Three Ways To Protect Your Team from the Negative Effects of Conflict

Conflict is one inevitable occurrence in the workplace. In other words, conflict will always occur in a group of people with different values, personalities and ideologies as is the case in the workplace nowadays.

This means as a team leader, you must perfect your ways of dealing with conflict in such a way that it results in the growth of your team rather than it’s destruction. The thing is, once you discover the right approach to deal with conflict, your team could instead gain and grow from a well managed conflict.

Knowing that, you need to adopt the mindset that conflict at the workplace is not always negative. Always use conflicts as an occurence to improve the communication effectiveness and the productivity of your team.

Here are three tips to protect your teams through effective conflict resolution:

Practice active listening by giving affected persons, preferably individually at first, the opportunity to speak out in order to understand their perspective. You could be very surprised by your discovery.

Create a team culture where team members know that disagreement over work-related issues will be addressed impartially by you and that your judgement will be fair and without undue bias.

Make sure the parties gain clarity on these three questions: A. What happened? B. What should have happened? C. How can the two parties make it right so there are NO hard feelings? These questions and their answers will surprisingly melt the conflict away when asked with finesse.

Therefore, the best way to protect your team from the negative effects of conflict is readily resolving it and ensuring that each party learns from the disagreement. A final BONUS step is to take the necessary proactive steps to prevent such conflicts from reoccurring in the future by building a corrective mechanism informed by your recent learnings.

Reflection:

Have you encountered conflict lately in business or personal life? If your answer is yes, how did you resolve it? What could you have done better for a good outcome?

Comment below and let me know your challenges.

Till then, work to prevent and resolve conflicts!