By Matt Harrington, BCBA · Behaviorist Book Club · April 2026 · 12 min read

Conflict Resolution as a Leadership Skill: Navigating Workplace Disagreement in Behavior Analytic Practice

Overview & Clinical Significance

Leadership in applied behavior analysis is a clinical function, not merely an administrative one. BCBAs who lead teams — directing the work of RBTs, coordinating with caregivers and school personnel, influencing organizational culture and practice standards — shape the conditions under which effective behavioral services can be delivered. One of the most consistently demanding aspects of leadership in human care service environments is conflict: the disagreements, tensions, and competing interests that arise when multiple stakeholders with different roles, values, and goals work together around vulnerable individuals whose welfare is at stake.

Ellie Kazemi's WIBA presentation on conflict resolution as a leadership skill takes this as its starting point. Effective leadership in behavioral health does not mean creating environments where conflict never arises — it means creating environments where conflict is surfaced, engaged, and resolved in ways that serve client welfare and strengthen the professional relationships needed to deliver sustained, high-quality services. The ability to navigate challenging conversations — to disagree productively, to surface tensions that others are avoiding, and to reach resolutions that are honest and durable — is a distinguishing feature of effective behavioral health leadership.

The presentation draws on three substantive areas that reflect the breadth of a BCBA leader's responsibilities: caregiver engagement during services (how conflict with families is prevented and resolved), ethical and effective supervision (how conflict within the supervisory team is managed), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles as they apply to behavioral practice. This scope reflects the reality that conflict in ABA leadership does not stay in one lane — it appears in family relationships, in supervisory hierarchies, and in practitioners' own internal experience of the ethical and clinical tensions that leadership generates.

Background & Context

Conflict resolution theory has a long history across organizational development, negotiation research, and clinical psychology. The foundational insight that persists across this literature is that conflict avoidance and conflict escalation are both less effective than structured conflict engagement — surfacing the disagreement, understanding each party's underlying needs, and working toward resolution through transparent negotiation.

In behavioral health specifically, the sources of workplace conflict are distinctive. BCBAs lead teams where the work involves high emotional stakes, physical demands, and frequent ethical complexity. RBTs who implement crisis procedures, manage severe problem behavior, and navigate the emotional experience of working with clients in distress bring significant workplace stress to the team. Caregivers who are frustrated with service progress, anxious about their child's welfare, or skeptical of behavioral methods bring that complexity to family meetings. Supervisors who hold both clinical and administrative responsibilities face structural conflicts between clinical best practice and organizational resource constraints.

Kazemi's inclusion of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles is notable and reflects a growing conversation in behavior analysis about the role of values-clarification and psychological flexibility in clinical leadership. ACT's application in organizational contexts — developing leaders who can hold competing demands with flexibility rather than rigidity — provides a behavioral framework for the internal experience of conflict that complements the interpersonal conflict management skills the rest of the presentation addresses. A BCBA leader who can engage with the discomfort of conflict without suppressing it or being overwhelmed by it is better positioned to navigate it productively on behalf of their team and clients.

The BACB's increasing attention to leadership competencies in its updated ethics and supervision requirements reflects the field's recognition that technical clinical skill and leadership effectiveness are distinct competency domains — and that BCBAs who move into leadership roles without specific leadership development often find that their clinical training has not prepared them for the interpersonal and organizational challenges leadership requires.

Clinical Implications

Caregiver engagement during behavioral services is the first clinical domain Kazemi addresses. The quality of caregiver engagement predicts treatment generalization — whether skills acquired in the clinical setting transfer to the natural environment depends substantially on whether caregivers understand and can implement the treatment strategies being used. Conflict with caregivers, when not managed effectively, undermines this engagement: caregivers who feel at odds with their BCBA are less likely to implement faithfully, less likely to share clinical observations, and more likely to discontinue services.

Leader-level conflict management for caregiver engagement involves two capabilities: preventing conflict through proactive communication and collaborative goal-setting, and resolving conflict when it arises through the structured engagement Kazemi describes. BCBAs who invest in building caregiver relationships before disagreements arise — who establish shared language, collaborative decision-making norms, and explicit processes for raising concerns — are doing preventive conflict management that reduces the frequency and intensity of the conflicts they will need to navigate.

Effective and ethical supervision is the second clinical domain. Leadership-level supervision involves not only individual BCBA-RBT relationships but the supervisory culture of the entire team. A leader who navigates team-level conflicts transparently — who addresses tensions between staff members, who raises performance concerns directly and early, who creates conditions where disagreements can surface without retaliation — builds a team culture where clinical honesty is the norm. That culture directly affects treatment quality: teams where staff feel safe raising clinical concerns produce better information flow from front-line observation to clinical decision-making, which produces better programming decisions.

ACT principles applied in leadership contexts address the internal experience of conflict for the leader themselves. BCBAs in leadership roles regularly encounter situations where their own values — commitment to client welfare, ethical practice, fairness to staff — are in tension with organizational pressures or interpersonal dynamics that pull in other directions. Leaders who can engage with these tensions with psychological flexibility rather than rigid avoidance or fusion with any single position navigate conflict with greater effectiveness and with less personal cost.

Ethical Considerations

Code 5.0 (Responsibility as a Professional) is the primary ethics frame for BCBAs in leadership roles. Code 5.04 requires BCBAs to address organizational practices that are unethical and to advocate for change through legitimate channels. In conflict situations that arise from ethically problematic organizational practices — insufficient resources for supervision, pressure to reduce treatment intensity for financial reasons, administrative decisions that compromise client welfare — the BCBA leader's conflict management skills are directly in service of their Ethics Code obligations.

Code 1.01 (Being Truthful) and Code 1.03 (Honest and Accurate Communication) require BCBAs to maintain honesty in all professional communications, including during conflict situations. This rules out the common avoidant pattern of softening positions under social pressure, agreeing with multiple parties while actually agreeing with only one, or allowing organizational discomfort to suppress clinical honesty. Conflict management that maintains this honesty requires specific skill — the skill of being direct without being aggressive, of maintaining a position without being inflexible, and of engaging with disagreement without either capitulating or escalating.

Code 4.0's supervision obligations interact with conflict management in the leadership context. BCBA leaders who avoid surfacing conflict within their supervisory teams — who manage their own discomfort with conflict by not addressing performance problems, role tensions, or clinical disagreements — are failing in their supervisory obligations under Codes 4.05 and 4.06. Effective supervision requires honest engagement with the full range of clinical realities, including the uncomfortable ones.

The application of ACT principles to leadership has an ethical dimension as well. Leaders who develop psychological flexibility — the ability to act effectively in service of values even when doing so involves discomfort — are more consistent in their ethical conduct under pressure. The ACT concept of committed action aligns directly with the Ethics Code's expectation that BCBAs act in accordance with their professional obligations even when organizational or interpersonal pressures push in other directions.

Assessment & Decision-Making

Leadership-level conflict management assessment should cover both the interpersonal and internal dimensions. Interpersonally: how do caregiver conflicts typically arise in your practice context, and what patterns predict them? How are supervisory team conflicts typically surfaced or avoided? What is the current conflict climate of your team — do staff feel safe raising clinical concerns? These questions can be assessed through direct observation, structured team conversations, and periodic surveys of caregiver and staff experience.

Internally: how does conflict affect your own clinical decision-making? Are there conflict situations where you tend to capitulate too quickly, or where you tend to escalate unnecessarily? Are there types of stakeholders (caregivers, administrators, RBTs) whose conflicts you find more difficult to navigate, and why? ACT-informed self-assessment involves identifying the psychological experiences that show up for you during conflict — anxiety, frustration, self-doubt — and assessing whether those experiences are driving your responses in ways that are inconsistent with your values as a clinician and leader.

Decision-making in active conflict involves a sequence of judgments: Is this conflict best addressed now or at a different time? Who are the relevant stakeholders and what are their underlying needs? What resolution would best serve client welfare? What is my own clinical position and what flexibility do I have? What accountability is needed to ensure the resolution holds? Leaders who develop fluency with this decision sequence respond to conflict situations with more strategic effectiveness than those who respond reactively based on the most immediately salient interpersonal cue.

What This Means for Your Practice

Leadership is a skill set that develops through deliberate practice, not through the accumulation of experience alone. BCBAs who want to improve their conflict management as leaders should do what behavior analysis prescribes for any skill development: define the target behavior operationally, establish a baseline, implement a structured training experience, and measure progress.

The specific practice application from Kazemi's framework is to identify the conflict situation type you are currently least effective at navigating — whether that is caregiver conflict around treatment decisions, supervisory conflict with direct staff, or the internal tension of leading under organizational pressure — and to focus developmental effort there. Read the conflict management literature in your chosen area, find a peer or mentor to role-play challenging scenarios with, and build in structured reflection after the next three conflicts you navigate.

The ACT dimension is the practice of noticing your own psychological response during conflict — the thoughts and feelings that arise — without letting them automatically drive your behavior. This is a metacognitive skill that develops with intentional attention. The next time you find yourself in a high-stakes clinical disagreement, pause for a moment before responding. Notice what is showing up internally. Then choose a response that reflects your values as a clinician and leader, rather than the response that reduces your immediate discomfort most quickly.