Let’s face it: Sometimes people just don’t know how to get along. This is one of the most common and vexing challenges managers face. Negative social dynamics—interpersonal conflict among coworkers—cause stress, diminish cooperation, and have a measurable impact on productivity, quality, engagement/morale, and turnover.
At the individual level, the least likeable characters in most any workplace are: porcupines, entanglers, debaters, complainers, blamers and stink-bomb throwers. If you can help those people replace their negative behaviors with good communication habits, you will eliminate the most common sources of interpersonal conflict.
However, not all attitude problems in the workplace are clearly attributable to anyone person, exactly. Some derive from social dynamics. Sometimes team conflict is just a clash between two particular individuals. Other times it’s more complex. Sometimes everybody is implicated somehow or another (Including the manager because they are not fully engaged or mismanaging by doing things like hiring the wrong people, not living by the organization's values, one-way communication, playing favorites, micromanaging and such.).
If there is a high level of interpersonal conflict on your team, you need to ask yourself, “Why do my direct reports have enough time on their hands at work—not to mention enough brain space—to focus on interpersonal conflict with each other?”
Research shows that interpersonal conflict between and among employees is almost always an indication of undermanagement. Interpersonal conflict in the workplace has room to flower only in a relative leadership vacuum.
If you don’t have clear regularly reinforced standard operating procedures, you leave room for clashes of style and preference. If you don’t have good performance development in place, there will be more rivalry for attention, resources, recognition, and reward. If you are not spelling out expectations and tracking performance, employee blame each other for problems that occur and resent each other because there is no or very little accountability.
If you are a leader, your first step is to fill the leadership vacuum. That doesn’t mean putting your foot down. It means getting everybody more focused on doing all the work they have in common, so they won’t have as much energy to focus on conflicts. You don’t need a big moment. You need a good process. Take a look at your use of team meetings and one-on-ones to make sure you are practicing the fundamentals regularly and consistently. What do you need to do to fill that leadership vacuum?
If you get back to practicing the fundamentals with discipline, you will suck the oxygen right out of most conflicts. Make sure every individual is highly focused every day in being productive and producing quality work. Remind everyone about company values and the broad performance standards—including the standards for good professional communication, cooperation, and mutual support.
When you are consistently coaching employees, spelling out expectations, and tracking performance, employees are less likely to worry about each other and more likely to worry about getting their own work done. And the more focused everyone is on the work they have in common; the more likely they are to cooperate. Most of the intramural conflicts will fall away under your strong, highly engaged leadership. When conflicts occur, you will know what’s in character and out of character for each person, what rings true and what doesn’t. You will be in a better position to evaluate and make effective decisions.
If you find lingering conflicts on your team, even after you’ve filled the leadership vacuum, chances are you are fighting conflict that has had too much time and space to fester and grow. Perhaps it’s an unresolved personality clash that has left ill will. Or maybe cliques have formed, ringleaders have emerged, or in some cases, even bullies. You need to identify the problem and treat it immediately and effectively.
When there is ill will between specific employees, you need to approach the situation thoughtfully and directly. You cannot be the judge and jury for every argument between employees. But who else is going to adjudicate? For past “wrongs” the only question is: What can and should be done now? You are going to have to hear out both parties and then make a judgment call. That means you need to be sufficiently engaged that you can evaluate the situation. Either you make a decision that everybody needs to live with, or else the issue remains in status quo—and that, too, is a decision. In any case, everybody needs to live with the decision and agree to move on (This may take several meetings.)
Going forward, you have another decision to make: Will you make an effort to keep them apart in the future, work on different projects, in different areas, or on different shifts. Or will they need to able to work together? If it’s the latter, then they need to establish a regular, ongoing, one-on-one dialogue with each other and agree on ground rules for how they are going to work together in a cooperative and professional manner.
If certain employees are especially prone to conflict—in repeated instances—you need to actively coach the conflict-prone employees on avoiding conflict and to interact in more positive and productive ways. They don’t have to “like” each other but they do need to work cooperatively and professionally. Coach them what to say and how to say it so that they can engage in conflict free interactions. Spell it out. Break it down. Follow up.
You rarely find cliques without ringleaders. Often cliques form around competing ringleaders. Sometimes ringleaders emerge from within a clique. But they almost always go together. The real nature of the problem with cliques and ringleaders is that they constitute a parallel power structure, chain of command, and system of communication. That creates role confusion and dissent, at best. You cannot allow that to continue.
You have two choices when it comes to cliques and ringleaders: either co-opt the parallel power structure or break it up. Co-opting means turning the ringleader into a deputy of sorts. You have to ask yourself: Is the ringleader demonstrating natural leadership ability and having a positive impact? Does the clique make sense as a team? If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then may deputizing the ringleader as captain of the team-clique is good idea. Otherwise, you need to break up the parallel power structure: counsel (and possibly remove) the bad apples, reassign key players, and/or impose a strong chain of command that displaces the ringleader and disrupts the clique.
When it comes to bullying in the workplace, those are often clear-cut. That is a zero-tolerance issue. If anybody in the workplace is abusive to anyone else in any way---menacing, threatening, or even suggesting violent words or actions—this is a matter of public safety. As a manager, you have a responsibility to keep everybody safe in that workplace. Any behavior like that must be removed from the workplace immediately—period.
To your greater success and fulfillment,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT
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