The trouble is that current attitudes and systems of conflict resolution actually foster conflict, and that conflict in turn costs huge amounts, most of which will never be recovered. Along with direct costs like professional fees, organizations in conflict must face opportunity costs as things that might have otherwise been produced are not, continuity costs as they struggle with the loss of relationships, and "community" and emotional costs, which can cause real pain.

"The cost of conflict represents a resource drain of huge proportion and a source of great unhappiness and discomfort," Levine says. "And conflict has other costs too. For instance people obsessed with rehashing the past, or feuding over intellectual property, can't create and produce value in the present. That translates to losses of both productivity and revenue.

"People stuck in the past can lose relationship and community. And when the conflict gets too tense, the emotional toll can be enormous, as anger, fear and blame sap current productive capacity. Instead of going about your business, you are riveted on the injustice done to you and the untoward behaviour of the perpetrator. You are consumed with vengeance and a desire to punish the wrongdoer. You expend energy on your anger in addition to the loss you have already suffered. All of this energy will never be recovered."

Levine says those who can effectively resolve conflicts and create healthy working relationships can positively transform every organizational function - from management to collaboration to customer service to production and innovation - and ultimately, the bottom line. CIOs, like other managers, should learn how to create relationships that are based on shared commitments to ideas, issues, values, goals and process, and foster a culture of healthy agreement.

What makes a relationship a high-quality relationship? Alignment, manifesting itself not just as a "meeting of mind, but also a meeting of hearts", Levine says.

And while you obviously cannot mandate that people get along and work from the same playbook, you can guide people towards what he describes as "covenantal" relationships. "We're not talking about legalistic relationships, we're talking about a certain level of covenant among people. You can foster a higher level of covenant and manage your immediate key relationships," he says.

Cultural Web

When Levine says culture is reflected by the "web of relationships that are the organization", he uses the phrase with a lot of intent, he says, because that "web of relationships" - which extends to suppliers, business partners and customers - is the organization. "It's not like you have an organization and there is this web of relationships in it. The web of relationships is the organization."

Culture is embedded in every organizational relationship, and those organizational relationships, in turn, are a function of the agreements, usually implicit, between members of the organization. The quality of the culture depends on the quality of the agreements the organization has (both explicit and implicit), and can be greatly improved by making implicit agreements explicit. "[Agreements] must be explicit if you want to achieve alignment," Levine says. And through alignment you prevent conflict, because then there's not a lot of chatter in people's minds when they are working with others and that means clarity."

He says conflict often arises because managers have failed to take the time to craft effective, explicit agreements on the front end of their collaborative relationship. Partly, this is because this is a skill that is seldom taught in the context of the working environment, even though agreements are the foundation of joint enterprise.

Levine says because most people never develop certain skills - which include developing a kind of conversational competence that enables them to establish and sustain effective long-term collaborative relationships; learning what to talk about in building solid agreements with team members, direct reports, supervisors, suppliers and all members of the virtual team; learning how to deal with conflict in a non-adversarial way; and creating ground rules for moving through challenging times - the occasion for conflict is actually increased.

"There is a huge payoff available when we can engage in the dialogues that both create and sustain long-term relationships and lead to high levels of performance and effective, happy people," he says. "I have come to call these collaborative understandings 'agreements for results'. The causes of wasteful, expensive conflicts are implicit in artful, incomplete agreements that do not express a joint vision.

"Good quality organizational relationships will only be achieved by instigating good quality agreements among and between every person in the organization. That means not only for agreements between individuals and the organization but between the organization and all its stakeholders, and between departments, among team members and with reporting relationships."

Levine says most organizations let themselves down and can inadvertently damage those relationships by failing to incorporate a structured process for consciously creating explicit agreements that embody and reflect the culture, and a process to sustain the relationships through periods of breakdown.