The past few years have been exhausting for many Western organizations. Civil strife seems to be widespread, with clashes over racial, gender, and income inequality; rising authoritarianism; immigration; climate change; and foreign wars deepening the divides in an increasingly polarized society.

It’s perhaps inevitable that in this time of growing discord, conflict at work would increase too. A recent Society for Human Resource Management survey of 1,622 U.S. workers showed that 76% had witnessed acts of incivility in the past month, with 21% experiencing it personally. Nearly half said they had encountered it weekly, and 13% said they had encountered it daily. Forty-four percent believed incivility would worsen in 2025, and 26% said they were likely to leave their jobs because of it. With employee engagement at a low, contentious interactions at work are estimated to cost businesses more than $2 billion a day in productivity losses and absenteeism.

Polarization and increased incivility have put CEOs under intense scrutiny too. Today their every utterance risks backlash from employees, customers, politicians, or all three. But in this era leaders are often expected to wade into the fray. Research from Weber Shandwick published in 2023 revealed that 65% of employees believe that their companies have a responsibility to speak up about critical social issues, and upwards of 80% of consumers think that companies should take stands. Some leaders have a difficult time threading this needle, however, which may explain why in the first quarter of 2024, 622 CEOs announced their resignations—50% more than quit in the first quarter of 2023, which was already a record year for departures.

CEOs and other corporate leaders are by no means the first to navigate thorny conflicts, however. Over the past 30 years, I and my colleagues at the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University have drawn insights from psychology, peace and conflict studies, and complexity science—and conducted scores of surveys and laboratory, case, and field studies—in order to identify the most effective conflict-engagement strategies of leaders, mediators, and peacemakers. Those efforts led us to create a set of principles that will help leaders guide their organizations through even the most vexing situations.

Our research reveals that leaders need four core competencies to navigate conflict. The first, and most foundational, is self-awareness and self-regulation—recognizing and managing your personal reactions so that you can remain calm and engage strategically. The second competency, strong social-conflict skills, which include deep listening, balancing advocacy with collaboration, and checking biases, helps leaders reach constructive solutions. Situational adaptivity—knowing how to tailor strategies to fit different types of conflict and when to lean in, step back, or adjust for cultural nuances—is also crucial. Finally, systemic wisdom allows leaders to address chronic, deeply rooted conflicts by seeing the bigger picture, embracing complexity, and learning from past successes and failures.

Leaders who demonstrate the four core competencies have what we call a high conflict-intelligence quotient (CIQ). Our research indicates that such executives not only excel at dispute resolution but also create workplace environments where team members experience greater job satisfaction, empowerment, and well-being. These leaders also tend to build organizational cultures marked by greater creativity and constructiveness and, according to research by Nicholas Redding, the ability to navigate stress and uncertainty. Notably, our research has found significant correlations between employees’ perceptions of leaders’ conflict intelligence and the psychological safety they feel at work—whether their environment is characterized by mutual trust, transparent communication, professional respect, and support for calculated risk-taking.

It’s easy to confuse emotional intelligence and conflict intelligence, but they’re distinct concepts with unique applications. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others. It involves skills like empathy, self-regulation, and social awareness. Conflict intelligence encompasses a broader set of competencies aimed at managing and resolving disagreements. While emotional intelligence is a crucial component of conflict intelligence and enables people to engage constructively and adapt, conflict intelligence includes understanding social dynamics, situational factors, and systemic forces that influence disputes.

The question is, what, exactly, do high-CIQ leaders do during conflicts? What strategies do they employ to successfully manage these encounters? Our research reveals seven principles that are particularly helpful in volatile situations. They often are apparent in the work of master mediators and peacemakers of different stripes—people who work in business, community organizations, and global affairs. In this article I’ll draw on examples from those arenas to highlight how effective leaders deploy them.