Resolving Conflicts In Your Team
Conflicts are inevitable, even in the most engaged of workplaces. Regardless of the source of the conflict, if they are left unresolved, conflicts can quickly impact employee morale and productivity.
People have different viewpoints and, under the right set of circumstances, those differences escalate to conflict. How you handle that conflict determines whether it works to the team’s advantage, or contributes to its demise.
When a team oversteps the mark of healthy difference of opinion, resolving conflict requires respect and patience. The human experience of conflict involves our emotions, perceptions, and actions; we experience it on all three levels, and we need to address all three levels to resolve it. We must replace the negative experiences with positive ones.
The below is a process, which helps team members to do this:
Acknowledge the conflict
The conflict has to be acknowledged before it can be managed and resolved. The tendency is for people to ignore the first signs of conflict, perhaps as it seems trivial, or is difficult to differentiate from the normal, healthy debate that teams can thrive on. If you are concerned about the conflict in your team, discuss it with other members. Once the team recognizes the issue, it can start the process of resolution.
Develop rules for handling conflict
Ensure team members listen to one another, respect each other’s points of view, and refrain from interrupting each other.
Never take sides
Your role is to help the team members address the issues causing the conflict and to reach a resolution that works well for them.
Discuss the impact
As a team, discuss the impact the conflict is having on team dynamics and performance.
Agree to communicate
The most important thing throughout the resolution process is for everyone to keep communications open. The people involved need to talk about the issue and discuss their strong feelings. Active listening is essential here, because to move on you need to really understand where the other person is coming from.
Clarify positions
Whatever the conflict or disagreement, it’s important to clarify people’s positions. Whether there are obvious factions within the team who support a particular option, approach or idea, or each team member holds their own unique view, each position needs to be clearly identified and articulated by those involved. This step alone can go a long way to resolve the conflict, as it helps the team see the facts more objectively and with less emotion.
It’s important to understand that a conflict-free workplace is not necessarily a good thing. Conflict is both normal and healthy. It’s all about managing team conflict and creating a culture where dissent is encouraged and where everyone feels safe to disagree with one another can spark innovation, and future success.
Knowing how to deal with conflict in a team; especially unhealthy conflict is important. Indeed, healthy conflict is not toxic. Nor will it destroy your work environment or company culture. In fact, handled properly through appropriate team conflict management activities, conflict can generate that spark of ingenuity that is so important to the health of the business.
But, instead of cleaning up other people’s messes, empower your people to work through the problems themselves.
When conflict is resolved take time to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions everyone made toward reaching a solution. This can build team cohesion and confidence in their problem solving skills, and can help avert further conflict.