Share this
Resolving Team Conflict - 5 Key Considerations
by Frederick Way on 26/06/24
In Brief
Resolving team conflict is incredibly challenging. Based on CEDR's experience, there are five key considerations when looking at building a process to resolving ongoing issues with groups.
These are: choosing an appropriate and neutral facilitator to work with the group, safety first in process design, treating the group as individuals, separating people from the problem and establishing buy in and practical solutions for change.
“Everybody on the team is complaining about the manager. They’re saying he’s a bully and he micromanages. There’s no-one who will say a good word about him. We’re at our wits’ end with this as that team has gone through manager after manager since we brought in the new targets. What can be done to fix this?”
So goes many initial conversations with senior managers in organisations when they are seeking help with tackling conflict within teams.
It’s an understandably challenging issue – organisations may have a group of employees who are important for the organisation but who simply do not work effectively together. The organisation may have replaced managers and individual team members but still found that the disharmony remains and after periods of calm, the old dynamic of distrust and disruption returns.
At worst, these teams can become barely functional with team members doing their hardest to work in a purely transactional way with each other – doing the job and nothing more – or actively sniping at management and each other.
For managers of these teams, they can be placed under extreme pressure as they try to appease the employees or alternatively battle them by asserting authority. Equally, they are placed under intense scrutiny from more senior people looking for an end to the problem. Sandwiched between these competing forces, many managers see themselves as under attack and it has a deep impact on their personal and professional lives.
When a dispute has become as challenging as this, it is important that an organisation takes a proactive approach to tackling the underlying issue(s). Whilst the problem may be with an individual and an exit may seem the simplest solution, with ongoing challenges it is important that the team themselves are able to find a resolution that they can live with to ensure enhanced and sustained performance. Decisions that are imposed seldom work as well as those that a group has developed together bought into.
In thinking about building a process to do this, an organisation should consider these five key areas:
-
Choose an Appropriate and Neutral Facilitator
-
Safety First in Process Design
-
Treating the Group as Individuals
-
Separating People from the Problem
-
Establishing Buy In and Practical Solutions for Change
Choose an Appropriate and Neutral Facilitator
Too often, organisations get this critical first step wrong. You need to pick someone appropriate to facilitate the conversation. This person almost always needs to be someone who is not directly connected to the issues and as far as possible does not have prior knowledge.
For large organisations, there may be internal staff from other departments who would be able to facilitate this.
Be careful about using employees from People teams (however well trained) who have been involved in managing the dispute to this point.
It can be useful to keep a barrier within an HR department on a issue which looks like it made need an intervention.
This allows for the deployment of a senior individual who is available to help with no pre-conceptions about the issues.
However, it simply may not be possible to find anybody suitable and so it may be useful to use an external facilitator. There are other advantages to using an external mediator as well:
- The ability to give a fresh perspective twinned with the experience of working with other organisations in similar positions
- Complete confidentiality – the conversations and concerns that a team has with an independent facilitator leaves the organisation with that individual.
- The facilitator does not need to fit this assignment in around other work challenges.
- Total neutrality – being external there will be no potential for them being accused of toeing the company line or prioritising the interests of the company for example.
Whomever is used as a facilitator, they need to be confident and competent in this role with a firm ability to process manage and a clear understanding of purpose.
In CEDR’s experience, a well-intentioned but unqualified internal can exacerbate disputes – organisations should not underestimate how challenging conflicts can be to deal with.
Safety First in Process Design
Before resolving a dispute involving a group, the facilitator needs to devise a process which allows the group to have a conversation towards a successful outcome.
Whilst the primary purpose of the process is to allow the group to speak freely and problem solve; the primary principle must be safety for everyone involved in the conversation.
To that end, it is important to think about the individuals within a process and their needs to be able to participate effectively.
When working with a group (especially where the manager is being criticised), before anything else, have a conversation with the manager to get their buy in towards having the discussion.
These conversations are normally confidential and may take time to work on how they can feel safe and have an effective conversation with others. It’s important that people are clear at the outset as to what the conversation will be and what the anticipated outcomes may be.
Particular care needs to be taken if it is anticipated that any outcome of the facilitation may result in someone exiting an organisation.
With the wider group, a similar process needs to happen and everyone needs to be aware of the rules of engagement for the conversation.
This is likely to be whether there is a whole group meetings; facilitated one-to-ones; focus groups, but also what the ways of working are for each of these groups.
The facilitator also needs to be extremely clear on the importance of preserving these rules and what they will do with challenges or breaches.
Treating the Group as Individuals
Teams are an interesting web of psychological factors that underpin how they operate and perform. Understanding them all go beyond the scope of this article, but two significant ones to be aware of are that groups often provide a united front which is different from what individuals members think and the phenomenon of groupthink.
As much as possible, it is useful to find out separately what individual group members think about an issue. Be wary that there are people who feel more strongly about an issue that others and there are individual conflict styles – those who do not speak up initially do not necessarily have less interest in the dispute.
To manage this, the facilitator needs to find out information from the individuals before the group meets. Solutions for this are using tools like surveys but also having individual conversations with the team-members and thinking about whether there needs to be a different way of running the later stages of the facilitation so that it is done in smaller sessions, rather than en-masse.
In dealing with groupthink, namely where the desire for conformity trumps individual thought, there are a number of strategies. Two that work well are to actively name groupthink as an issue (nobody wants to be seen to be doing groupthink when they’ve been told about it!) and also to encourage everyone to talk only about their experiences from their perspective, rather than on behalf of anyone else.
For example, “I think this because this was my experience and its impact on me…” instead of “everyone in marketing thinks this and we all feel that it’s having a detrimental impact”.
Separating People from the Problem
Very few people deliberately upset other people or seek to cause havoc. However, many people do cause these problems through their actions.
There is a colossal gap normally in intention and impact from these actions. For example, few people labelled by others as “bullies” would define their behaviour as bullying. They might instead see themselves as robust, challenging or direct.
Generally, people also struggle to accept points that go towards their identity (i.e. accepting that they are a bully, dishonest, unpleasant) but they will accept points that talk about the behaviour (the behaviour was “interpreted as bullying” or “seemed to be dishonest” or “felt unpleasant”.
The other key point is that people perceive behaviour as easier to confront when placed in the context of a particular incident or time, rather than something which is consistent.
So, when working with an individual on behaviour, it is worth thinking about how they themselves are valid as a human being, but their behaviour at a particular point in time was not effective.
When working with a group, it is important to help them towards seeing this difference through appropriate questioning.
So, “What are the challenges for you with the current leadership style of Liz?” is better than “What are the challenges with Liz as leader?”.
People should be encouraged to look at the behaviour as it currently is and then what they would want to do to change it.
Establishing Buy In and Practical Solutions for Change
A team needs to have a purpose for what it’s doing and generally this needs to be moving towards a new way of working together or some other change that will make things more effective. This stage is an important one and groups can often rush to solution.
As much as possible, teams should be encouraged to be realistic about any solutions (a directive that the manager must say good morning to every team member every day, for example, would be bound to fail) but also be willing to reflect on them and even try them out. There will also need to be organisational buy in and there may need to be consultation on changes.
A facilitator will want to make sure therefore that there is a period of reflection and testing to allow for final changes to be made effectively. Where adjustments do need to be made, the facilitator will need to keep the positive momentum going (it can be understandably disheartening for people) to allow a final change to be agreed.
In summary, facilitation of group disputes requires a capable facilitator to guide all of the group members through a process of purposeful practical conversation towards finding a solution.
Effective process design and making sure that all group members are participating effectively is fundamental to the success of the process. Although challenging, the results of an effective group process can be life-enhancing for those involved and move a dysfunctional team to a high functioning unit.