Developing collaborative working relationships that focus on 'win-win situations' can help prevent conflict from arising. The Team planning wizard can help you:
- establish common goals that everyone has agreed to
- have flexible roles and share the workload fairly
- maintain positive communication where respectful and constructive debate and questioning are encouraged
However, if conflict emerges in your group, the first step is to understand why. Looking at other resources about communication, and making decisions will help you with this. The next step is to decide how to address it. Some disagreements are minor, trivial, or even 'healthy' and keep everyone on their toes. But, if the problem is long term and likely to escalate or become destructive, it needs addressing.
You have two key options:
- Do nothing: you need to assess if this is an option, or if it may make things worse
- Deal with the conflict: this will require intervention, which may take different forms:
- facilitation, where someone external to the conflict (in your team or outside of your team) can help each party in the conflict to explain their feelings and seek to reframe the conflict.
- negotiation, where everyone in the team comes together to look for a solution. It will require concession and creative approaches to the problem.
Mindtools.com provides a practical step-by-step approach that you can follow to help resolve a conflict.
This video explains the different ways people approach conflict.