One of the less pleasant aspects of being in charge of the team is that you will need to step in to make sure that conflicts do not get in the way of the team’s progress. This chapter includes some information and techniques that will be useful in dealing with conflicts.

Conflicts are not necessarily negative. People see different pieces of the entire system, and there are likely to be legitimate conflicts of interest between them. When handled properly, conflicts can lead to positive change.

Methods of Conflict Management

There are several different ways to handle a conflict. Blake and Mouton¹ characterized them as

• Confrontation. In this problem-solving mode, the affected people directly confront the conflict and try to work it through. (Confrontation refers to confronting the problem, and it is not meant to indicate that the manager picks a fight with a team member.)
• Compromise. This is a give-and-take approach that tries to give each of the parties some of what they are looking for.
• Smoothing. This approach emphasizes areas of agreement and de-emphasizes areas of disagreement.
• Forcing. A “solution” is imposed from higher up the hierarchy. If this method is overused, a manager will be seen as autocratic, which may have an impact on team members being willing to exercise independent judgment.
• Withdrawal. The problem is ignored. This is the least desirable tactic because the problem will just fester and re-appear again.

These five methods of dealing with a problem are listed in order of effectiveness. Effective managers use confrontation and compromise most frequently. Weaker managers tend to use the other three methods of dealing with a conflict.

Conflicts between Team Members

You can’t live your team members’ lives for them, and you can’t force them to engage in constructive rather than destructive conflict. But you can create an environment of trust, respect, and compassion.

There are a few techniques you can use to deal with an interpersonal conflict:

• Interview the people involved to try to identify the core issues.
• Separate these issues into needs and wants.
• It will not be effective for you to simply pick winners and losers. (You may have to make a decision to move forward, but listen to both sides first.)
• Provide individual coaching for the people involved. Ask them to restate the other person’s point of view.
• Encourage both team members to have an open mindset and try to build a fresh relationship based on tolerance and respect. They don’t have to agree, just work together.

Conflicts between Teams

Conflicts sometimes emerge between teams. Sometimes these are proxy battles between the team leaders. If you are engaged in one of these, it is your responsibility to sort it out.

More frequently, there are issues associated with work allocation and scheduling. It is up to management to assign responsibilities. Negotiate with the other team lead, and engage the next level of management if there is a genuine disagreement about task ownership.

Scheduling can be more difficult. Teams need to consider how things look from the other team’s point of view.

• Provide as much advance notice as possible.
• Work on the procedure collaboratively.
• Specify formats in which standard requests should be submitted. That will help avoid the problem where someone mentions something to someone else at lunch, which is inevitably either misunderstood or forgotten.

Sometimes there are members of each team who are friendly. To the extent possible, leverage these personal relationships to foster trust and cooperation between the groups.

The fact is that the teams have to work together. It is in everyone’s best interest to develop compatible work habits.

Personality Types

The most common way to characterize personality types is the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator.² There are four axes used to measure a person’s personality:

• Extrovert/Introvert (E/I): Do you draw energy by interacting with other people (E)? Or by thinking and studying during your private time (I)?
• Sensation/Intuition (S/N): Do you gather information by direct observation (S)? Or are you more intuitive and conceptual (N)?
• Thinking/Feeling (T/F): Do you reach decisions by thinking and logic (T)? Or do you use more subjective and personal criteria to reach decisions (F)?
• Judgment/Perception (J/P): Do you value completion, deadlines, and closure (J)? Or do you see things as more of an ongoing process, with deadlines being flexible and fungible goals (P)?

When psychologists run population studies of personality types, some interesting patterns occur. It turns out that there are differences between techies and the general population, and even between different types of techies.³

There was no significant difference between IS people and the general population on the J/P axis. About half of each group falls onto each end of the axis. But there are significant differences on the other three axes.

Among IS developers 75% were introverts, 80% were on the thinking end of the spectrum, and 55% were classified as intuitive. That contrasts with 25%, 50%, and 25%, respectively, for the general population. (That helps explain part of the communication gap between implementation teams and the end-user community.)

If you think about the people you are dealing with, you might see where some communication disconnects can occur. If you are an “N,” but you are working with someone who is an “S,” you need to present information to that person differently than you would want it presented to yourself. Perhaps something more concrete, such as a prototype or mock-up, would work better than a conceptual overview.

There are other ways to look at how people interact. Psychologist David Merrill (a codeveloper of the Wilson Learning Social Styles Profile) characterizes social styles as being defined along axes of assertiveness (proactive/reactive) and responsiveness (task oriented/people oriented).⁴ The four social styles in this classification are

• Drivers are proactive and task oriented. They tend to be rooted in the present, and look at actions over words. They can be viewed as pushy or dominating.
• Expressives are proactive and people oriented. They look to the future, and try to find new perspectives and approaches to problems. They can be viewed as manipulating or ambitious.
• Analyticals are reactive and task oriented. They are thinkers, and tend to look to the past for lessons. They can be viewed as critical and indecisive.
• Amiables are reactive and people oriented. They are strongly relationship driven. They can be viewed as conforming and ingratiating.

Thinking about the social styles of the people you are dealing with can help you to approach them more successfully. The strongest team will be made up of people of different styles because a team of similar people is likely to overlook something important.

Dealing with Difficult People

There are a few keys to dealing with a difficult person:

• Identify what you feel. Your feelings will cause you to think and perceive things a certain way, which may or may not be entirely accurate. If you identify what you feel, you can correct for your emotional filter and make sure your perceptions are correct.
• In what ways are you contributing to the conflict? It takes two to tango. Think about the ways in which the conflict is partly your fault. Do you sometimes behave in a manipulative way to force the issue? Or gossip about the other person?
• What assumptions are you making about the other person? These may be coloring your perceptions, and may be contributing to the conflict.
• To what extent are you causing the problem?

This doesn’t mean that you have to be a patsy. Don’t let anyone take your power away from you. That will just cause resentment and keep the conflict going anyway. Just don’t feed into it, and do your best to make the situation work.

If you can remove the emotion from the conflict, you can get closer to addressing the actual problem. Try considering some questions to define the problem:

• What is the problem? State it in the simplest, least emotional way possible.
• Whose feelings are upset? What are they feeling? Why?
• Who raised the issue? Why?

Once you have defined the problem, you are that much closer to being able to work with the other person to resolve it. Examine the issue unemotionally, and try to view the issue from the other person’s point of view to find some possible workarounds.

Don’t Be a Difficult Person

We have been discussing how you should shape your communication to fit the other person’s personality and social style better. Do you get prickly if people are communicating with you in other than your preferred style?

To some extent, you need to get over it. You are a leader, and part of being a leader is sucking it up and not sweating the small stuff.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, maybe we can find ways to structure communication in a way that is more comfortable for you. If you clearly communicate how different requests should come to you (what information you need, what format you need it in, and how you would like it delivered), you can control some of the communication, and you can get the information you need in a format that is comfortable for you.

Communications Breakdowns

When there is no communication, progress ceases. In fact, the problems will get worse if the communications breakdown is not addressed.

Communication problems can be addressed by following some good habits:

• Clarify assumptions. Make sure that you are both talking about the same thing.
• Set ground rules. You are not going to be able to solve every problem immediately. Pick a problem and work on it.
• Share information. If you have information that is relevant to the subject at hand, make sure that everyone involved in the conflict understands what is at stake.
• Listen. Hear what the other person is saying. Ask clarifying questions as needed. Make sure you understand the key points being made by the other person.
• Avoid personal attacks. Stick to the business problem at hand.

You may not become best friends with the other person, but you have to find a way to work together. Don’t allow communications to break down. Use every tool at your disposal to find a way to work together.

Issuing Reprimands

Nobody wants to be a jerk. Issuing reprimands stinks. But sometimes it has to be done.

The key is that it should be done quickly, clearly, privately, and personally. Don’t repeat yourself ad nauseam, and prepare what you need to say beforehand. The key elements of an effective reprimand are⁵

• Make sure you have the correct information beforehand. This includes the instructions you had previously issued on the subject.
• The team member should know beforehand that you will be discussing this particular incident.
• Reprimand the team member immediately, at the beginning of the session. Be specific about what the team member did wrong, and how it should have been handled. Be brief, but be specific.
• Tell the team member how you feel about the situation. Again, be brief, but be specific.
• Pause so that it sinks in.
• Make it clear that the reprimand is over. Shake hands or make contact in an appropriate way. Tell the team member how much you value them, just not their behavior in this particular case.

After the reprimand is done, you need to let the matter go. No snarky comments later, no discussion with other team members, nothing.

Keep in mind that most of what your team member provides for the team is excellent work. (If that is not true, I’m not sure why you haven’t removed this person from the team already.) You may need to remind the team member about the general quality of his or her work at the end of the session.

The One Minute Manager (see “Further Reading”) has an excellent chapter on issuing reprimands. I highly recommend picking the book up and reading it for ideas on how to motivate your team members.

Summary

Resolving conflicts is not a type of leadership that comes easily to most technical people. A lot of technical managers avoid conflicts rather than confronting them and pushing through to a resolution.

Don’t fall into the trap of allowing conflicts to manage you. Manage the environment. Deal with the conflicts directly and with integrity.

Discussion Questions

1. Think about a workplace conflict that you were engaged in. What do you think the personality type of the other person was? (Remember that “J” does not stand for “Jerk.”) What is yours? How did that contribute to the conflict?
2. What are some positive ways to deal with a constructive conflict?

Further Reading

Blake, Robert R., and Jane Mouton. The Managerial Grid: The Key to Leadership Excellence. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing, 1964.

Blanchard, Ken, and Spencer Johnson. The One Minute Manager. New York, NY: Morrow, 2003.

Harvard Business Essentials. Manager’s Toolkit. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Schwalbe, Kathy. Information Technology Project Management (Chapter 9). Boston, MA: Thompson, 2006.

¹ Robert R. Blake and Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid: The Key to Leadership Excellence. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing, 1964.

² Isabel Briggs Myers with Peter B. Myers, Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Mountain View, CA: Davies-Black Publishing, 1980/1995.

³ Kathy Schwalbe, Information Technology Project Management. Boston, MA: Thompson, 2006.

⁴ David W. Merrill and Roger H. Reid, Personal Styles and Effective Performance. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1981.

⁵ Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager. New York, NY: Morrow, 2003.