Your coworker took credit for your idea in the all-hands meeting. Again. You’re sitting there replaying it, drafting furious Slack messages you’ll never send, wondering if you’re overreacting — or if this is the third time and you’ve just stopped noticing the pattern.
Here’s the question nobody actually answers for you: should you say something, or let it go? Every “workplace conflict examples” list on the internet will tell you what kind of conflict this is. Almost none of them tell you how to decide whether it’s worth addressing at all — which is the part that’s actually keeping you up at night.
Why “Naming the Conflict” Isn’t the Same as Solving It
Most advice on workplace conflict follows the same format: here are seven types (leadership gaps, time management clashes, credit-stealing, and so on), here’s a tidy paragraph on each. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just solving the wrong problem.
Knowing that your situation is a “recognition conflict” doesn’t tell you whether to bring it up in your 1-on-1 tomorrow or whether you’re one bad week away from making a molehill into a career-damaging molehill. The actual skill isn’t classification. It’s triage — figuring out, fast, whether a given conflict is worth your political capital, your energy, and the risk of being the person who “makes things weird.”
Here’s the misconception that trips people up: they treat every conflict as equally urgent, which leads to one of two failure modes. Either they escalate everything — turning a one-off miscommunication into a formal complaint — or they suppress everything, including patterns that are quietly costing them a promotion, a project, or their sanity. Neither instinct is calibrated to the actual stakes.
And the stakes are bigger than most people assume. The 2023 Pollack Workplace Conflict Report found that U.S. employees spend an average of 2.8 hours a week dealing with workplace conflict — and that 76% of people default to avoiding it rather than addressing it directly. That avoidance isn’t neutral. Unaddressed conflict doesn’t stay the same size; it compounds, because the other person usually doesn’t know there’s a problem, and silence reads as consent.
So the real question underneath every “workplace conflict example” isn’t what category is this — it’s does this meet the bar for a direct conversation, and if so, who’s the right audience for it: the person, their manager, or HR?
There’s a second variable that most conflict guides skip entirely: power. A recurring issue with a peer and the same recurring issue with your manager aren’t the same conflict wearing different clothes — they carry different risk, and they call for different framing. Bringing up a concern with someone who writes your performance review requires more setup (a clear “I want this to succeed” framing, evidence instead of impressions) than the same conversation with a peer. Ignoring that distinction is how otherwise reasonable people either freeze up around authority or, just as often, torch a relationship with someone who had leverage over their next raise.
A quick personal note on this: Early in my career, I sat on a recurring issue — a peer routinely reassigning parts of shared projects to me without asking — for four months because I kept telling myself it wasn’t “big enough” to bring up. By the time I finally said something, I’d built up enough resentment that the conversation came out sharper than I intended, and it took longer to repair than it would have if I’d raised it the first week. The lesson wasn’t “speak up immediately about everything.” It was that I’d never actually decided when to speak up — I was just waiting for my frustration to make the decision for me. That’s the gap this framework is meant to close.
The Framework: Deciding What to Do, Then What to Say
Before you draft a single message, run the situation through two questions.
| One-off | Recurring | |
|---|---|---|
| Low stakes (annoying, not damaging) | Let it go — or mention it lightly, once, in the moment | Name the pattern directly, one-on-one, soon |
| High stakes (affects your work, credit, workload, or standing) | Address it directly and specifically, within a few days | Address it directly first — then loop in your manager or HR if it continues |
That’s the whole triage. Most conflicts people agonize over for weeks land in “recurring + low stakes” or “one-off + high stakes” — both of which have a clear next step. The only box that ever needs a third party immediately is anything involving harassment, discrimination, or safety, which skips this table entirely and goes straight to HR.
Once you know whether to say something, here’s exactly what to say for the four scenarios that come up constantly:
When someone takes credit for your work:
“In the meeting, it sounded like the [project/idea] was framed as [Name]’s. I want to make sure it’s clear I led that — can we make sure that’s reflected when it comes up with [manager/team]?”
When a coworker keeps dumping extra work on you:
“I’ve noticed [specific task] has landed on my plate the last few [weeks/times]. I’m at capacity — can we figure out a way to split this more evenly going forward?”
When your manager makes a decision you think is wrong:
“I want to raise a concern before we move forward — I think [specific issue] might cause [specific consequence]. Can I walk you through my thinking, and then I’ll fully support whatever you decide?”
When a message or comment reads as passive-aggressive:
“I want to check in on this — [quote the exact line]. I read that as [your interpretation], but I might be misreading it. Can you clarify what you meant?”
When two people disagree on how the work should get done (not whether it should):
“We’re aligned on the goal, we just see the approach differently. Can we lay out both options with trade-offs and pick one together, rather than defaulting to whoever’s louder?”
When it’s a remote/hybrid communication clash — terse messages, no context, or “per my last message” energy:
“I want to flag something about how we’re communicating on [Slack/email] — [specific example]. Can we agree on a norm, like a quick call for anything with more than one back-and-forth?”
Notice what all six have in common: they name the specific behavior, not the person’s character, and they ask for something concrete instead of just venting. None of them require you to know, in advance, how the other person will respond — they just require you to open the door.
Common Mistakes That Turn Small Conflicts Into Big Ones
Escalating to HR before trying a direct conversation. Unless it’s harassment, discrimination, or safety, skipping straight to HR for a garden-variety disagreement often reads as disproportionate — and burns the relationship you were trying to fix.
Having the conversation over Slack or email. Tone doesn’t survive text. A message that would land fine spoken aloud reads as an attack in writing, and now you’re managing two conflicts instead of one.
Waiting for the “right moment” that never comes. The longer a pattern sits unaddressed, the more resentment builds — and the sharper (and less fair) the eventual conversation tends to be, as I learned the hard way above.
Making it about the person instead of the behavior. “You always…” invites defensiveness. “This specific thing happened, here’s the impact” invites a conversation.
Bringing up three unrelated grievances at once. It turns a fixable issue into “this person has a list,” which makes you the problem in the room.
Assuming intent instead of asking about it. Most recurring conflict isn’t malicious — it’s two people operating on different assumptions about who owns what, what “urgent” means, or what a curt message was supposed to convey. Opening with “I’m sure you didn’t mean it this way, but here’s the impact” gets you further, faster, than opening with an accusation.
FAQs
What if the conflict is with my manager, not a peer? Use the same framework, but weigh the power dynamic — frame it as raising a concern rather than a complaint, and lead with the shared goal (“I want this project to succeed”) before the specific issue. If direct conversation doesn’t shift anything after a genuine attempt, that’s when HR or your manager’s manager becomes appropriate.
Should I put anything in writing before or after the conversation? A short, neutral follow-up email after a verbal conversation (“Thanks for talking today — to summarize, we agreed to…”) is usually enough, and it creates a record without feeling like a paper trail built for a fight.
How do I know if something is HR-worthy versus just annoying? If it involves harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or something affecting your safety or legal rights, it’s HR-worthy regardless of how “small” it feels. If it’s a personality clash or a one-off frustration, it almost always belongs in a direct conversation first.
What if I bring it up and the person denies there’s an issue? Stick to specifics and outcomes rather than trying to win the argument about what happened: “Regardless of intent, here’s the impact — can we agree on how to handle it going forward?” You don’t need them to admit fault for the conversation to be useful.
Does just avoiding conflict ever actually work? Sometimes, for genuinely minor one-offs. But as a default strategy, no — the data backs this up: conflict that goes unaddressed doesn’t disappear, it tends to resurface bigger, later, and with more resentment attached.
Is workplace conflict always a bad sign? No — disagreement over ideas, approach, or priorities is often a sign people care about the outcome, not a sign the team is broken. The distinction is whether the conflict stays about the work (healthy, often productive) or shifts into personal territory (not). Treating every disagreement as a red flag can make you conflict-averse in situations where speaking up was actually the right move.
The Takeaway
You don’t need a taxonomy of conflict types. You need a fast way to decide whether something’s worth addressing, and language that names the behavior instead of the person. Most workplace conflict isn’t actually complicated — it’s just been sitting unaddressed long enough to feel that way.
If the thing keeping you up at night is less “how do I handle this disagreement” and more “am I about to lose my job over this,” that’s a different problem — our guide on figuring out if you’re actually at risk or just spiraling covers how to tell the difference.
