Tool 19

Opinions and instincts

If you avoid conflict at the early stages of a team’s work, it could be detrimental to the project later on because you may be postponing important foundational issues that will be more expensive and traumatic to sort out further down the line. This tool helps to flush out disagreement and misalignment at the early stages of a team coming together, giving people permission to express their opinions and instincts and show where they agree or disagree early.

Ask each member of the team to consider these questions carefully, and to answer them individually and without discussion, in writing.

1. 1If you were the sole decision-maker, what single thing would you do to make us achieve our goal?
2. 2If we had to make a decision right now on what to do, what would that be?
3. 3What is the most important challenge we will need to overcome to achieve our goal?
4. 4What are the traps and time-wasters we need to avoid?
5. 5What will happen if we do nothing as a team and let nature take its course?

Feel free to reword these questions or create new ones to fit your project, but keep them broad, rather than specific. The questions you use should make people think about the big picture of what you are doing as a team. You are asking people to give personal opinions and share their instincts, and in this way you are more likely to understand their thinking and expose any fundamental misalignment early on.

How to use this tool:

• • Send the questions out in advance so people have a chance to consider their answers.
• • In a meeting, ask your team to write out their answers, each on a separate Post-it.
• • Starting with Question 1, ask people to take turns to read their answer out loud, and then stick it up on a wall. Ask people to stick their answers next to similar ones when they agree, so that themes form around common answers.
• • Do this for all the other questions before starting a discussion – so you will have a wall with the answer to all five questions, themed visually in front of you before you start discussing.
• • Discuss all the points of agreement first, starting with the biggest themes, and noting where the team are aligned on all five questions
• • Then address those areas where you don’t all agree, starting with the area that has the least agreement first, and talking each through properly to understand why people disagree. At this point, you are not looking to change people’s minds or force agreement, simply to understand the differences and why people feel that way.
• • Record a list of areas that need to be covered in future meetings, starting with the most important ones, and address each in turn in subsequent sessions together.

It is important to do this visually, on a wall, (or with pieces of paper on a table if you don’t have wall space). If you use the tool verbally, there is a greater risk of people taking the conflict personally. When people disagree while facing each other and looking into each other’s eye, the discussion becomes about each other. By looking at the wall together, it is easier to feel the disagreement is about the themes, not the people talking. This tool encourages people to disagree in a structured, neutral way, so that they can move on together, and helps team members to get to know each other early on too.

I’ve seen this approach lead to two separate teams being formed when it showed that people in the team had completely different projects in mind. I’ve also seen this tool show where people are making assumptions about language, target consumers or technical know-how, only to find that we were all talking about completely different things. Had we not found these out early, we would have failed to achieve our goals.

Tool 20

Conflict predictor

Earlier we set our team rules in Tool 17, but every team finds itself under pressure at some point, and with more remote, flexible and gig-style jobs, there are seven common issues that are likely to cause conflict, no matter what team you are in, how good your ways of working are, or how brilliant the people in your team are.

As a team, talk through each of these in turn so you will be able to predict the conflicts that might arise, how to avoid them in the first place, or deal with them when they happen. Working through this list will make some people in the team more aware of the impact they may have on each other, preventing issues from arising.

1. 1Trust and relationships are hard to build, especially when we are working in different locations. How can we make sure we build relationships both personally and professionally?
2. 2Personalities clash when people have different expectations of behaviour, like how acceptable it is to be late to a meeting, or how we challenge each other. How will we understand each other’s styles and communicate when we feel offended or annoyed?
3. 3Email can lead to misunderstandings and can make decisions more complicated than they need to be. How can we avoid the wrong tone, being misunderstood or communicating inefficiently?
4. 4Competing work priorities and workload are hard to manage, and stress can create conflict. How can we plan ahead for busy periods and support busy people?
5. 5Learning, advice, knowledge-sharing and coaching are harder for managers and team members, so we give each What to do when aother less support than we should. How can we make time for learning from each other and giving advice?
6. 6New team members need ‘onboarding’, and sharing knowledge adds workload. When people aren’t properly briefed, they can cause problems later on. How can we share the load of training new people to get them up to speed?
7. 7Some team members can be excluded by technology challenges and feel left out, or put under pressure. How can we make sure technology issues don’t cause extra worries?

How to use this tool:

• • Send these questions out to the team and ask them to read it and consider what’s missing. Ask people to add any other areas that may cause conflict, for example, if the ­previous tool has thrown up severe differences in opinion or instinct, talk through them here to predict where conflict may arise in the project journey, and how to spot it and avoid it early on.
• • In a meeting talk through your potential causes of conflict, including any others that people have added, starting with the conflicts that the team feel are most likely and possible for this team.
• • For every point, discuss how and when the conflict might happen, how to avoid it or deal with it, and make some commitments to avoid or deal with them.

Many of the most common symptoms of conflict – assuming the worst of each other, making assumptions about each other’s intentions, dealing with different agendas, priorities or disagreements, competing for resources, and not understanding each other’s perspectives or communication styles – can be avoided if you use Tools 19 and 20.

Tool 21

Six reasons why

This is a simple tool I’ve used many times with different teams to address situations that went badly, understand why they happened, and learn from them for the future.

• • Ask each individual team member to think of something this team worked on in the last year that went well or felt good, and list three reasons why it went well.
• • Ask each individual team member to think of something that did not go as well as hoped in the last year, or did not feel good. List three reasons why.
• • Send these questions to people in advance so they can think about which situations they want to share.
• • Ask people to make the reasons descriptive, so instead of writing just one word such as, ‘time’ write ‘we had enough time to prepare well’.
• • When you come together as a team, ask each person to write down their reasons on separate Post-its, so each person has in front of them six Post-its: three with reasons why something went well, and three with reasons why it did not.
• • Ask people in turn to share their positive examples first. They should mention the project briefly, but spend the time on the three reasons why it went well, sticking their three examples up on a wall or flipchart, before the next person shares their three positive examples.
• • Theme similar thoughts together, so if several people mention having enough time to prepare (even if referring to different projects), put those together.
• • When you’ve got all the three reasons why things went well and themed them, you will see why things go well, usually to do with communicating early, having time to prepare, having the right people on the team, and so on. Make sure you identify the key themes as a group before moving to the projects that went badly.
• • Then repeat the exercise for the projects that went badly. Ask people in turn to briefly describe their project, and the three reasons why, putting them up on the wall and building common themes. Often you will find that the reasons why things go badly are the exact opposite of the reasons why things go well, such as not enough time, being brought in at the last minute, no clear briefing, or the wrong people on the team.
• • Once you have the themes for the projects that went badly, focus the discussion on the reasons why, not the projects themselves, talking through why things go badly and how to avoid those issues in future.

This tool is simple, but it really works. One team had a boss who was never on time, cancelled meetings at the last minute and didn’t answer any emails, so the team couldn’t get decisions from him and make progress on their work. We brought together the boss, his five direct reports and his PA and through this tool every person, including the boss and the PA shared their six reasons why.

We established that successful projects happened when his team were able to talk with him, even briefly, to get his opinion, and that projects went badly when he cancelled meetings that they were relying on having. After the exercise, he agreed not to cancel meetings, so even if he could only offer ten minutes rather than the full hour booked, they would go ahead (and his PA helped to make this change happen).

It works well because people focus on what’s right before what’s wrong, so there is a constructive set-up. It allows people to have a bit of a moan about what has gone badly, but in a structured way that highlights the causes rather than the situation itself. And like previous tools, it focuses the team on a set of themes on a wall rather than directly and challenging each.

However, this tool does assume that the conflict has not gone too far and is still possible to fix as a team. If you are in a team already at war with each other, with historic issues and a lot of baggage, you will need to bring in a conflict mediator like Irene.

Tool 22

Individual intervention

Use this tool when there is someone causing tension and conflict in the team. Let’s call them Person X instead of ‘the difficult person’ or ‘the aggressor’ so we don’t prejudge them.

Use this tool early on, even on seemingly small issues, as you don’t need to wait until things get really bad. If you have an HR person who can support you, get them involved from the start, preferably as soon as you have an inkling there is an issue.

1. 1Identify the specific change you want
   • • Before the intervention, agree what change you want to make happen. Do you need Person X to stop doing their emails during team meetings? Be very specific about the change you need and what that specifically looks like before you do anything.
   • • Everything you prepare should be focussed on making that one change happen, rather than a shopping list of changes.
2. 2Consider the conversation setting
   • • Who is the best person in the team to have the conversation with Person X? It’s not best done as a whole team, or they may feel under attack.
   • • Where and when should the conversation take place? Should it be in person, on a particular day of the week, in a neutral setting, or walking round a park rather than facing each other across a table?
3. 3Script an intervention statement
   • • Write a script beforehand with key bullet points you want to make.
   • • Start with a top-line reason for the meeting – a brief description of what you want to share and get.
   • • Talk first about the positive contribution the person makes to the team, what they do well, when they are at their best.
   • • Then talk about what the team is finding difficult, focusing on one or two specific examples only, with how these examples make people feel. For example, instead of saying ‘We think it’s really rude to be doing your emails instead of focussing on our team meetings’, say ‘When you are on emails during our team meetings, it makes us feel like you don’t see us or the meeting as important.’
   • • Then end with a positive wish to move forward to make a positive change, for example, ‘I really hope we can work out how to get your full attention in our team meetings and make sure the whole team feels you value their time too.’
4. 4Question, listen, understand
   • • Once the intervention has been made, wait and listen to what Person X has to say. Try not to leap in with excuses or conversation fillers, but listen and empathise with how they are feeling at that point.
   • • They may be defensive or try to explain their behaviour, and the best way to engage with them is to keep asking questions rather than fight back with facts. Ask questions like “You seem to be surprised about this feedback, so has it come as a big surprise?” or “I understand you disagree with this feedback, so how do you see the situation differently?”
   • • Keep questioning, listening and understanding and play back to them what they are saying so they feel heard, for example, “So the reason why you are on emails is because you are very stressed and you would rather attend and multi-task rather than not attend at all.”
5. 5Moving forward
   • • Make sure that Person X feels like you really understand them, and only then gently shift to moving forward.
   • • You can do this by saying something like “Coming back to the team feeling as if you are not valuing their time in meetings, what changes can we make to improve the situation and make the team feel you do value their time?”
   • • Keep coming back to the impact they are having on the team and how they can make that impact more positive. You may need to do this several times to remind Person X about how they make other people feel.
6. 6Record commitments
   • • Write down what you and Person X agree to do to improve the situation, and make these as specific as possible, preferably in Person X’s own words, for example, “Even though I’m very busy, I will not be on emails in team meetings and will focus on the meeting so that I value people’s time – and if I need to do emails I’ll miss the team meeting rather than multi-task.”
   • • Agree to review these commitments after a few weeks.