anyone tries to move it.

2. To Have Their Perspective Acknowledged as Valid

There is a difference between agreeing with someone and acknowledging that their perspective makes sense given their experience. That distinction matters enormously in conflict work.

People need to know that their view of the situation is not crazy, not petty, not irrelevant. Even when two parties hold genuinely opposing views, both perspectives usually make sense when you understand the context from which each person is operating. Part of the mediator's role -- and the effective leader's role -- is to help each party see that the other person's position did not appear from nowhere. It came from somewhere real.

This is the Name step: helping parties accurately identify and articulate what they are experiencing, and doing so in a way that does not assign blame but does honor the reality of the conflict for everyone in it.

3. To Be Treated Fairly

Research on conflict and dispute resolution consistently shows that people care deeply about process, not just outcome. In many cases, a party who does not get what they wanted will still accept the result if they felt the process was fair. And a party who gets what they asked for will still feel aggrieved if they felt the process was rigged, rushed, or dismissive.

Fairness in this context means: everyone had a chance to speak. No one was talked over or ignored. The process had some structure and consistency. Decisions were not made before the conversation even happened.

Leaders who skip this step -- who try to resolve conflict through private conversations with one party at a time, or who treat resolution as a matter of announcing a decision -- often discover that the conflict resurfaces with added resentment. The outcome may have been reasonable. But the process felt unfair, and that is what people remember.

4. To Move Forward Without Losing Face

This one is underestimated. People need a way out of the conflict that does not require them to publicly admit they were wrong, abandon their identity, or look weak in front of colleagues or community members.

This is not about ego in the pejorative sense. It is about dignity, which is a legitimate human need. When the resolution process requires one or both parties to fully capitulate -- to accept a narrative in which they were simply mistaken and the other person was simply right -- it often fails. People will resist resolution, sometimes irrationally, because the cost to their dignity is too high.

Effective conflict work creates a path forward that allows both parties to maintain their integrity. The goal is not to determine a winner. It is to move. This is what the final step -- Move -- is designed to do: identify concrete, forward-facing action that both parties can commit to without requiring either to surrender their sense of self.

What This Means for Leaders

You do not have to be a trained mediator to use these ideas. But you do have to be willing to slow down.

The next time conflict lands in your lap -- a grievance, a governance dispute, a personnel situation that keeps resurfacing -- try asking yourself four questions before you move toward resolution:

Does each person feel genuinely heard? Has each perspective been named and treated as valid? Has the process been transparent and fair to everyone involved? And is there a path forward that preserves dignity on both sides?

If the answer to any of those is no, you may be solving the right problem with the wrong tools.

Conflict is not just a problem to be managed. It is information. And the four things people need -- to be heard, to be acknowledged, to be treated fairly, and to move forward with dignity -- are not obstacles to resolution. They are the path to it.