Ed Batista on Conflict
Executive coach Ed Batista argues that most leaders default to a single conflict style and pay for it when situations demand something else. Good conflict work, in his view, rests on three things: knowing the full repertoire of conflict modes (and when to use which), recognizing that a fight is almost always about something other than what it appears to be about, and developing the rare skill of using anger and confrontation instrumentally rather than suppressing them. Harmony-first is his default setting as a coach — but "almost always" is not "always," and leaders who never fight end up unable to fight well when they have to.
Five conflict modes, and the cost of a favorite
Batista's starting frame is the Thomas-Kilmann model, a 1970s framework from psychologists Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann that maps conflict behavior onto two axes: assertiveness (how much we pursue our own concerns) and cooperativeness (how much we accommodate others'). The grid yields five modes: competing (high assertiveness, low cooperativeness), accommodating (its mirror), avoiding (low on both), collaborating (high on both), and compromising (moderate on both).
The diagnostic value of the model isn't in labeling someone a "collaborator" or a "competer." It's in noticing that everyone has a preferred mode that becomes the default — the setting they reach for without thinking. Batista's argument is that every one of the five modes is the right tool in some context, and the leader's job is to choose deliberately rather than reflexively. A senior operator who wins through competition will run over a direct report who needed ten minutes of accommodation to feel heard. A leader whose instinct is collaboration will burn weeks on consensus when a situation calls for a fast competing move. Avoidance — often treated as pathology — can be exactly right when the stakes are low and you're buying time for emotions to settle.
Batista considers the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) more defensible than instruments like the MBTI, which he criticizes for lacking validity and being prone to boxing people in. The TKI was designed to control for social desirability bias. He also flags Ron Kraybill's Conflict Styles Inventory as a useful alternative that distinguishes "calm" from "storm" conditions — acknowledging that our conflict style under stress often looks nothing like our style when relaxed.
Underneath both instruments is the older Managerial Style Grid developed by Jane Mouton and Robert Blake in the 1960s, which maps the same two dimensions onto management behavior (concern for results vs. concern for people). Batista calls this "one of the most important frameworks in the history of organizational management" — not because the grid is subtle, but because it dissolves the false trade-off between accountability and empathy. The two are independent axes, not opposite ends of a single slider.
The coaching implication: you can't just teach someone "better conflict skills." You first help them see which mode is their default, then build comfort with the modes they've been avoiding. Someone whose default is avoidance needs reps — low-stakes confrontations they wouldn't normally pick up — before they can reliably compete when the situation requires it.
Stupid fights and the pasta shapes problem
Most interpersonal conflict in functioning teams is not about what the participants think it's about. Batista calls the phenomenon pasta shapes, after an argument he and his wife once had about what kind of pasta to cook. Mid-fight, they caught themselves: "What the hell is going on here? Why are we fighting about pasta shapes?" The fight, obviously, wasn't about pasta. It was about a set of unresolved issues that weren't being discussed and had found a convenient — and safely disposable — outlet.
The underlying principle is that unresolved emotions leak out. They find symbolic expression in whatever low-stakes surface dispute is available. A management team's heated argument about seemingly minor operational details is often really about trust, status, a recent decision that someone hasn't processed, or an unspoken worry about the business. Batista's diagnostic test is a gap test: if the intensity of the argument is disproportionate to the importance of the issue, it's probably a fight about pasta shapes.
The useful move isn't to resolve the surface disagreement. Winning the pasta argument settles nothing. The useful move is to name the disproportion and pause — the Batistas literally just say "pasta shapes" to each other, and he describes it as "lifting a spell." Sometimes that pause opens a real conversation about the underlying issue. Sometimes it doesn't, but either way the stupid fight gets stopped before it generates its own momentum and damages the relationship.
Stopping pasta-shape fights depends on emotion management, which Batista is careful to distinguish from emotion suppression. You don't get there by distancing yourself from your feelings. You get there by getting closer — building enough awareness to notice the physiological signs that you're gearing up for a fight before your cognition narrows, and enough regulation to articulate what you're feeling in a way that dissipates the emotion rather than discharging it as an attack. His practical guidelines: literally ask yourself how do I feel? and notice the body's answer; speak up rather than staying silent (research indicates naming feelings makes them easier to manage); hold a growth mindset about the inevitable mistakes; and keep practicing — because avoidance only guarantees that the fights you do have will be the ones where emotion has already overpowered you. See ed-batista-on-emotion-regulation for more on the awareness-regulation pair.
The value of a good fight
Batista's own practice leans heavily toward de-escalation, win-win framing, and turning adversaries into allies. But he insists on the word almost in "almost always." If you always put harmony first and never engage in conflict, you fail to exercise skills that don't get worked in other modes. Adversaries who are more comfortable with conflict will extract concessions before you reach agreement. And when you're dealing with an actual enemy — someone whose interests are implacably opposed to yours, or who's acting in bad faith — efforts to find common ground can be perceived as weakness and exploited.
Anger, which coaches typically treat as a liability, is on Batista's reading sometimes instrumentally useful. Drawing on Jennifer Lerner and Lara Tiedens' research, he notes that angry people are perceived as threatening but also as competent, powerful, and dominant. They approach situations with confidence and a sense of control. In negotiations, this can trigger overconfidence and aggression, but it also buffers against indecision, risk aversion, and over-analysis. Anger can "motivate us to stand up for ourselves and others in the face of injustice."
The costs are real: anger heightens prejudice, narrows the set of motives we attribute to others, and diminishes our ability to assess information quality. In Lerner and Tiedens' phrase, angry people rely on "readily available general knowledge structures" — they get heuristic and shallow. So anger is useful when we're in a fight — when the task is confrontational and the other traits anger brings (confidence, power, optimism) outweigh its costs. Research from Maya Tamir, Christopher Mitchell, and James Gross found that participants actually preferred to increase their anger before confrontational tasks, despite the unpleasantness, and that this preference correlated with better performance.
Batista is emphatic that this is not a license to pick fights or indulge anger. He cites W.C. Fields — "I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to" — as a personal mantra, and John Gottman's finding that the most successful married couples fight with a minimum of anger and drama. The skill is to feel the emotion fully while managing its outward expression — to dial it up to the right level without going too far. Easy to say, hard to do in the moment. And the only path to doing it well is practicing in real fights rather than avoiding them. If we always avoid conflict, we never learn how to have a good one. See ed-batista-on-difficult-conversations for the preparation side of this work, and ed-batista for more of his coaching frameworks.