I manage a team of people who don’t get along – help!

I manage a team of people who just don’t get along, I seem to spend most of my time managing the conflict in my team. How do I just get them to get along and get on with their jobs!

Whenever you bring people together who may not have chosen to be together as a group conflict can arise. In a professional environment this will affect morale, performance and retention of team members.

Have you been able to identify the underlying reason the conflict occurs between your team members? What do your team have to say about it?

What is the result of the conflict between team members? Conflicts and disagreements are a natural result of people who work and play together. How does the team currently work to resolve issues when they arise? Does the team have a process that they can fall back on when emotions are heightened? If not, taking time to agree how to disagree would be a worthwhile exercise.

Think about what positives come out of the conflict. Conflict is not necessarily a negative thing, it can challenge ways of thinking, new ideas, higher levels of honesty and when resolved can create increased trust between people. I know that with some of the people who I can have conflict with I am always grateful that we can have a sometimes tense or difficult conversation and resolve it, create from it and move on. This increases my trust in the relationship and certainly promotes more honesty between us. A lack of healthy conflict in teams can sometimes be a sign of complacency.

Of course, if conflict and tension is the norm for your team then action is required to establish what is occurring and what needs to happen for this to change.

What’s at the heart of the conflict and what are the behaviours that are contributing to the conflict. Is the conflict aimed at individuals in the team? Emotional or values driven or is the conflict aimed at issues?

How well do your team members know each other?

When people get to know each other it is harder for them to treat each other as objects. Often when individuals are ‘at war’ with each other they see each other as objects and it’s easy to dehumanise the person.

What is going well in the team? Where is the focus of the team?

Look at where the team is united. Do they share common goals, values and interests?

Spending time in finding alignment with these areas will help your team to:

• get to know each other and improve relationships.
• strive for a common goal and outcome.
• create greater support and tolerance within the team.
• improve cooperation and teaming.
• improve business outcomes.

As the leader of your team some steps that you can take to help improve the situation are:

• spend time with your team to understand the issues and cause of the conflict.
• involve and engage you team in creating a better team environment so that you can all spend time on achieving your business goals as well as having a more fun and
• productive work environment. Make them part of the solution and hold them accountable for the results.
• establish and communicate acceptable behaviours.
• establish and communicate unacceptable behaviours and the consequences of these.
• set ground rules for meetings, differences of opinions, etc.
• get some support from your mentors, HR or outside facilitators to help you improve team performance and resolve the issues.

The Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute is a great book that you may find a valuable resource.

Good luck.

Pollyanna Lenkic is the founder of Perspectives Coaching, an Australian based coaching and training company. In 1990 she co-founded a specialist IT recruitment consultancy in London, which grew to employ 18 people and turnover £11 million ($27 million). In this blog Pollyanna answers questions from our readers on issues they are experiencing leading or being part of a team.  She offers insights on teams and team dynamics. For support and information on team days run by Perspectives Coaching see here. Her previous Blog for SmartCompany, 2nd Time Around was about the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned building a business the first time round and how to do it better second time round.

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