Team Work: More Bits and Pieces to Team Management

First I want to address how to identify healthy conflict. If conflict is mislabeled it will be costly to everyone. So what makes for healthy conflict? Here it is in a nutshell. Healthy team conflict is when two or more members disagree about a relevant element of their assigned project. And it does not digress into a diatribe; nor, does it result in one or more members concentrating on stonewalling other members with objection after objection. If you ever been through one of the foregoing you know how easy it is to stir the pot by using one of these ploys. Typically this is done when a person or small group of people have an agenda (something they want to guard or something they want to acquire). This is not saying emotional appeals or wrong - not at all. What I am getting at is when a slant is taken to manipulate the process by the drive to dominate reasoning then the conflict is unhealthy.

If you find the conflict is unhealthy in that it reeks of bias, private agendas, or it is being cloaked (suspected but difficult to identify) here are further steps you can take in addition to the ones I gave in an earlier post. Our goal is to make to make it hard for anything to fly below the radar.

Two rules that help keep things on the table where everyone can see what is going on is:

1. Subgroups (or individuals) can only take action when they check with the whole group.

2. Subgroups (or individuals) must report research findings, test results, etc. to the whole group.

Note: As a last ditch strategy restructure the team with different members.

The idea here is to prevent people from obligating the group in a manner that from which they cannot easily wiggle out or to blindside other members by dumping a lot of finding and results out and pushing for a decision based on time.

Of course the best prevention is early defense. Some of the ideas I presented before, but they are worth repeating. Signs of a secret hostility to a public agenda are:

One or more aspects of contributions are askew. Only evidence in favor is being presented without due diligence being given to contrary evidence.

Noting a given individual (or subgroup) consistently seems to be highly critical of another person’s or group’s input.

An individual (or subgroup) seems to only support a certain individual or a select set of individuals’ proposals.

Any combination of the above.


I want to back track a little and give a few more ideas about selecting team members in order to minimize the probability of private agendas interfering with group process. The ideas are:

Note whether or not:

The team came together as a result of a merger or take over.
There are potential conflicts of interests between members or subgroups?
Cultural differences (this can be between departments or even in the case of international corporations nationally cultural differences).

There is a perceived or real difference in power among the participants.
Certain members are feeling underprivileged in the organization.
It is important to pay heed to the statement I am about to make so my position about conflict is not misunderstood. It is completely within game rules of a team to careful prepare a presentation by framing arguments, presenting vivid supporting evidence, and trying to fire up the group. There is nothing wrong with using emotional appeals to influence a group. However guileless appeals speak to the values of the team, division, and organization at large. What makes an emotional appeal wrong is when it is done underhanded manner meant to subvert the agenda of the organization or the team (providing the team’s organization is in line with the organization’s). Of course there are cases where the team and organization is wrong, but then the burden of proof lies on the dissenters to give real evidence that the larger community is wrong.

As a last bit, I will very briefly address a tactic to take with a team stuck in group think. It is likely that they can be shaken out of it by being challenged to find flaws in the idea they formed and further challenged to propose alternatives. You can even put a number on the amount of flaws or proposals they are to find. Doing this can prevent the next step which is to determine what members need to be rotated out, and identifying potential candidates to replace them. The reason you want to prevent this step is simply because it is time consuming.

Stay tuned for more bits and pieces tomorrow.