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Managing Conflict in your Team by Randall Peterson, Programme Director, High Performance People Skills Most managers realise that some amount of conflict among the members of a close-working team is inevitable. Differences in background, personal style, and training all contribute to the potential for conflict in teams. But while it may be unavoidable, most of us dread the prospect of dealing with the havoc conflict can create. Happily research now indicates that some degree of conflict is actually a healthy experience for groups. Well managed conflict can lead to a deeper understanding of problems faced by the group, greater creativity and innovation in problem solving, and even increased acceptance of group decisions by individuals. This doesn’t mean that conflict is to be encouraged; nor is it to be wholly feared by team leaders. The key to ‘successful’ conflict is knowing how to manage it so that it produces the desired benefits, without getting in the way of productive group work. The first step in managing conflict to your benefit as a team leader is to understand that conflict comes in three distinct flavours: The first, relationship conflict, is interpersonal animosity, or the ‘I hate you’ type of conflict. It is always bad for groups because it distracts people from their work, lowers commitment to the team, and decreases support for team decisions. One important source of animosity is differences in personal style. For example, Chris is fastidious and likes to have detailed descriptions of every fact reported to the whole team. On the other hand, his colleague Susan prefers all data to be summarised. Their relationship could quite quickly deteriorate into one of mutual, personal animosity. To turn the situation to best advantage, however, their manager could offer training in interpersonal skills. Individuals would then benefit from learning to understand and appreciate the different personal styles of the members of their group. Relationship conflict can also be started when extremely negative feedback from leaders results in team members blaming each other, rather than working together to improve the situation. This can be avoided simply if team leaders are careful about how they deliver negative feedback and steer clear of individual recriminations. The second flavour of team conflict is disagreement over process issues, or how the group will accomplish something, particularly problematic for self-managed teams. Team-mates may get no further than disagreeing over whether consensus or majority rule will be used to make important decisions, who is assigned what types of tasks, and how people who do not complete their work will be punished. It is extremely damaging to a group, because individuals can feel undervalued by decisions that imply that their contributions are not important. Some groups create process routines to avoid these types of conflicts, for instance: John will always take notes and provide minutes for the meeting; Sarah will always set the agenda. The problem with process routines is that they can lock people into tasks they find boring and repetitive. A better way to deal with this problem is to assign or elect someone that all in the group respect to make these decisions, whether or not that person holds a leadership title. The third and final flavour of team conflict is the best: it involves disagreement about task-related issues and can be extremely beneficial to groups. If team members can reasonably discuss differences in their viewpoints, ideas and opinions this can improve their understanding of a task, encourage divergent thinking or creative problem solving, and increase their satisfaction with the workings of the group. Managers need to be extremely careful about encouraging too much task conflict, however, as it can easily be misinterpreted as relationship conflict in teams where there is low trust among members. In this case a consensus decision rule is a good way to build trust and ensure that all members support group decisions. Where neither trust nor consensus are possible, simply allowing all group members to voice their position before making any decisions will improve the quality of your group’s decisions. This in mind, managers should make the most of task conflict where possible. If team members trust each other, then encourage a thorough discussion of the issues. It is true, conflict can help your team to be better and stronger, so while being careful how you handle it, above all be brave!
Want to know more about managing conflict and other leadership skills? Randall Peterson is one of the School’s world-class faculty teaching on Executive Education’s High Performance People Skills
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