Managing Team Conflicts

One of the benefits of working in today’s world is the opportunity to interact with others and work as a team. Strong teamwork can build positive cultures and produce better work, but with this comes the need for effective communication.

With a 20-year history in Toastmasters leadership and a long career in civil engineering, Jaap Russchenberg knows how important it is for teams to maintain good communication. When a team communicates well, he says, its members work more efficiently, get things done more quickly, and create better relationships with clients.

“Team communication can make or break a project,” says Russchenberg, DTM, a member of Leiden Toastmasters in Oegstgeest, Netherlands. “Relationships are the most important characteristic for the well-being of a project, and communication is at the core of relationships.”

That’s why when Russchenberg starts a new project—in business or in Toastmasters—he takes time to establish a united team that agrees on priorities and sets ground rules on how to communicate. Priorities for a well-functioning team can include setting project deadlines, sharing regular updates, and establishing metrics for measuring success, he says. Among the ground rules to consider are respecting other team members, showing up on time to meetings, listening to each other attentively, and making sure feedback is constructive.

“The most important part is not the goal at the end, but how you get there,” he says. “You have to first think about, ‘What is important for us as a team? What are our values?’ You have to understand people’s personalities and build up trust.”

Communication Breakdowns

Despite your best efforts to build a high-functioning team rooted in good communication, workplace conflicts can still arise, often because communication breaks down. For example, if you see a rise in missed deadlines, or if you find that multiple people are unknowingly working on the same task, something has gone wrong with communication.

Communication breakdowns happen when preferences or decisions aren’t explained well, when instructions are unclear, or when team members are more focused on making sure their opinions are heard than actively listening to others and attempting to understand their positions.

A conflict might arise when a coworker keeps attempting to communicate with you after work hours about non-urgent matters. Or one member of a team may get promoted, leaving other members with feelings of jealousy or resentment. In either case, clear communication can help alleviate the issue—asking that coworker why they need to message you after hours, for instance, or explaining what it was about a worker’s skill set that led to them being promoted.

Whether the cause is team disagreements or unclear directions, communication problems need to be rooted out early to keep a project running smoothly.

“It often happens when a person says ‘yes’ but does ‘no’—the team agrees on a direction, but someone decides to do something different,” Russchenberg says. “Trust is a very important part of a project or in a team, and if someone is not a part of the team anymore, the team will fall apart.”

Especially if a team is made up of people who haven’t worked together before, building trust early is vital to its success. A team whose members trust one another collaborates better, has better morale and productivity, has stronger bonds, performs better, and has a greater sense of respect. Those qualities, in turn, can help prevent communication problems, Russchenberg says.

“Conflict doesn’t have to be something terrible. Conflict can be a disagreement or misunderstanding,” he says. “If you have trust in a team, it’s easier to talk about a conflict and understand why it’s happening.”

Know Your Style

One key to open and productive communication among team members is understanding each person’s communication style. Understanding your style and how it meshes with others’ goes a long way toward successful meetings and conversations. The Toastmasters Pathways project “Understanding Your Communication Style” discusses four styles that indicate how someone prefers to deliver and receive information.

Direct communicators like to get to the point quickly and in a succinct manner; initiating communicators value interacting with others and sharing stories; supportive communicators appreciate a calm, steady approach; and analytical communicators like facts and figures.

A direct communicator who leaves time for an initiating communicator to tell a story about their weekend may find more success, for example, as would a supportive communicator who includes a few data points in their suggestion to an analytical communicator. To identify someone’s communication style, experts recommend evaluating body language as well as the actual words someone uses when they speak. If you’re hearing a lot about data and tactics, for instance, you are likely talking with an analytical communicator.

“If team members working together understand their own styles, as well as one another’s, it can go a long way,” says Monique Levesque-Pharoah, DTM, a Toastmasters International Director from 2016 to 2018, and a conflict-resolution expert based in the Canadian province of Manitoba.

Focus on Interactions

Levesque-Pharoah trains Toastmasters leaders in a conflict-resolution style known as the interaction model, which is based on the understanding that everyone approaches situations differently and puts a focus on mutual understanding. One element of the interaction model is the intent-action-effect framework—the idea that every visible action has an unseen intent and an unseen effect.

“At the heart of most conflict is not understanding someone’s intent and reading into their intent based on your own opinion,” says Levesque-Pharoah, a member of Vital Words and We Believe in Winnipeg Toastmasters clubs, both in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The interaction model provides a simple template for approaching someone about a communication problem. Using “I” statements and sticking to facts, the person instigating the conversation should state what they noticed, how they interpreted the action, and how that perception made them feel. It’s a noncombative way of starting a dialogue that has the potential to provide answers and even deepen relationships.

Levesque-Pharoah gives the example of a time she had a disagreement with a colleague late in the workday. The following morning, her colleague said “Good morning” to everyone in the office except Levesque-Pharoah.

“Using the interaction model, I went to her, and I said, ‘I noticed that at the meeting last night, we were on different ends of a decision, and then this morning, you said good morning to the other people in the office, but you didn’t say good morning to me,’” Levesque-Pharoah says. “‘I interpret that to mean that maybe I upset you at the meeting yesterday, and now I am feeling stressed out, because that’s not how I want to be in my working relationship with you. Is my interpretation correct?’”

It turned out, Levesque-Pharoah says, that her colleague’s 16-year-old son had been involved in a car accident the night before, and the insurance company called her as she was approaching Levesque-Pharoah’s office. The perceived snub was not intentional, and her colleague appreciated the opportunity to clear the air.

“Had I not been trained in that model I would have been consumed by my feelings, and things might have escalated from there, because you base your future interactions on past interactions,” she says. “A lot of the issues people have arise because they don’t understand people’s intent. They can only see the action.”

Among Toastmasters members, misunderstandings of intent can happen more easily because people are coming from an even wider variety of contexts than in the average workplace—different levels of work experience, cultural backgrounds, ages—and because it’s easier to assume everyone is on the same page.

Within Toastmasters, misunderstandings may arise when a member doesn’t receive the feedback they were expecting during a speech evaluation, for instance, or if a club officer feels they are being ignored by another officer. Another common issue is role clarity, Levesque-Pharoah says—who sends emails and invitations? Who sets the agenda?

“We can fall prey to those pitfalls a little more easily in Toastmasters because we think, ‘Oh, Kumbaya, we’re all rowing the same boat. We’re all going in the same direction. We don’t have any problems because we all are singing from the same song sheet,’” she says. “But too often, we’re on the same song sheet, but a different songbook. Our context really forms how we look at things.”

International Relations

Contexts can vary among people in the same office, but they can really vary among people from different countries. Working among Toastmasters teams in northern and southern Europe, Russchenberg has seen culture clashes that have threatened to derail projects, as people from countries that tend to subscribe to a top-down leadership style attempt to work with those from areas where team consensus is more often sought. When such clashes happen, he says, he brings the two parties together for a dialogue focused on listening rather than debating.

“The exercise starts with the person who has the complaint or problem, and they explain what the problem is,” he says. “Then the other person has to repeat what the first person said, and then I ask confirmation from the person who stated the problem. ‘Is that correct? Yes or no?’ If it was not correct, they have to do it again.”

In such a dialogue, he says, no one has to defend themselves. The goal is simply for the two parties to understand where the other is coming from.

“By focusing on listening, then people can ask questions, and many times the problems are solved in an easy way,” he says. “It can be as simple as, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you meant it that way,’ or ‘I didn’t know you felt that way or perceived it that way.’”

Other business leaders have additional strategies for managing conflict and communications breakdowns in the office, including scheduling check-ins with each employee, using active listening—a technique Toastmasters consistently practice in club meetings—and using shared documents to keep collaborations on track.

One such document available to Toastmasters is the Early Detection Conflict Checklist that Levesque-Pharoah helped to create. It assesses team interactions in categories such as communication, performance, and trust, with questions like “Are District leaders responding respectfully during conversations?” and “Are team members aligned on expectations?”

“I’ve used this document in other contexts, and it can serve as a great tool to determine team dynamics and if you are headed into negative conflict,” Levesque-Pharoah says.

But Russchenberg and Levesque-Pharoah agree that the best way to solve communication problems is with better communication—getting people talking with one another to get to the root of the problem. Not only does the practice smooth the road for teams that may have to work together on multiple projects, but an open approach to confronting conflict can ultimately build stronger bonds among team members.

“Conflict always reveals a sunnier side, if you navigate it properly,” Levesque-Pharoah says. “You can get to the truth and the heart of what people really need from a relationship. Conflict is almost always good when it’s handled properly.”

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