Mitigating Conflict on Your Team

Conflict at work is inevitable. While healthy conflict can be productive, stimulating creative thinking and problem solving, as managers, we often have to step in to mitigate unhealthy conflict on our teams.

A new piece from two experts ( Peter T.Coleman & Joshua Flax) in mediation and conflict resolution explores how to limit the fallout from difficult conflicts. Their research uncovered four main reasons why conflict mediation fails and four roles managers can play to help get teams back on track. Depending on the situation at hand, you may play one or multiple of these roles:

• The Medic: This is an active role when you’re dealing with a highly volatile conflict. As the authors write, think of your task as “triaging the conflict to reduce its intensity.” You want to allow the parties involved to vent, but you need to give them a structure that allows them to hash out their differences.
• The Referee: Sometimes a conflict boils down to a win-lose situation. In this case, you need to provide guidance, direction, and transparency about the rules. You’ll also want to identify potential areas of common ground, compromise, or trade-offs to help move the team out of a zero-sum mentality.
• The Fixer: You can take on this role when the conflict is due to constraints on the situation — for example when deadline pressure or restrictive procedures are preventing the team from moving forward. Identifying and addressing these constraints can create a more cooperative dynamic.
• The Counselor: In this role, you want to find the unspoken or hidden agendas that underlie the conflict. This may take time — you need to speak to people individually, giving them the space to air grievances and listen to their concerns. This role will give you insight into some of the deeper challenges your employees may be facing.

What if your team is becoming too conflict avoidant? Some clues could be hearing a lot of “let’s take this offline” during moments of tension in meetings, or creating workarounds instead of dealing with an unproductive colleague. This article from 2019 offers an exercise you can do to help your team feel more comfortable with conflict. And if you’re not sure whether your team is conflict avoidant but you worry things are getting a little stale, this piece from last year offers four strategies to help you foster healthy disagreement in your meetings.

From HBR: Sarah Moughty, Executive Editor, HBR.org