Locked lesson.
About this lesson
From time to time teams will experience conflict. When the team leader or team members are able to resolve the conflict in a positive manner, the team becomes stronger and performs better.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Conflict Resolution.docx.docx62.5 KB Conflict Resolution - Solution.docx (1).docx
62.1 KB
Quick reference
Conflict Resolution
From time to time teams will experience conflict. When the team leader or team members are able to resolve the conflict in a positive manner, the team becomes stronger and performs better. If the conflict is not resolved or resolved in a negative manner, the team performance suffers.
When to use
Whenever conflict arises on a team, one of the conflict resolution approaches should be applied to the situation.
Instructions
From time to time, conflict occurs on teams. The team leader must recognize it and when needed help the team members resolve it. Conflict is likely to be emotional at times, so a facilitator, like the team leader, is often needed.
Causes of Conflict
There are both technical causes and personal causes. Technical causes are often easier to resolve. These are conflicts due to a difference of opinion about some aspect of the work. It could be the plan, the requirements, the technical approach or the technical standard used for acceptance. Clarify the issues associated with the conflict, and these can normally be resolved through explanations or negotiation. Personal causes are more difficult to resolve. Personal causes are based upon a team member’s background or personal values. These are not easily changed. While it is easy to say that we value diversity and respect differences, the diversity and differences will often create team conflict. This conflict will almost always require a facilitator to resolve.
Conflict Resolution Spiral
Conflict can be resolved in a manner that creates an upward spiral of strengthening the team. But if conflict is ignored or not resolved appropriately, it will cause a downward spiral in performance.
Unresolved conflict leads to loss of efficiency as team members waste time and energy in the conflict, communication is curtailed between the team members, and people start developing defensive and paranoid behaviour to protect themselves from the attacks of team members. Often physical or psychological illness follows.
Conflict that is resolved through a win-win approach, will improve overall team efficiency, fosters open communication, and creates trust and teamwork. All those increase the team’s performance.
GRPI
The best simple technique I have found for team leaders to use is GRPI – Goals, Roles, Processes, and Inter-personal relationships. These are essentially the steps in team building. As a team, establish team goals, assign roles, develop processes and procedures, and the team relationships will develop. When conflict arises, it is usually because one of those four aspects has broken. The conflict shows up at the Inter-personal relationship level, but it is often due to a problem at a different level. Work your way back up GRPI, find the problem, resolve it, and then rebuild the team with the GRPI steps.
Login to download- 00:00 Hello I'm Ray Sheen, turn a life as a team conflict often arises.
- 00:07 The team leader would be prepared to resolved this conflict in a positive way
- 00:12 to strengthen the team.
- 00:14 You may feel you're in a perfect team and everyone gets along great.
- 00:19 But conflict can still arise.
- 00:21 Sometimes a conflict is what technical conflict.
- 00:24 That means that it is conflict that is due to the nature of the work of the team.
- 00:28 Different team members have a different opinion of the work, or how to do it.
- 00:32 A typical cause of technical conflict is misunderstanding of the plans and
- 00:36 procedures for the work that the team is doing.
- 00:38 This could be due to miscommunication or just a different definition of terms or
- 00:43 experiences.
- 00:44 Another type of conflict is the difference of opinion about the technical
- 00:47 requirements for the work that is being done.
- 00:49 Many team members will read into requirements an expected performance
- 00:54 level.
- 00:54 Even when requirements are clear, different team members may prefer
- 00:57 different approaches for fulfilling those requirements.
- 01:00 This could be based upon their own previous training or experiences.
- 01:03 Another technical cause is, different standards for quality of acceptance.
- 01:09 What is considered perfectly acceptable by one person, is considered sloppy or
- 01:13 unprofessional by another.
- 01:15 While all of these reasons can relate to the work, and
- 01:18 the team members understanding of that work.
- 01:20 There are also personal causes of conflict that are related more to the personality
- 01:25 or personal values of each individual.
- 01:27 One of these is unmet needs of team members.
- 01:30 Some people expect a friendly greeting or help on certain activities,
- 01:34 a team member failing to respond in that matter starts to create conflict.
- 01:38 Different value systems, be they religious based or
- 01:41 cultural based can create conflict when one team member feels that another team
- 01:45 member is disrespecting something that is important to them.
- 01:49 Perceptions of teamwork can also change conflict.
- 01:52 Teams can form clicks, or subgroups, that begin to isolate others.
- 01:57 Sometimes this is based upon the type of work that is done essentially creating
- 02:01 a cast system.
- 02:02 I wanna mention assumptions and expectations.
- 02:05 This is essentially what is behind all of their technical issues but
- 02:09 I included here with personal causes because people also make assumptions
- 02:14 about others based upon things like how they dress, how they speak,
- 02:18 what education they received or ethnic and race identity.
- 02:22 This can be either positive or negative assumptions and
- 02:25 they lead to expectations that may or may not be fulfilled.
- 02:28 The final personal cause that I want to mention is the willingness to deal with
- 02:33 conflict.
- 02:33 Conflict avoiders can escalate conflict by not resolving it early.
- 02:38 Conflict seekers will find conflict when none exists until they've caused it.
- 02:44 When conflict occurs, the way it is handled can either strengthen the team or
- 02:48 weaken it.
- 02:49 So let's start with a conflict as mentioned on the previous slide, and
- 02:52 see what happens if it is approached in a negative fashion.
- 02:55 The conflict causes a loss in productivity.
- 02:58 The people in conflict are generally less efficient because they're fighting
- 03:02 the conflict instead of working and
- 03:04 it often takes a crisis to get them back on track.
- 03:07 With the loss of productivity, we see an escalation in communication problems.
- 03:12 People refuse to talk to each other unless they absolutely must.
- 03:15 Even then, the communication is laced with hidden agendas to further the interests of
- 03:19 each side of the conflict.
- 03:20 And of course from there, the relationship starts to shatter.
- 03:24 Team members feel they need to defend themselves from the real or
- 03:27 perceived attacks from other team members, and paranoid behavior sets in.
- 03:31 All of this leads to even more conflict.
- 03:33 Everyone starts watching out for themselves instead of the team and
- 03:37 many times we see the onset of physical or psychological illness.
- 03:41 The negative spiral keeps going down and down.
- 03:44 But the different approach is to recognized and resolved the conflict.
- 03:48 Bring the issue to light and find the win-win solution.
- 03:51 This will energized the team to be more efficient and
- 03:54 often leads to better creative solution to problems.
- 03:57 Productivity increases as team members gain confidence that can work together to
- 04:01 resolve conflict, communication barriers come down, and
- 04:05 you get open two way communication.
- 04:07 Relationships are strength than there's trust and teamwork grow.
- 04:09 Instead of downward spiral,
- 04:11 positive conflict resolution improves the team in many ways.
- 04:16 So, how do you actually deal with the team conflict?
- 04:19 Well my favorite tool is GRPI.
- 04:21 GRPI stands for goals, roles, processes and interpersonal relationships.
- 04:26 If you think about the team building process,
- 04:29 these are the steps you go through.
- 04:31 Set the team goals, determine the roles reach team member, ensure everyone
- 04:36 those how to do what expected processes procedures of project test and
- 04:40 then this is developing the inner personal relationships are created.
- 04:44 When conflict arises, the relationship problems is what we see but
- 04:48 often that is not the true problem, sometimes people just not like each other.
- 04:53 I had a team where two of the team members were divorced from each other and
- 04:56 it was not a friendly divorce.
- 04:58 In that case, I reassigned one to another team.
- 05:01 There was just too much relationship baggage.
- 05:03 But that is not usually the case.
- 05:06 I worked my way back up GRPI to find the problem.
- 05:09 Is there confusion or
- 05:10 difference of opinion on the processes that are causing the conflict?
- 05:14 Let's clarify what should be done and determine the best way to do it.
- 05:18 Is there conflict on the roles?
- 05:20 Again, we need to clarify the roles and expectations,
- 05:23 then rebuild the processes and procedures if necessary.
- 05:26 What if there's conflict about the goals?
- 05:29 We'll gather the team back together and if necessary,
- 05:32 get the stakeholders involved to clarify the team goals and expectations.
- 05:36 I've used these technique countless times.
- 05:38 Find the right problem, fix it, and
- 05:40 then rebuild the rest of the team with the GRPI.
- 05:44 Conflict happens.
- 05:47 Resolve it positively and your team is stronger for it.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.