Managing Conflict in Your Team as a Manager: A Seven-Step Approach

A conflict inside a team puts a manager in difficulty for a reason that is rarely stated: they are both the person who has to deal with it and one of its possible causes. An ambiguity of remit, an arbitration never delivered, unequal recognition — many lateral conflicts are the echo of a management decision that was not taken. Starting with that question is not self-flagellation: it is the first act of diagnosis, and it avoids looking for in two people what actually lies in the way the work is organised.

Step 1 — Diagnose before doing anything at all

Three questions, in this order.

What is the disagreement really about? The content of the work, who decides what, the relationship itself, or what each person considers acceptable to do? The five kinds of conflict do not call for the same response, and the overwhelming majority of conflicts a manager believes to be relational are in fact role ambiguities that have been left to run. Since when, and at what rate? A three-day disagreement and a nine-month tension are not handled in the same way. The duration determines whether the subject is still the subject, or whether the original object has been replaced by the relationship. Who else is already in it? A tension between two people that has already produced alliances within the team is no longer a tension between two people. That is a tipping point: beyond it, individual handling is no longer enough.

Much of the material for this diagnosis is available and dated — channels used, frequency of exchanges, the share that has moved to the group, the people copied in. ScanMyJob puts that material in series; the team conflict case presented as an example shows what a team of seven looks like over thirteen weeks when you look at the exchanges rather than at impressions.

Step 2 — Decide which role you are holding, and say so

This is the step most often skipped, and the one that explains the most failures. Three roles are possible, and they are incompatible.

Facilitator: you organise the exchange, you do not decide. You guarantee that each person speaks, that the subject remains the subject, that the discussion produces an agreement between them. Useful for task conflicts and for relationship conflicts that are still recent. Arbitrator: you hear both versions and you decide. Useful for process conflicts — an ambiguity of remit is not settled by consensus, it is settled by a decision. Decision-maker: the subject is not up for discussion, you announce what will be done. Useful when the disagreement bears on a direction that is not within the team's remit, or when the situation has consequences you cannot let continue.

What damages trust is not the role chosen, it is sliding from one role to another mid-course: announcing an open discussion and then imposing a decision loses you both — the agreement and your credibility. Announce the role at the start, and hold it.

Step 3 — See each person separately, before any joint meeting

Bringing two people in tension straight into a room produces a confrontation in front of an audience of one. Each defends their version in front of the person who appraises them, and the room for movement is nil.

The individual conversation has three purposes, and any one of them justifies it: hearing the facts as the person describes them; identifying what they concretely want to obtain, which is almost always more modest than the conflict suggests; and telling them what happens next, including that a joint meeting will take place.

Three questions that do the work:

• "Talk me through what happened, with the dates." — facts before interpretation.
• "What does that stop you doing, concretely?" — the effect on the work, which is the only ground on which you have any standing to intervene.
• "If you could obtain one single thing, what would it be?" — the real request, which is often a change to how work is organised rather than an apology.

What not to do in those conversations: ask one of them what they think of the other. The question calls for a judgement about a person, it will be reported back, and it commits you.

Step 4 — Reframe the disagreement in terms of work

Between the two individual conversations and the joint meeting, write the disagreement in a form both parties could sign. Not the cause, not the fault: the object.

"Requests from department X arrive sometimes with one of you, sometimes with the other, without any order of priority being set. Each of you reorganises your week accordingly, and the trade-offs are made case by case, often in a rush."

That sentence can be discussed and corrected. "You two don't get on" cannot — it offers no handle.

It is also what makes the joint meeting workable: it does not open on an accusation, but on a neutral statement both can amend.

Step 5 — Run the joint meeting

Four rules are enough, and they can be announced in a minute at the start.

We talk about the work, not about intentions. What happened and what it produced; never what the other person wanted — nobody can prove it and nobody will accept it. Each person speaks without being interrupted, then reformulates what they heard. Compulsory reformulation is the only device that stops two people talking past each other for forty minutes. You hold the subject. Drifting towards another grievance is the normal mechanism of a conflict meeting; bringing it back is not authoritarianism, it is your function in the room. You leave with written decisions, not with an atmosphere. A meeting that ends on "at least we've said things" has settled nothing.

Step 6 — Write the decision down, and set the review date

A short note, sent to both the same day: what was decided, who does what from when, what remains open, and the date on which you will review it. Three lines are enough.

That written record does three things. It prevents the two diverging versions that unfailingly appear within forty-eight hours. It turns a moral commitment into a verifiable reference point. And it allows you, at the review, to talk about an observed gap rather than an impression.

The review date is the most neglected and the most useful element. Without it, the only way of reopening the subject is a new incident — that is, waiting for it to start again.

Step 7 — Follow up, and deal with the cause if it is structural

At the review, only one question counts: has what was decided been applied? If it has, the subject closes and that has to be said explicitly — a conflict left to fade without being closed continues to exist for those who lived through it.

If it has not, there are two cases. Either the decision was unworkable, and that is your business: revise it. Or it was workable and was not applied, and you are entering another register — that of individual follow-up, which is no longer handled with two people in the room.

And if the conflict recurs with other people, on the same grounds, it is no longer a conflict: it is a feature of how the work is organised. Poorly distributed workload, overlapping remits, contradictory objectives between two functions, a single contested resource. A whole team can produce tensions in this way without anyone being the cause.

The three costliest wrong moves

Arbitrating without having listened separately. A decision handed down without each person feeling heard will be applied to the letter and circumvented in spirit. The time saved on the way out is lost three times over on the way back. Looking for the culprit rather than the mechanism. The question "who started it" never has a usable answer: both have a coherent, sincere and incompatible version. The question "what, in the way the work is organised, makes this friction recurrent" almost always has one. Handing the decision back to the team. "Sort it out between yourselves" is sometimes a mark of trust; more often it is a decision about remit that has not been taken, and the team knows it. The cost is high: they learn that this kind of subject will not be arbitrated.

When you are no longer the right person

Three situations, and each calls for handing it on rather than insisting.

You are a party to it. If one of the two disagrees with you, or if the conflict bears on an arbitration you delivered, you cannot be the third party. A peer, a more senior manager or an internal mediator is needed — not out of formalism, but because no decision you deliver will be received as neutral. The conflict has passed the third stage. When the people no longer speak to each other, when everything goes through you, and when exchanges have become exhibits, a managerial approach is no longer enough. Formal mediation exists for that. What is happening goes beyond the conflict. Repeated attacks, organised exclusion, visible effects on the health of one of the members. Those situations belong to other channels — the HR department, employee representatives, the occupational health doctor — and, where appropriate, to a legal assessment that belongs neither to you nor to this article: it belongs to the courts. Your role is then to ensure the facts are recorded and the competent people are notified, not to characterise.

To take stock of your own default mode of handling conflict — everyone has one, and it makes some of the five types easy and others almost impracticable — the tests on the platform let you review where you stand. The assistant can help you prepare the reframing of a disagreement before a conversation.

Three things this article does not do

It does not say who is right. The approach described assumes no distribution of fault and works when it is shared. It describes nobody. What is handled here is a dynamic between working positions, never a characteristic of a person. A manager who documents a pattern gives themselves options; a manager who documents a character puts themselves in difficulty. It replaces neither HR nor a trained third party. Mediation is a profession, and calling on it early is not an admission of failure — it is what costs least.