Managing Conflict in Teams

This morning's email included a Harvard Business Publishing Management Tip of the Day on How to Manage Conflict in Teams. It referenced an entry on Harvard's Management Update blog by Jim Kling in January that I thought might be of interest. A discussion is building on the topic that will grow in the next few days.

Here is the tip as distributed:

Conflict is essential to a team's creative collaboration. Without differences of opinion, there's no synthesis of ideas or debate about important issues. But when conflict is mismanaged, it destroys creative collaboration.

Keep conflict productive by establishing ground rules in advance for working through disagreements. Give team members two options: confront the conflict and handle it — or let it go. Agree to put issues on the table as soon as they arise. When feedback raises tempers, don't rush to cool things down. Instead, arrange team members physically to keep things from getting personal: Put issues and ideas on a white board and seat people around it in a semicircle so they're allied against the conflict, not each other.

Judy Warner