Managing Conflict In Your Team – 6 Quick Tips
When you run a team of talented and passionate people:
You will have plenty of disagreements.
Capable, assertive people will express their opinions clearly.
Sometimes others will disagree with them as a consequence.
This isn’t a negative, but a positive.
Manage these conflicts well and bring out the positives of them!
6 Quick Tips To Manage Conflict In Your Team
1 – Encourage people’s opinions:
Disagreements come from opinions. You must encourage people to vocalise theirs to get the best from your team.
However, this freedom of expression must be coupled with ensuring that nobody dominates.
If your team contains very confident people you may need to speak to them.
Ensure that they don’t dominate and let everyone speak up.
2 – Call up behaviour, not people:
When you need to speak to someone about their behaviour:
Ensure that disagreements are kept professional you need to ensure that you focus on their behaviour.
Do not personalise the criticism and point it at the person but stick to discussing the behaviour.
Personalising the criticism will likely inflame the situation rather than leading to a calm discussion of how to improve things.
3 – Avoid misunderstandings:
Simple misunderstandings can sometimes be the cause of disagreement, or make a disagreement worse.
One way to avoid this sort of unhelpful disagreement is for you as a manager to step in.
Clarify points made before someone else responds (or reacts) to them.
4 – Know when it’s over:
Some disagreements get worked over again and again. This isn’t helpful for anyone.
Usually, a warning sign of this is when the same points get brought up again.
It is important as manager to make clear that disagreeing is not the same as not listening.
Someone can listen to you and still disagree with you!
This means that if they disagree with you the solution is not to repeat your point!
Again you need to assertively deal with these types of disagreement as they are not productive or good for morale.
5 – Give it some space:
It is not unusual for assertive people to get heated or intense.
Sometimes you need to encourage people to step back and give the ideas being discussed some space.
Sometimes people need some time to digest everything that they have said and heard.
Just make sure you do return to it as promised so that as residual anger or frustration is cleared.
6 – Find common ground:
Conflict can often be managed by encouraging people to give their different perspectives.
Then you can find commonalities between their views.
Point out all of the areas where they do agree with each other.
This will remind them that they are working for the same goal and that they don’t disagree on everything.
Disagreement can be destructive or constructive.
It depends on how it is handled and managed.
As a manager learning when to let team members air and debate points and when to step in to avoid things poisoning relationships is key.
A good manager will act swiftly when they see things are becoming unprofessional.
This avoids any residual bad feelings amongst their team.
Conclusion
Having disagreements dosen’t mean your team is dysfunctional!
It’s actually a sign that your team is confident enough to speak up.
If your team isn’t confident enough to speak up:
Learn how to become a line manager that inspires people with our courses!
Make sure to refer back to these tips to master conflict management!
