This Simple Exercise Will Help Your Team Deal With Conflict

In business, conflict is unavoidable, but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable. With so much emphasis these days on building a happy and engaged workplace , it can be easy for teams and leaders to want to avoid conflict altogether. Still, conflict avoidance hurts productivity and keeps team members from working at their best. According to Liane Davey, team effectiveness advisor and professional speaker, normalizing productive conflict is a critical step in building a healthy workplace culture.?

In her article for Harvard Business Review, Davey recommends putting workplace issues on the table. Before even attempting any kind of conflict skills training, she recommends getting teams in the right mindset to understand and value role-based conflict — natural tensions meant to exist between team members — with a simple exercise.

Conflict Avoidance is Bad for Business

On conflict-avoidant teams, executives are often afraid to say no. Leaders fail to make difficult trade-offs in establishing priorities and cause overwhelming workloads. Managers tolerate poor performance or create unfair and inefficient ways to work around those team members rather than confront them.?

This also means other employees are usually picking up the slack. People feel unsafe voicing their complaints and frustrations or giving constructive feedback. Stress and resentment builds. Davey describes a phenomenon called “conflict debt” — the accumulation of all unresolved issues standing in the way of progress — and her exercise is the first step to paying it down.

The “How-To” of Davey’s Exercise

The exercise itself is fairly straightforward. Draw a big circle and divide it up into the number of people filling roles on the team. Make sure each slice has enough space to write their name and the answer to three questions:

1. What unique value does this person bring to the team or company??
2. On which stakeholder group does this person’s role focus??
3. What are some common tensions this person’s role can put on team decision-making??

Go around the room and for each team member, emphasize the third question. Focus on how roles are designed to put pressure on other players in the company. Give examples from real-life interactions that highlight these dynamics. Describe what healthy, productive tensions should look like so people learn to value diversity of thought on a team as an advantage.?

The Value of Conflict

By completing Davey’s exercise, everyone has the same expectation that there will, and should, be conflict within a team. She gives several examples where these natural tensions exist: research against marketing; corporate against field roles; people in sales looking for new customer solutions against operations trying to establish consistency and efficiency. When both are pushing hard enough for their goals, these people can easily frustrate one another.?

By identifying the value each member adds to team and company goals first, others can then approach the conflicts that team member’s role might create with more understanding. With a fuller picture of workplace issues, people realize that many of their difficult experiences with other team members were more likely natural role-based tensions, rather than interpersonal conflict. Keeping those perspectives in mind moving forward reduces the burden of everyday issues so more people can do their jobs better.?

When cross-functional teams can successfully navigate their role-based conflict, they drive more innovation and make better decisions with bigger-picture goals in mind.?

With more awareness around healthy conflict, we unmask interpersonal friction for what it frequently is — healthy, role-based tension — and create a shared language for team members to discuss their conflicts more productively.?

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Tom Popomaronis is Executive Vice President of Innovation at Massive Alliance, a global executive branding agency. Tom co-founded Massive's Executive Leadership Branding program – which transforms world-class executives into contributing authors at leading publications.

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