How to Successfully Navigate Team Conflict

Wherever there are teams of people, there is bound to be conflict. Poor team conflict management can have lasting negative effects on your organization – your employees won’t trust each other, and they won’t trust you. This will lead to breakdowns in communication and tanking productivity.

On the other hand, if you succeed at managing team conflicts, you can start to build credibility and trust as a leader. But what are the keys to managing conflicts in the workplace properly? This piece will be a quick guide to team conflict management, and show how 1Huddle can help your employee development plans.

What Does Handling Conflict Well Look Like?

There are a few core concepts you have to adhere to when planning out team conflict management. Managing team conflicts involves getting down to the root of the problem – otherwise, the same problems will keep emerging. This means that managing conflicts in the workplace will involve the cultivation of careful listening skills.

Once you’ve mastered finding out problems, you need to be able to engage in team conflict management like a real leader. This involves a careful balance between accountability and flexibility. This means that you need to treat all team members equally and hold them to the same high standards, but also understand when it’s best to give a stressed team member the chance to step out and cool their head. 

One of the most important parts of managing team conflicts is being proactive. This means that you need to clarify your team’s expectations from the get-go. It also means you’ll want to try and make your team feel a sense of belonging and pride in the work you do – that connection will be invaluable when it comes to managing conflicts in the workplace.

Techniques to Handle Team Conflict 

Now that you understand the basics of team conflict management, here are a few techniques that you can add to any employee development plan. 

• If you think there is a problem, talk with the employees to clarify it. This puts everyone on the same page and turns the conflict into a challenge to be overcome.
• Practice transparency, and encourage your team to do so as well. Don’t let resentment build up in secret
• If you need to have a serious discussion with a team member, do so in a private safe place. Berating a team member in front of others will only lead to resentment
• Practice your active listening. When navigating conflicts, give everyone a chance to have their say. 
• Don’t jump to conclusions. Taking some time to investigate, and to think things through rationally, always helps.
• Identify what the common goal of the conflict resolution should be, and let team members give their input
• Make sure team members all sign off on any solutions you could come up with in the process of team conflict management.
• When enacting a resolution, let all team members play a part
• Do follow-up evaluations on the resolution
• Determine how to avoid conflict like this in the future, and create an employee development plan designed around countering it. 

How 1Huddle Helps

Team conflict is created by stress. Two major sources of stress for employees are 1) not understanding something and becoming frustrated 2) being bored and unengaged. Thankfully, 1Huddle’s gamified training platform helps combat both those sources of stress. By letting employees train as they need it, they gain the confidence that knowledge is at their fingertips. And the gamified training platform means that this learning process is never dull or tedious. Need proof? Just listen to our amazing client base.