Choosing your battles helps reduce conflict, save energy, and build stronger relationships in leadership, business, and team collaboration.

“When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”

Legend attributes this citation to Winston Churchill. What isn’t a legend, however, is the fact that Churchill championed debate, dissent, and independent thought.

A healthy debate is not just necessary for finding good solutions, but an outright condition. And it’s quite normal for people to get into conflict when trying to find good solutions.

However, some people overdo it. They are in constant conflict in everything they do. That’s exhausting for everybody who needs to collaborate with them.

Let’s look into some patterns and a better approach to conflict management.

Bad Behavior 1: Constant Disagreement

As an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, I am also the president of the General Staff Officers’ Association. In that function, I am involved in coordinating with other officers’ associations.

Naturally, each officer’s association cherishes the same purpose, but pursues slightly different interests: Tank guys have different interests from intelligence guys. Logistics people are different than signals people. Yet they are all officers, and they fight for a common cause.

In this context, I have met a guy who constantly disagrees with whatever you say. You could switch your point of view by 180 degrees from one sentence to the next, and he would still contradict.

Super strenuous.

But more than that, valuable counter-arguments are getting lost when somebody constantly disagrees with whatever you say.

Bad Behavior 2: Constant Criticism

As the Founder & CEO at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, we run a ticket system for our customers to report problems, bugs, and requests.

Pretty normal, you will probably say.

The vast majority of our customers use our ticket system in a pretty normal way. If there is a bug or a problem, they file a ticket. If not, they just use our software and that’s it.

And then there are very few people who are responsible for the majority of the tickets in our system. They report every misalignment of a text field in an admin screen. They send us screen recordings for absolute edge cases. And they create tickets that aren’t bugs, but logical consequences of their overly complex organizational setup.

So far, so good. We often close tickets that are edge cases, only to have those people complain that we shouldn’t close tickets that aren’t done yet. So we leave the ticket open, only for them to complain that the resolution takes too long.

Bad Behavior 3: Multiple Conflicts

Change of scene: Office politics. Everybody who has worked in large organizations knows them.

Recently, I collaborated with somebody who cherished office politics in a special way. In every possible situation, that person started frontal attacks on other people. It seems to be a special form of leadership theory to open as many conflicts as possible at the same time.

The problem with this behavior is that you create unnecessary enemies. And it will be hard to ask those people for a favor or help in the future if you started an unnecessary conflict earlier on.

The Solution: Choose Your Battles

As an entrepreneur, I am used to scarce resources. We never have enough manpower, money, and time to get everything done within the required time.

Conflicts usually take a lot of time and energy. That’s why I live by the mantra of choosing my battles. Even if I don’t always agree 100%, I strive to start as few conflicts as possible.

That makes you more cooperative and likable, which directly translates into more business, more future opportunities, and lower costs.