Mastering Team Conflict Management: Essential Tips for Project Managers (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Jennifer Whitt, Director of ProjectManager.com. Well welcome to our whiteboard session today on how to manage team conflict. One of the most difficult things is we as project managers can encounter. It's really where project managers go from the hard skills to the soft skills because in truth, a lot of it is subjective. So I want to give a few pointers that we found along the way and just know that this topic could be a series. I mean, I could literally probably write a thesis on this one topic. But a few things to point out. When we say manage, the word manage means to actually control. So there's a decision point in a project. Is this something that I want to stop or is this something I want to fuel? Because there are times we want to stop it when it's not helpful and when we want to fuel it, when it does become helpful. So when do we want to stop? If we're disrespecting people, whether it's our team members, it's our vendor partners or stakeholders, or if we're hindering progress, then we need to stop it. It is helpful when we're trying to get to a core issue or we're getting to a better result. Sometimes to actually fuel that, you get a better result. So here are a few pointers that I found helpful just to get people started. Number one is as a project manager, you have to educate yourself because there is so much written on this on Teams and Team Conflicts. So there are multiple resources that you can access. So the best place to start is to Google. Number two is educate your team. Just educating people to let them know that this will occur and when is very helpful. So let the team know, hey, this is normal. We're going to encounter it along the way. It's normal and here are some things our situations when. For instance, there's the Tuckman's stages of group development. So knowing that on a project when a project first forms and kicks off, the team members, no matter if the people have worked together on a team or not, this is a new project and new variables are introduced. So there's the forming of the team. There's the storming when people start meeting their boundaries. So they start storming and maybe conflict arises over certain things. And then once the team exits the storming phase, they enter the norming where everything kind of levels off. And then they begin performing as a team again. That's natural. It's been researched for many years and you can find a lot, again, by the Tuckman's stages of group development. And then knowing that different stages of the project can interject more stress. There are things that occur during the initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling and closing of a project. So this is the PMI project life cycle and just knowing that in the throes of execution where you've executed the project, changes are introduced, things don't work as planned. Maybe the project starts derailing. Then stress is going to occur and usually team conflict. And knowing there are certain situations that arise that normally stems conflict. For instance, when you're recovering a troubled project or trying to create a new solution where something that's been tried and true or has always worked before maybe isn't working. So you have to get together and hash out things in order to get a new solution. And then the best thing you can do is create your plan. So by now, knowing yourself that it's going to occur, educating yourself on new resources, new ways to approach this by educating your team, you come up with a plan. And we know in order to control something, they say in order to control something, you've got to measure it. So what are we measuring? So if we're measuring something to know whether we're going to stop it or fuel it, we have to know certain things like where are we? Are we in a certain phase of group development? Are we in a certain stage of the project? Are we encountering certain scenarios? So knowing where are we in these and what typically happens. So knowing typically on this type of project, during this phase, this type of conflict arises or I've got these teams, I've got the sales and marketing, and I've got IT, and we always encounter stress or conflict around these areas. So by knowing that, knowing what typically happens, then we determine a path. So according to history or reasoning, are we going to stop it or are we going to fuel it? And then in order to, again, we're controlling it, we stop it or fuel it, and then we communicate to the team. When we're in the throes of this and we encounter the conflict or the stress by saying, okay, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, here we are, we're experiencing team conflict here, we know from what we've talked about, we're here or here or here, here's what's happening, and now here's what we're going to do. So it's part of your plan and you communicate with your team along the way. Again, we can go into more detail, but for now, these are some simple things just to get you started. If you need a tool that can help you know where you are in the project and where your team conflict may occur, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.com.