Understand our Peers For Managing Team Conflict
My book, A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams, deals with managing team conflict. In preparation for the book, I interviewed over 150 virtual managers and team members about their situations, stories and solutions to successfully managing team conflict. For this week’s blog I chose to highlight some of their suggestions for how to handle conflict in virtual teams.
To continue with the spirit of turning lemons into lemonade and practice productive conflict management, see the ways your peers deal with managing team conflict virtually:
HOW YOUR PEERS HANDLE CONFLICTS:
“I defuse (nip) conflicts quickly; I don’t avoid them – I deal with them right away. Once I talk to the team, I ask (1) what would it take to get the program on track? and (2) if we could do 1 thing, what would it be?”
Global Leader, Electronics
“I use the 3R’s technique – reflect on the other’s feelings; restate the underlying issue and resolve the conflict.”
Team Lead, Medical/Hospital Environment
“If the conflict is about someone’s personality but both team members are doing a good job, I have them work separately but still participate in calls.”
Virtual Team Manager, Financial Investor Relations Firm
“To anticipate the challenges having to do with different work styles, I ask people at the beginning of calls to allow 10 minutes to reflect on how things are going so we can ‘course correct’ any issues. The reflective questions I ask are: (1) Did you say everything you wanted on the call? (2) Did you hear from everyone on the call? (3) Did you get answers from everyone you wanted to? At the end of the conference call, I ask questions (simple dynamics stuff): (4) who did we not hear from? (5) Who talked the whole time? It takes about a month for virtual team members to get used to this and then they start asking each other to talk more. The upfront time is longer but it is worth it.”
Virtual Manager, Financial Services
“In face-to-face meetings, silence often means YES. In virtual ones, I can’t read their face, so I need to know yes / no, so I call out whether they are in agreement or not.”
Talent Consultant, Media
“I have a rule about negative emails: once I see conflict, I immediately use the phone for an interactive conversation and move forward. I listen to customers and teammates talk and facilitate solutions around priorities and alignment.”
Team Leader, Electronic Health Records
“To resolve conflict, I shut email down (especially when email is at the center of the storm) and say, let’s take it to a public forum and use the phone. Once you get people talking, 80% of the time it can bring down the emotional state and 20% of the time even phone calls don’t help because you cannot see people’s reactions.”
Senior Leader, Imaging Company
“I coach people to take conflict offline and coach leaders to look at the issues and consider what assumptions people are making and how they resolve them. Because our work is all over the world, it’s not a situation where the manager can fly down, so it becomes about influence skills.
Consultant, Global Peace Organization
