Conflict to collaboration: how to bring people together

In today’s global and fast-changing business environment, organisations increasingly need seamless collaboration across internal and geographic boundaries. Improving customer experience, offering tailored solutions, and driving operating efficiency and profitability all demand teamwork in its truest sense.

An inability to effectively work through conflicts that inevitably arise is a common reason teams struggle to collaborate. In many circumstances these conflicts are a natural reflection of the competing priorities of various roles and groups across the business. How people navigate their way through these issues has a profound influence on whether they move past roadblocks and implement successful solutions.

Healthy conflict

While conflict can be destructive, when managed well the disagreements sparked by differences in views are essential to the evolution of the organisations thinking and standard of its achievements. Allowing the diverse perspectives of people, with varying competencies and strategic focus within a business, to be heard and influence decisions is essential to any organisation’s ability to leverage its full potential.

In an article for HBR: ‘Want Collaboration? Accept—and Actively Manage—Conflict’, Jeff Weiss & Jonathan Hughes put it perfectly when they say: "Clashes between parties are the crucibles in which creative solutions are developed and wise trade-offs among competing objectives are made."

Creating a healthy and robust approach to conflict resolution is a necessary precursor to truly effective collaboration. Conflict can be transformed from a major liability into a significant asset for any business.

Among the most important steps leaders can take are these:

1. Foster strong relationships.

   Trust, respect and, ultimately, values alignment are critical to any team’s ability to think, decide and work well together. Develop communication, conflict resolution and trust-building skills of your team. Help them to understand how to earn trust, build rapport and negotiate agreements.

Consider carefully the people you choose to bring into your business. Reflect for example on the impact they are likely to have on others. Explore the extent to which you believe they will bring a respectful approach to dealing with their colleagues irrespective of the challenges they may face.

2. Influence culture.

   Create an environment in which people feel safe and expected to challenge one another in support of optimal outcomes. Focus on honest conversations in which the truth is spoken with respect and sensitivity. Expect people to place equal value on achieving their individual objectives with those of the broader team and organisation.

Integrate conflict resolution into day-to-day decision-making processes and people are more likely to feel confident and comfortable to ‘lower their defenses’, open their minds and engage in cooperative dialogue. Equally, people will come to appreciate the need for them to play an active role to move through conflicts and maintain strong relationships.

3. Support decision-making.

   Give your team clear insight into the criteria you need them to follow when making trade-offs. Its natural that people from across your business will have competing priorities and therefore demands. Help them to understand the decisions that can and should be reached that enable the collective outcomes you are working to achieve.

Tradeoffs between service excellence and achieving financial objectives, for example, are a common challenge for many businesses. Equally common are tensions between sales and production teams who have at times competing objectives to achieve. These teams need to understand where they can compromise or negotiate an alterative approach, and when they can’t.

4. Expect people to own the outcome.

   When a joint decision can’t be reached, the problem is often escalated to the next level of management. While this might be an appropriate step, issues arise when each party takes their respective views and ‘pitches’ them to their own boss. Unless these leaders chose to come together to explore mutually agreeable solutions, the issue escalates again up the chain of command.

First expect managers to use the escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching their staff to resolve issues effectively. Encourage them to coach people to gain clear insight to the objectives and challenges of all parties and look for solutions that support the organisation’s strategic priorities. When conflicts persist, require managers to work directly with their counterparts to reach agreement.

5. Expect collaborative decision-making.

   Unilateral responses to unilateral escalations of issues reinforce silos and lead to teams undermining the success of one another. Inefficiency, poor decisions, eroded trust and dwindling rapport across divisions are typical consequences of failing to appropriately consult.

Require every member of your team to respect the roles their colleagues need and are expected to play in reaching certain decisions. Expect that people give consideration to those they need to consult before reaching decisions that have consequences for other teams.