Conflict often falls into one of two categories: 

• Cognitive: This involves conflicts aimed at tasks, issues, ideas, principles, or processes. This impacts our team's boundaries and the rules we operate by. We can fix these types of conflict by adjusting our team's working agreement.
• Effective: This involves conflicts aimed at people, emotions, or values. It will have a direct impact on our trust and respect for each other. These types of conflict are not so easily fixed.

The problem is that while task-related conflicts will resolve more easily, with little to no damage done to our interpersonal relationships, conflicts often spill into both areas at once. If this causes a breakdown in trust within the team, we'll effectively have team members in either open conflict or simply not talking to each other. Broken trust can be extremely hard to repair.

If we're to resolve conflict without causing damage to our team's trust, we need to keep our minds focused on the cognitive aspects of the problem we're trying to solve. The first step to achieving this is to assume that everyone on our team has positive intent. After all, we all want the same outcome, a productive and successful team.