Team coaching and conflict

In this series of posts around teaming excellence, we have so far talked about dialogue and building trust. In this post we'll look at managing conflict. In many teams conflict is regarded as something to be avoided. But if the team is determined to avoid conflict, then there is no challenge, no barriers to the advancement of bad ideas. It's helpful then to distinguish between two types of conflict:

• Task conflict arises when team members disagree about the work to be done.
• Relationship conflict describes interpersonal incompatibilities among team members due to differences in personality, values, and beliefs.

The evidence suggests that task conflict is ‘good’ and relationship conflict is ‘bad’. Without task conflict, there is no disagreement about the work to be done. Team members don’t feel safe to challenge each other as to the best way forward. Effective teams feel comfortable engaging in task conflict and know how to engage in respectful challenge.

Task conflict can improve or diminish the performance of a team – team members need to engage in skilful task conflict. Relationship conflict always has a detrimental impact on team performance. The challenge for the team is that task conflict and relationship conflict tend to co-exist. Here are eight things you and the team can do to better manage conflict:

1. Wait for it to go away. Conflict does sometimes diminish with time as people get to know each other better simply by spending more time with each other. But waiting doesn’t always work, and it takes t-i-m-e.
2. Educate. Share the idea that there exist two types of conflict; task conflict and relationship conflict. Point out how easy it is to misattribute other’s intentions, such that task conflict becomes relationship conflict.
3. Do dialogue. People can check in on each other’s intentions by staying curious, asking questions such as 'help me better understand your point of view?'. We can resist responding reactively to others by remembering that feedback tells us as much about the feedback giver as it does about the receiver. If we can avoid being defensive and stay curious, we directly contribute to minimising relationship conflict. Good dialogue helps teams surface conflict and manage conflict in an open and respectful manner.
4. Make time to reflect. Reflection enables ‘cognitive reappraisal’ - the sense we make of emotional exchanges. For example, Sue snaps at me as I pass her in the corridor. I’m upset because I sent her a report yesterday – she must think I did a bad job! Upon reflection I remember how much Sue has going on in her life right now. Instead of avoiding her, or snapping back, I make time to go and ask her how she’s feeling today and what might be stressing her out.
5. Call out individual relationships. Relationship conflict between just two people on a team can create conflict across the team as a whole. When relationships on your team seem to be festering, how do those relationships get called out? Or does everyone decide it’s none of their business and leave the relationship to get worse?
6. Call out the good stuff. Task conflict can lead to relationship conflict when people don’t think the team is doing well. And we tend to focus on things that aren’t going well. How good is your team at giving each other authentic, real, heartfelt, affirmative, feedback in the moment? Or does your team focus only on the stuff that needs to be changed?
7. Pre-empt. This is about surfacing potential differences before conflict takes place. Teams often use psychometrics to characterise themselves and frame conversations around similarities and differences, how they like to work together and how they like to communicate. But we don't have to use psychometrics - we can have a structured conversations around set questions. Ginka Toegel & Jean-Louis Barsoux, for example, offers up five short conversations that may be useful for a team might engage in to make relationship conflict less likely (HBR, June 2016).
8. Build trust. See the last post!

I hope you're enjoying these postings. All feedback is good, as we prepare to publish the Team Leader's Instruction Manual early next year, a guide for leaders, coaches and others interested in helping teams become more effective. If you're interested in the book, or our programs, don't hesitate to get in touch with [email protected].